Nytimes: Opinion: The Destruction of Progressive Wisconsin

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Opinion: The Destruction of Progressive Wisconsin. http://rss.nytimes.com/c/34625/f/640385/s/4ceaddaf/sc/7/l/0L0Snytimes0N0C20A160C0A10C170Copinion0Ccampaign0Estops0Cthe0Edestruction0Eof0Eprogressive0Ewisconsin0Bhtml0Dpartner0Frss0Gemc0Frss/story01.htm …



The Opinion Pages | Campaign Stops
The Destruction of Progressive Wisconsin

By DAN KAUFMANJAN. 16, 2016
Photo
Credit Jeffrey Phelps/Associated Press

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SHORTLY after his exit from an abbreviated presidential run last fall, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin returned to a more successful undertaking: dismantling what remains of his state’s century-old progressive legacy.

Last month, Mr. Walker signed a bill that allowed corporations to donate directly to political parties. On the same day, he signed a law that replaced the state’s nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, a body that is responsible for election oversight and enforcing ethics codes, with two commissions made up of partisan appointees. Now a new bill supported by Mr. Walker, which is expected to clear the Republican-dominated Legislature with a Senate vote soon, threatens to corrupt Wisconsin’s Civil Service.

In 1905, Wisconsin became the third state to enact Civil Service reform, helping establish it as a national model for clean government. The reforms were one of the many achievements of Gov. Robert M. La Follette Sr., who later founded the Progressive Party and ran for president on its ticket. But Mr. Walker’s new Civil Service bill replaces anonymous exams with résumés, opening the door to political or racial bias that would prove almost impossible to detect because personnel files are not part of the public record.

The bill lengthens the probationary period for new employees, during which they can be fired for any reason (or no reason). And it centralizes hiring within the Department of Administration, the most politicized agency in the state’s government. Incoming résumés would be judged by one of the governor’s appointees.

Besides rewriting the hiring process for new employees and the work rules that govern some 30,000 current state workers, the bill highlights Wisconsin’s role as a laboratory for a national conservative strategy to destroy the labor movement. That experiment began in 2011 with the passage of Act 10, which all but ended collective bargaining for the state’s public employees and helped inspire more than a hundred bills across the country attacking public-sector unions.

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Last year, Mr. Walker signed a “right-to-work” law that weakened private-sector unions and also marked a significant national turning point: Half of the 50 states are now right-to-work. A national right-to-work bill, which already has 18 co-sponsors in the Senate, including Senator Ted Cruz, appears increasingly possible under a Republican president...................