I was away from this laptop much of Wednesday, so I didn’t get a chance to read all of the reaction to the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision (which the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel commemorated in end-of-the-world-font-size) reinstituting the substantial weakening of public employee bargaining rights.

(The Supreme Court’s 4–3 decision, by the way, has exactly as much legal weight as a 5–2, 6–1 or 7–0 decision, the latter of which shows the margin of Supreme Court justices who concluded that Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi overstepped her legal authority in overturning the law. Interesting, isn’t it, that the words “divisive” and “controversial” only describe initiatives the user of those words dislikes.)

What was touted at the time as a move necessitated by the $136 million budget deficit that existed at the time (the most recent example of the flood of red ink in which Wisconsin is drowning) was actually necessitated by the imbalance of the relationship between public employees and the taxpayers who pay public employees’ salaries.

Ever since the state’s mediation–arbitration law was enacted in the late 1970s after the Madison teacher strike, taxpayers have not been represented in collective bargaining between public employee unions and the state, county, municipality or school district from which they receive their paychecks. (Taxpayers, of course, pay their salaries.) Public employees have gotten pay raises in years in which taxpayers largely did not, and public employees have consistently received better benefits than their employers the taxpayers. Outsize spending on salaries and benefits lead to excessive government spending, which leads to high taxes (fourth highest state and local taxes in the U.S., as you know) and enormous levels of state and local government debt.

Gov. Scott Walker, who showed unusual fortitude for proposing to reorder the balance between public employee and taxpayer, has been branded public enemy number one. To that, said WTMJ radio’s Charlie Sykes, “Do you know who was Public Enemy #1 for the last 20 years? The TAXPAYER!”

To say that those who believe public employee unions should run Wisconsin — I mean, opponents of Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill — are not happy is like saying water is wet. Some responses have been printable; others have not.

I’ll repeat what I have written elsewhere: Public employees, because they are paid by the taxpayers, do not deserve collective bargaining rights of any kind on any workplace issue. Period. The relationship between a private company and its union is between them and is no one else’s business. (Except the company’s customers, which can vote with their wallets whether or not they like unions.) The relationship between government as employer and government employees is the business of the taxpayers, whose (excessively high in Wisconsin) taxes are paying government employee salaries. (You can guess whose side I’m on in the teeter-totter between the 15 percent of workers who work for some Wisconsin government and the 85 percent of workers who do not work for government but whose taxes pay for the salaries and benefits of the aforementioned 15 percent.)

In the same way that teachers and teacher unions are not the same thing, public employees and public employee unions are not the same thing either. Employees of an organization deserve to have their work evaluated and rewarded individually, because each employee’s performance in and contribution to the organization is different. Public employee unions serve only to protect themselves and their most underachieving members, at the expense of high-achieving union members and, most importantly, the taxpayers. So if you conclude that the weakening of public employee collective bargaining approved by the Supreme Court does not go far enough, you are a perceptive reader. But, to quote Otto von Bismarck (the author of the famed comparison of laws and sausages), politics is the art of the possible.

One predictable result is that Da Union has filed suit in U.S. District Court in the People’s Republic of Madison seeking to overturn the law on the grounds that it’s discriminatory because it doesn’t apply to police and fire unions. (The law should apply to all, but there is a legislative solution for that, not a judicial solution.) You need not have attended law school to see that the lawsuit is obviously a fishing expedition to get U.S. District Judge William Coffey (conveniently, a Barack Obama appointee) to rule that public-employee collective bargaining is a constitutional right, when it is not. And even if Coffey lets his inner Democrat prevail, given the current makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court, though I am not a lawyer, overturning the law seems unlikely to pass Supreme muster.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel also isn’t happy:

In a rash decision based on flimsy reasoning, four justices of the Wisconsin Supreme Court have upended the state open meetings law and opened the door for political mischief. …

The court found that the Legislature must obey the state constitution but not the open meetings law even though the constitution requires the doors of the body to remain open when it is in session and even though the constitution is mentioned in the law. Under the law, meetings typically require 24 hours notice.

With four short words – “access was not denied” – the majority weakened Wisconsin’s reputation for open government. …

The court’s slapdash ruling has injured its own reputation for thoughtfulness and fair play – perhaps for a very long time. The court should revisit this issue.

