Read the series
After the election, Wink received probation for fundraising on county time. Russell got a twoyear prison term for stealing $21,000 from an annual county-staffed picnic that saluted veterans and boosted Walker’s political profile.
As his campaign for governor gained strength, it looked more and more as if there would be a new union man in Walker’s life.
Marty Beil, a big man with a Santa Claus beard, at times made Rich Abelson seem mild-mannered.
His Madison-based AFSCME council included the state employees union.
Beil, a former seminarian and probation officer, had been around forever and had deeply influenced governors of both parties.
“Characters like Walker” didn’t understand that employees had traded lower wages for solid pensions, he said.
Later, Beil would threaten that state workers might just strike — illegally.
“Does he want our firstborn?” he asked.
The next governor would face a $3.6 billion budget shortfall, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. Walker also wanted tax cuts.
But he was vague during the campaign about how he would persuade unions to go along with his major budget proposal: pension and health care cost-sharing from employees.
By his own mouth, Walker spoke mainly about getting concessions through tough bargaining. State unions would want to avoid layoffs — or the furloughs Doyle had used, he said.
Less than a week before general election day, Walker faced a direct question at an Oshkosh Northwestern editorial board meeting:
Would he negotiate with state unions over the pension contribution he wanted from employees? Yep, he said.
“You still have to negotiate it. I did at the county as well. … We’d approach a similar strategy for the state.”
Walker’s labor stance sounded tough, not transformative. Labor leaders didn’t sense a kill shot was coming.
Or they didn’t think that Walker could pull it off if he tried. For the previous two years, Democrats had control of the administration and both chambers of the Legislature.
The elections on Nov. 2, 2010, Scott Walker’s 43rd birthday, gave him all he needed.
He easily knocked off Tom Barrett.
Republicans took both chambers of the Legislature in a national wave for the GOP. Walker would take over state government without an opposition party to blunt his agenda, as the County Board had done in Milwaukee.
State unions rushed to finish a contract with the departing Doyle, but a union bricklayer, a Democrat, cast the deciding vote in the Legislature to defeat it.
Walker was free, as he would later say, to “drop the bomb” on labor, igniting the standoff with unions that made him a national figure.
A decade of jousting with labor seemed only to fuel his rise.
“The unions made Scott Walker,” County Supervisor Rob McDonald said. “He should slap a union label sticker on his car.”
In the aftermath
In the years following the Act 10 fight, Walker’s national profile grew as he fended off a recall attempt, won re-election and ran unsuccessfully for the GOP nomination for president ultimately seized by Donald Trump.
In his old stomping grounds, Milwaukee County, the fiscal picture improved dramatically.
County Executive Chris Abele’s fiscal conservatism, earlier actions by Walker and the County Board, the national economic recovery — all contributed.
But through Act 10, Walker had given his successor, Abele, the powers that he himself lacked while in Milwaukee County’s top job.
“The county’s overall financial condition — which five years ago was in ‘intensive care’ — has progressed beyond ‘critical’ and is heading toward ‘stable,’” the Public Policy Forum said when it revisited county finances in late 2013.
County government was making new investments in mental health, fixing roads and building up other neglected programs — without raising property taxes or increasing debt.
Gone were the bargaining battles with AFSCME. County employees felt the change in their take-home pay; Abele required workers to pay a much bigger chunk of health care costs.
Gone, too, is Abelson, who moved on to the union’s international office in Washington, D.C. On his old turf, the Milwaukee-based AFSCME council lost 70% of its members shortly after Act 10.
As Walker surged to an early lead in the 2016 race for the GOP presidential nomination, an embittered Abelson called Walker a fraud who says he’s for workers but cuts family-supporting government jobs.
“He destroyed Milwaukee County,” Abelson said.
A few months later, AFSCME leaders delighted in Walker’s sudden exit from the race.
They saw his fall as a clear repudiation of the federal union limits Walker rolled out in summer 2015 while trying to re-energize his presidential campaign.
Walker disagrees. He said Trump adviser Newt Gingrich emailed him just this week expressing interest in that plan.
“They should tackle that,” Walker said — and consider term limits on Congress and federal judges, as well as fulfilling promises to secure the border and overturn Obamacare.
“They should go big and bold and not hold back,” he said, echoing his description of Act 10.
Walker might have had a chance to join Trump in D.C. No doubt, some union leaders in Wisconsin would have helped gas up his old “Van Force One” — anything to get him out of the state.
But Walker, still only 49 and trying to navigate his complicated relationship with Trump and with Wisconsin voters, says he strongly prefers being governor and leading the Republican Governors Association.
As for seeking a third term, he said, “I’m not 100% sure, but I’m definitely headed in that direction.”