Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch, of Utah, and Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee, recently introduced the Employee Rights Act of 2013. Their proposal includes a provision requiring that unions undergo recertification elections at regular intervals. (The measures has 68 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives and 26 in the Senate). Some advocates will perhaps say every three years would be an appropriate interval, and others might say five years. In his landmark public employee union reforms for Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker made recertification an annual event.

Whatever the interval, the experience of Wisconsin teachers’ union members points to the importance of recertification becoming a national norm. As the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack recently reported, “Teachers unions in nineteen different Wisconsin school districts failed to achieve recertification during annual elections that ended Thursday. … Under Act 10, the Wisconsin law signed by Gov. Scott Walker that reformed collective bargaining for public sector unions, each union is required to get the support of a majority of its members — not simply a majority of those casting votes — in order to maintain certification each year.