The news media is obligated to fight for open government, of course. It is interesting, though, how often advocates claim that the U.S. Supreme Court or a state Supreme Court is the law of the land when they agree with the decision (for instance, Roe v. Wade or, for the media, New York Times v. Sullivan), and then seek to delegitimize a decision they don’t like. Editorial writers are journalists, not lawyers and not usually constitutional scholars.

One news report suggested a constitutional amendment would be introduced to make the state Open Meetings Law apply to the Legislature too. (The irony is that the Open Meetings and Open Records laws were passed after the Legislature in 1975 created the state budget almost entirely in secret. Both houses of the Legislature were controlled by Democrats.) Such an effort should be made, because the Legislature should be subject to the same laws as everyone else in the state. (Assembly and Senate Democratic and Republican caucus meetings are not subject to the law either.) Perhaps if that were the case, the Legislature would create better laws than the laws the previous Legislature passed, about which voters expressed their opinion Nov. 2.

The second predictable result is a predicted wave of government employee retirements to prevent having to do what taxpayers have had to do for several years — pay more for their benefits. As I wrote yesterday, you have the right to retire if you have the wherewithal to retire, even if few of the people whose taxes paid for those benefits will be retiring after just 30 years in the workforce. As I also wrote yesterday, those who take the early-retirement out when they could still be serving the public forfeit their self-description as selfless public servants.

There are two other benefits for the state from a wave of public employee retirements. In a state with an estimated 228,000 unemployed workers (as of May according to the state Department of Workforce Development), every retirement is a job opportunity for someone else. Or: Every retirement is an opportunity to reduce the public sector workforce (about 280,000, of which 70,000 are state employees, according to the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance) without layoffs.

Earlier this month, the Ripon Commonwealth Press published this letter to the editor:

Don’t hate teachers

TO THE EDITOR:

Why do people hate our teachers?

I think back to when I was in school and how much I learned from my teachers.

My band teacher was one of the most influential people to me. His influence helped me land a job in the music business working with the world’s top artists and was one of the greatest things that I have ever experienced.

If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have had this great opportunity to work for the Berlin School District as their AV coordinator/IT specialists.

My point to this is to not be angry at teachers over our current budget situation. They didn’t personally create the problem.

Everyone created the problem. Everyone drives on public roads, enjoys publicly funded parks, uses critical public services and yes even public schools.

If you ever learned anything in school from your teachers is that everyone should have to fix the problem together. …

We all understand that the budget needs to be fixed and have agreed to Walker’s request to pay more for retirement and insurance.

Taking away our right to collective bargaining is wrong! Please don’t support his agenda that hurts many people’s families.

Let’s find a way to fix this without hurting anyone. Don’t let hate ruin our wonderful schools.

A first read might make the reader wonder what is being taught in the Berlin schools. “Everyone created the problem”? How many readers agreed to spend $86 million per year to take land off permanently off the tax rolls? How many readers agreed to a tax and spending structure that has resulted in this state’s lagging the nation in per capita personal  income growth for the past three decades? How many readers agreed to pay government employees Rolls-Royce benefits, pay both employer and employee contributions to pensions, and allow government employees to retire after 30 years?

Moreover, unless the letter-writer is referring only to the Berlin teacher union when he wrote that “We all understand that the budget needs to be fixed and have agreed to Walker’s request to pay more for retirement and insurance,” that statement is false. Each school district’s teacher union has to agree to contract concessions, since there is no state teacher contract; the writer has no idea whether teacher union members in other school districts agreed to concessions or not. (Unless, that is, he blindly believes anything the Wisconsin Education Association Council tells him.) And as for his assertion about “our wonderful schools,” the fact that the students in schools in this country underperform the students of other countries in the industrialized world does not meet my definition of “wonderful.”

Having written that, neither I nor anyone I know hates teachers. To hate teachers as a class would be stupid. I had some very good teachers, and my wife and my children have had very good teachers during our years in school.

The problem with the letter-writer’s assertion is that he has committed the error of equating teachers and teacher unions. The former have chosen as their life’s calling expanding the knowledge and reasoning ability of their students. The latter have institutionalized not just self-preservation at the expense of those paying their salaries, but the concept that all their members should be treated the same regardless of their abilities and their performance. (The qualifier to “treated the same” is that the Last In First Out layoff concept shows that some teacher union members are more equal than others.)

Following is a list of examples I personally witnessed that demonstrate the pernicious power of teacher unions in Wisconsin. (To paraphrase “Dragnet,” the names are omitted to protect the innocent, but I believe none of the people mentioned are still employed by Wisconsin school districts.)

