shewholaughs: The national media finally made it.

The focus of the coverage has finally shifted as well - away from pensions and health care contributions to the real issue at hand: workers' rights. If our public employee unions are crushed, if public employees lose their hard-won collective bargaining rights, the floor will drop out from under wages and benefits in the private sector, too. Defeating this bill is about stopping the erosion of good middle and working class jobs from Wisconsin's public and private sectors.

Mother Jones: What's Happening in Wisconsin Explained

Walker says his legislation, which would strip most state employees of any meaningful collective bargaining rights, is necessary to close the state's $137 million budget gap. There are a number of problems with that argument, though. The unions are not to blame for the deficit, and stripping unionized workers of their collective bargaining rights won't in and of itself save any money. Walker says he needs to strip the unions of their rights to close the gap. But public safety officers' unions, which have members who are more likely to support Republicans and who also tend to have the highest salaries and benefits, are exempted from the new rules. Meanwhile, a series of tax breaks and other goodies that Walker and the Republican legislature passed just after his inauguration dramatically increased the deficit that Walker now says he's trying to close. And Wisconsin has closed a much larger budget gap in the past without scrapping worker organizing rights.

Ezra Klein: Unions aren't to blame for Wisconsin's budget problems

The governor called a special session of the legislature and signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues (among other things). The new legislation was not offset, and it helped turn a surplus into a deficit [see update at end of post]. As Brian Beutler writes, "public workers are being asked to pick up the tab for this agenda."

But even that's not the full story here. Public employees aren't being asked to make a one-time payment into the state's coffers. Rather, Walker is proposing to sharply curtail their right to bargain collectively. A cyclical downturn that isn't their fault, plus an unexpected reversal in Wisconsin's budget picture that wasn't their doing, is being used to permanently end their ability to sit across the table from their employer and negotiate what their health insurance should look like.

That's how you keep a crisis from going to waste: You take a complicated problem that requires the apparent need for bold action and use it to achieve a longtime ideological objective. In this case, permanently weakening public-employee unions, a group much-loathed by Republicans in general and by the Republican legislators who have to battle them in elections in particular. And note that not all public-employee unions are covered by Walker's proposal: the more conservative public-safety unions -- notably police and firefighters, many of whom endorsed Walker -- are exempt.

The New York Times: A Turning Point in Labor History

But collective bargaining there must be- -- not a single-minded devotion to the interests of the most fortunate. That is why Wisconsin workers are right on the issues in Madison -- and why the emulation of Governor Walker by other Republican governors is a step backward away from the civilized world. The unions have made a stand for free people.

and

Since the fiscal crisis began, unionized public sector employees in many cities and states have accepted unpaid furloughs, layoffs and other concessions with hardly a peep – and very little publicity. Why mobilize now?

The rallies in Madison and other cities are about whether working people have any protections against the moneyed interests that bought the last election, not about wages and health insurance premiums. While the rich get richer and middle class prospects diminish, they've seen every opportunity to level the playing field crippled by the same people who supported Governor Walker’s election.

...

Governor Walker is betting that private sector employees who have seen their wages decline and who rarely enjoy the benefits of union contracts will rise up in disgust against their public sector neighbors. He’s betting the images of rallies will disturb those who love order and work stoppages will outrage citizens. What he risks is that other citizens will make common cause with these middle class workers, be inspired by them and join in.

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