Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s abrupt departure from the presidential race Monday was the first thing he had done in years that organized labor could really get behind.
Union leaders cheered the end of the White House ambitions of the candidate that they feared and hated the most and who would have presented the greatest threat to them as president.
“This is a clear rebuke of the anti-worker platform on which Governor Walker based his entire presidential campaign,” said Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, made a similar argument. “As Gov. Scott Walker leaves this race, this is much clear: You can’t build a campaign by tearing working people down and attacking their aspirations for a better life.”
Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, issued a statement calling Walker “still a disgrace” just no longer a “national” one. The statement was a reference to his reaction in July to Walker’s official campaign announcement — Trumka called Walker a “national disgrace.”
The Wisconsin AFL-CIO tweeted, “America has said NO THANK YOU, GOODBYE, and GOOD RIDDANCE to Scott Walker and his union busting campaign!”
There’s little evidence that Walker’s labor policies had anything to do with his campaign’s woes. The governor had been a top-tier candidate in the polls as recently as the beginning of the summer, largely on the strength of his battles with unions in his home state.
Walker lurched rightward in recent months on issues like immigration and gay marriage in a way that alienated supporters without winning new fans. After billionaire developer Donald Trump’s sudden rise to the top of the GOP race, Walker struggled for media exposure. His debate performances received lukewarm reviews. His standing in the polls fell into the low single digits by September. On the day he dropped out a CNN poll said he had negligible support.
Labor leaders have detested Walker ever since he instituted major reforms to the Badger State’s public sector union laws in 2011 that allowed workers for the first time to opt out of union membership if they chose. The reforms also eliminated automatic union dues, deduction from worker paychecks, required unions to get a majority of members to recertify it each year and limited collective bargaining to just wages. State public employee unions have seen major membership losses since then.
The reforms prompted a major outcry from labor leaders and massive protests at the state capitol as unions and their allies sought to prevent the reforms’ approval. After they passed, unions sponsored a gubernatorial recall election that Walker won in 2012. He also won re-election in 2014 and in March signed a law making Wisconsin a right-to-work state, in effect extending his public sector union reforms to private sector workers.
Walker had promised to go further still during his presidential bid, calling just last week for abolishing public sector unionism altogether, as well as abolishing the National Labor Relations Board, the main federal labor law enforcement agency, and making the right to work laws the norm nationwide — states would have had to pass legislation specifically saying they were not right to work states.
It would have represented the most radical reform of federal labor laws in 80 years and a major problem for union leaders. Public sector unions account for about half of the nation’s 14 million-member organized labor movement. The other reforms would have made it harder for the remaining unions to retain members since many workers would gain the ability under right to work laws to opt out of union membership and likely exited unions just as Wisconsin union members did.
Walker said the reforms were about giving power back to individual workers and requiring unions to be responsive to their members’ needs. To counter labor leaders’ claims that this would have allowed non-union workers to become economic “free riders” benefiting from union collective bargaining, Walker proposed releasing unions from the obligation of representing non-members.
