WALKER NOT EXACTLY OPEN TO COMPROMISE…. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) union-busting efforts aren’t making compromise easy, but that doesn’t mean options aren’t available.
The most obvious is also the easiest — state workers are prepared to accept less pay and fewer benefits, and in exchange, Walker would be expected to drop his punitive and unnecessary demands that workers give up their collective-bargaining rights. The governor has already said this isn’t a deal he would even consider.
Which leads us to another possible compromise.
With Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker maintaining a hard line on his budget bill and Democratic senators refusing to return to Madison to vote, attention is turning to a group of moderate Republican senators to negotiate a compromise to the stalemate that has drawn thousands of protesters to the state capital for a sixth straight day.
The proposal, written by Sen. Dale Schultz and first floated in the Republican caucus early last week, calls for most collective bargaining rights of public employee unions to be eliminated — per Mr. Walker’s bill — but then reinstated in 2013, said Mr. Schultzs’s chief of staff Todd Allbaugh.
Now, as compromises go, this doesn’t sound like much of a deal for state employees. The state would temporarily strip workers of the collective-bargaining rights, but then bring them back later.
As it turns out, it doesn’t much matter whether labor would go for something like this — Walker announced this morning that this isn’t good enough, either. He wants both the cuts and the union-busting provisions, and will accept nothing less.
That said, it is interesting that a Republican state senator is open to a resolution that would deny the conservative governor his full agenda. It’s worth keeping an eye out for other cracks in the united GOP front.
