Fighting public-sector unions turned Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker into a national figure in 2011. Winning the fights made him a plausible Republican presidential candidate for 2016. Despite that, Walker talks little about organized labor specifically on the campaign trail.
Instead, he is recasting those battles to portray himself as having fought Washington itself, portraying the unions as the forces of the political status quo he was reforming.
“He doesn’t explicitly talk about unions all that much, but he implicitly does when he refers to the ‘big-government special interests’ he took on,” said Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Patrick Marley, who has covered Walker since he became governor.
In a well-received speech Saturday at the Iowa “Freedom Summit,” Walker mentioned unions specifically only once — and almost in passing. Instead, he described his battles as having been against an anonymous group of liberal special interests. The event brought several GOP candidates to the state, which holds the first major event in presidential primaries.
“We took the power away from the big government special interests and we put it firmly in the hand of the hardworking taxpayers,” Walker said, in a typical line from the speech. “The liberals didn’t much like that.”
Walker talked more about unions in a Jan. 15 speech to a Republican National Committee event in San Diego, when he mentioned them briefly in two sections. In other major campaign speeches, like his November re-election speech, unions weren’t directly mentioned at all.
In the RNC speech, Walker mentioned that the national heads of National Education Association and the AFL-CIO labor federation came into the state to campaign against him — “I was their number one target,” he said — but was quick to add that other Democratic leaders targeted him as well and portrayed the re-election fight as really being against the Washington establishment.
“Washington had picked the [Democratic] candidate. The big-government special interests in Washington had picked the candidate,” he said.
The Wisconsin governor has spent little time explaining who those special interests were and how he took their power away: By pushing the state legislature in 2011 to rewrite the laws regarding Wisconsin public-sector unions. The changes limited collective bargaining, allowed workers to opt out of being in a union, ended automatic member union dues deduction and required the unions to annually recertify that they still had majority support from their members or lose their recognition from the state.
The reforms caused Wisconsin government-sector unions, the principal allies of the state Democratic Party, to bleed members and money. Unions, particularly the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, fought tenaciously to prevent that from happening. They organized protests at the state capitol and later sponsored a recall election intended to oust Walker, both of which became popular liberal causes.
Walker instead highlighted the other groups he struggled with in his Iowa speech: “I guess in a way I have to apologize because the ‘Occupy Movement’ started four years ago in Madison, and then went to Wall Street.”
A spokesman for Scott Walker did not respond to a request for comment.
Matt Vadum, who tracks liberal organizations for the conservative Capital Research Foundation, echoed Marley’s assessment that Walker does talk about unions, just indirectly: “He didn’t say the word ‘unions’ constantly [in the Iowa speech], that’s true, but he discussed his battles with them and their allies at length.”
Still, he admitted it was a “bit of a head-scratcher” that Walker’s rhetoric wasn’t blunter: “There is no downside for any Republican nowadays to attack labor unions, especially government labor unions.”
In his speeches, Walker makes a point of saying that Republicans have to present a positive message. He ascribes his victory in last fall’s election to his campaign emphasizing what it was for, rather than what it was against, whereas the “special interests” were simply against him.
Since his 2011 reforms, Walker has resisted other efforts to reform laws relating to organized labor. He has repeatedly opposed passing a right-to-work law in Wisconsin, saying it would be a distraction from the rest of his agenda for the state.
