Labor unions plan to rally in front of the Arizona State Capitol on Thursday afternoon to protest four bills quickly moving through the state Legislature that could make last year’s Wisconsin labor laws look modest by comparison.
Three of the four bills restrict the way unions collect dues and the way workers get paid for union activities. The fourth bans collective bargaining between governments and government workers: state and local. Unlike Wisconsin, it affects all government employees, including police and firefighters.
“It seems as though those employees or at least the unions that represent them don’t care what the burden is on the taxpayer as long as they get theirs,” says state Sen. Rick Murphy, a Republican who is sponsoring the bills.
Murphy says collective bargaining lets public workers put themselves ahead of the public they are working for.
Nick Dranias of the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, a libertarian/conservative think tank that helped Murphy write the bills, says public-sector workers in Arizona make about 6 percent more in salary and benefits than their private-sector counterparts.
“You’re not in government, you know, to collect a fat paycheck,” Dranias says. “You’re in government to serve. And if you get paid reasonably, that’s nice, but the moment you feel the need to organize collectively and create laws like collective-bargaining laws that give you special privileges to negotiate and extract compensation not seen in the private sector, you’ve gone too far.”
Arizona is also different from Wisconsin in that it’s a right-to-work state: No one can be forced to join a union. So unions in Arizona already have less clout. Still, 80 percent of police in the state choose to belong to a union.
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