Has the Republican Party’s grand experiment in Union-Busting finally come to an end?

Scott Walker, the Republican Governor of Wisconsin, rose to national prominence in 2011 when he passed a landmark bill dealing a blow to Unions in the State and across the country. With Act 10, Walker stripped Public Workers of their right to collectively bargain, gutting their salaries, health care and pensions.  He then survived a vigorous recall effort, which featured 100,000 protesters storming the capitol rotunda in Downtown Madison.

Walker was the face of an Anti-Union Movement championed by Republicans and backed by libertarian financiers like the Koch Brothers, but seven years later, in the midst of an ostensibly booming State economy, Walker narrowly lost his re-election bid on November 6th - and he was not the only Anti-Union Gubernatorial Candidate to go down this election season.

The defeat of Walker in Wisconsin, as well as Bill Schuette in Michigan, Bruce Rauner in Illinois and Kris Kobach in Kansas, is evidence that Union-bashing politicians are finding it difficult to appeal to Workers in a humming economy, which would otherwise seem to validate their claims that low wages and Right-To-Work (for less) Laws have unleashed the prosperity-making powers of the market.

In fact, national support for Unions is at 62%, a 15-year high, with particular muscle in the Midwest, and among Women and Millennials.

“There’s a sense in which Scott Walker and his ilk ‘have overplayed their hand,’” said Lane Windham, the Associate Director of the Labor Center at Georgetown University. “People understand that Unions counterbalance corporate power, and corporations are too powerful.”

This was not the sense observers had two years ago when Donald Trump outperformed past Republican Presidential Candidates with Union Households and carried a string of States that formed the backbone of the old industrial Midwest. 

But his message - hostile to both trade and Immigrants - went against the grain of Koch-style economic orthodoxy.

While certain Working Class Voters did gravitate toward Trump, the Mid-Term Election results in Wisconsin and elsewhere suggest that they have not been convinced by his party’s economic agenda and may even have soured on Trump himself.

According to a Reuters-Ipsos poll released earlier this year, Trump’s support among Union Voters has fallen 15 points.

Many voters living under Republican leadership are reacting to stagnant wages and the rise of underemployment (Despite working fewer hours than they would prefer, underemployed Workers get counted as “employed” in official statistics).

In 2011, when Amy Mizialko, the President of the Milwaukee Teacher’s Union, first checked her pay stub on-line after Act 10 passed, she broke into tears.  “Those cuts were devastating,” said Mizialko, who took a $10,000 cut in wages and benefits in the first year alone.

Since the passage of Act 10, Membership in Wisconsin’s largest Teacher’s Union plummeted from 98,000 to 32,000.

Once the progressive heart of the Labor Movement in the United States, Wisconsin saw its Union Membership drop 46% between 2011 and 2017.

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