Regular Locker Room readers have seen plenty of evidence of the negative impact of public-sector unions.
The latest TIME magazine delivers some good news on that front:
Formerly friendly Wisconsin has a new governor, Republican Scott Walker, who is promising to use “every legal means” to weaken the bargaining power of state workers ? including decertification of the public employees’ union. Ohio’s new governor, Republican John Kasich, wants to end the rule that requires nonunion contractors to pay union wages, and he’s targeting the right of public employees to strike. Indiana legislators talk of making their state ? once a bastion of unionized manufacturing ? a Midwestern right-to-work redoubt.
Even in places where Democrats cling to power, unions are under the gun. New York’s incoming governor, Andrew Cuomo ? son of the labor darling Mario Cuomo ? intends to freeze the salaries of the state’s 190,000 government workers and has promised to cinch the budget belt tighter when public union contracts are renegotiated this year. In California, new governor Jerry Brown ? who gave public employees the right to unionize when he was governor in the 1970s ? returns to his old post talking darkly about the unsustainable drain that union pensions and health benefits are on the state’s budget.