First period: the 1976 Madison teachers strike, the last in the state. (For now.) At the beginning of the strike, a mother of two grade-school-aged children went to their school to pick up some supplementary materials so that their children would not regress in schoolwork during a strike of unknowable duration. (The strike occurred right after winter vacation, so over four weeks Madison students had 30 minutes in the classroom.)

At the door to the school, the mother was accosted by the children’s art teacher, who loudly demanded to know what she was doing here, and how dare she cross a picket line, etc. The resulting exchange between the children’s mother and one of the children’s teachers could not be described as pleasant. (The teacher, however, was lucky that the exchange involved the children’s mother and not their father.)

Second period: During a presidential election year, a middle school decided to hold a class presidential election and create a class student council. Not all the classrooms in the grade participated, which offended the non-participants to the point where they embarked on a campaign to overthrow the class president, complete with posters that were displayed in school hallways for months. None of the teachers in this particular class, nor the school’s principal, nor the school’s assistant principal thought that what would now be considered bullying was enough reason to intervene. (The teacher who did intervene was a teacher who had been absent recovering from a heart attack; the coup d’etat campaign originated in his class with the approval of his long-term substitute.)

Third period: A high school journalism teacher refused to take his students, some of which were considering journalism as a profession, to tour the local daily newspaper, one of  the largest newspapers in the state. The reason: During a strike by its union, the newspaper hired replacement workers, effectively breaking the union.

Fourth period: A popular high school band teacher left just before the school year began for a job at a college. The band teacher had been at the high school two years, replacing a teacher who had changed jobs and then left teaching. The previous teacher, having decided his alternative profession wasn’t the answer either, returned to his old high school thanks to his union rights. The band students’ experience was nowhere near what it had been in the previous two school years.

Fifth period: A high school senior was accepted to one of the state’s private colleges. The college had a scholarship that would have paid for most of that student’s tuition expenses. The scholarship’s provisions required the student’s guidance counselor to fill in and submit the scholarship application. When the student asked her guidance counselor what happened to the application, the guidance counselor replied that he hadn’t sent it in. The student ended up incurring tens of thousands of dollars of student debt because her guidance counselor was too busy eating sweet rolls made in the high school kitchen to do his job.

Sixth period: A school district embarks on a campaign to build a new high school. At a public forum, one of the school district residents whose increased property taxes would have paid for the new high school asks the head of the school district’s teacher union whether the school district’s teachers would agree to a salary freeze of one or two years as their contribution to paying for the new high school. The teacher union president refuses.

These incidents are all examples where the teacher union triumphed over people who should matter more — students, school administrators (since management is there to manage, after all) and/or taxpayers. (And teachers, given that few Wisconsin school districts have merit pay for their best teachers.) Most of these incidents might reasonably be described as misconduct on the part of the aforementioned teacher-union members. Had comparable incidents occurred in the private sector, the people involved may have been disciplined or even fired. In none of these cases did the teacher union members suffer any professional consequences. (Except in the last case: the school district voters rejected the high school project.)

The final example, I suppose,  would be the teachers who have fled into retirement instead of making their own pension contributions and paying higher health insurance costs, as those who pay their salaries have had to do for several years. Few taxpayers get to retire after 30 years of work, but someone who has the financial wherewithal to retire after 30 years in the workplace has the right to do so. Teachers who retire early instead of taking the opportunity to teach new generations of students would seem, however, to forfeit the self-description as selfless public servants.

Teacher union sympathizers claim that teacher unions are a necessary counterweight against school district administration. I would be the last person to claim that every school district administrator is an example of enlightened leadership. (Many Wisconsin school districts employ too many administrators — taxpayers should be wary of any administrator who doesn’t have the word “superintendent” or “principal” in his or her title — and the choice of paying one administrator or paying two teachers is a self-evident choice.) Poor school leadership, however, is a problem for school boards to deal with, and if school boards are hiring the wrong administrators and principals, or insufficiently supervising school district leaders, well, that’s one reason we have elections. For that matter, I’ve seen instances where school boards were nothing more than the puppets of school district administrators, but that is ultimately the fault of the voters for not voting wisely in elections. The teachers ultimately have the last word because they have the ability to work elsewhere.

So if you think I’m sympathetic to the public-sector employees who lost their collective bargaining rights thanks to Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision … you’re wrong. I suspect readers can come up with more examples of teacher unions protecting bad teachers than benefiting their employers, the taxpayers.