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Health & Fitness

On the Road to Being the Mississippi of the North – A look at Two Goals for the GOP Agenda in Wisconsin

A close look at what the State's GOP is looking forward to accomplishing before the November general election.

No matter how you look at it, the Republican Party of Wisconsin has scored spectacular legislative wins in the last year.  Regardless of your feelings, the changes in the state have changed the very character of the state and put us on the path to joining the governance structures and patterns of the U.S. South. Liberal progressives of Wisconsin are suffering, in shock, with the state’s redirection, turning back the clock to the 1950s and 1960s, dismantling, a once, model government for the rest of the nation to follow.  The changes made by the social and fiscal conservatives have encompassed everything from reproductive and women’s rights to education, healthcare and tax policy.

If one looks at the adopted agenda of the American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC, you will find the blueprint for the dramatic changes in Wisconsin’s governance. Remaining high on that agenda, yet undone, are two areas that will forever change the character of the Badger State. The first area in interest is to turn the entire state into a “Right to Work Law” state.

Over the last century Wisconsin had become the bulwark of unionized labor. Wisconsin, as an industrial manufacturing economy became a union organization success story. Not only did private unions flourish, but Wisconsin was the first in the nation to have its public employees organize. However, in roughly the last quarter century, Wisconsin has gone from a strong labor state to a state struggling to maintain its union organization. Two variables have influenced this movement: 1) the loss of a significant manufacturing base and transfer to a service sector economy as a result of the “rust belt” decline and the Reaganomics establishment of Supply Side Macro Economic  policies.  2) A belief that organized labor had achieved all its important goals and was no longer necessary and was actually counterproductive to the labor movement. Organized labor was seen as reactionary to future economic development and progress just concerned with the political power.

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The primary problem with “right to work,"  as labor becomes less organized, wages and benefits for organized workers begin to decline, and since labor unions have traditionally led the way in wage and benefit growth, the entire workforce, organized or unorganized, experiences the decline. Without a strong core of organized labor, all labor suffers. This is precisely what those who advocate “right to work” are looking for.

Although Governor Walker has denied accusations of pushing an agenda to make the state “Right to Work," however, he has not declared that he would veto such a law if presented with it. As strong as the pressure is from his primary supporters to create right to work, it would be most unusual for him to veto such a bill.

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The second agenda item left undone is the privatization of all government services except for the most essential; law enforcement, criminal justice, child protective services, and fire. The one greatest immediate impact is the move to privatize education.  

No one would argue that our current public education system is troubled. But the desire to dismantle the system is not strictly motivated by solving the education problems. It’s primarily motivated to revive a conservative controlled curriculum and the weeding out of liberal teachers.

The key issue is that many conservative ideological principles are currently forbidden to be taught within the public schools, based on the First Constitutional Amendment.  The conservatives’ objective is to reintroduce such things as prayer in school, a specific moral code, the banning of scientific evolution, the teaching of traditional historical interpretation, and  a reemphasis on the basic education of the past; reading, writing and arithmetic. The conservative movement wants to privatize schools in order to draw in more entrepreneurial players and set up education based on free market competition and corporatist structures.

The secondary key issue is to shed government of funding and maintaining wage and benefit plans. By reducing or completely eliminating direct government employees, benefits are shifted to the contractor and the relationship between the contractor and individual teachers. This will also open the way to reduce the dependency on state certified teachers, since anyone can teach with a bachelor’s degree in a private institution. The only role for the state would be to monitor education outcomes based on a state standardized series of tests.

Privatization of schools would also make education funding available to the wealthy to supplement the education costs of those who primarily rely on upper end private education schools to educate their children. Many private schools are either directly or indirectly affiliated to various religious institutions. By privatizing education, the conservatives can make an end run around the U.S. Constitution and achieve their goals without a major constitutional confrontation.

Privatization of other government services holds the promise of reducing direct government expense involved with maintaining a large bureaucratic structure. Again, by contracting out to service providers, the state sheds its responsibility for maintaining wage and benefit plans. On the surface this sounds as a smart fiscal move, but it comes with inherent risks to the citizenry.

Whenever a government entity begins to farm out its service function to private contractors, it requires a concerted effort to provide adequate contract maintenance and compliance. We have a recent example of the failure of this practice.

A number of private daycare providers were found to be committing fraud by billing the state for services never provided or provided at reduced levels to those reported. It took some time to ferret out these frauds because the state underfunded the supervising agencies. The underfunding didn’t allow for enough state licensing and inspection personnel.   The state was bilked out of millions of dollars and it took an excessive period of time to unravel the fraud schemes. But, this only represents the tip of the iceberg. Another example was under the Doyle Administration and their travel agent contracts. In this case it didn’t involve fraud but with campaign contribution payoffs for selected providers who had heavily given to Doyle’s election.

Privatizing agencies opens up too many venues for the abuse of the system. It introduces additional layers of bureaucratic management and undue political influences in the awarding of contracts. It also puts at risk service levels and service provision. It makes it much more difficult to correct service issues when they arise because of the multiply layers of bureaucracy that must be transited. It has also been proven that when a contractor is non-compliant, the usual course of action is to terminate the contract and award it to another, making it difficult to correct the core issues.

Contracts, based on open bids, make it difficult to award because of the process of awarding only to the cheapest bidder. In order to profitably win and perform the contract requirements, the contractor begins finding other areas to cut, which usually means hiring cheaper labor, providing less skilled service.  

In general, privatization turns out to be only a short term solution. The savings made are like “stumbling over dollars to pick up pennies."  As usual, people fail to think things through and seek only immediate solutions to complex issues.

If the state conservatives are successful, then we can expect over a relatively short period of time, a reduction in government service, service levels, and the general health of labor will suffer. Thus, leaving us all poorer and pursuing a lower standard of living overall.

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