In Wis. union stronghold, residents struggle with cuts

Associated Press

RACINE, Wis.

There once was a time when Harry and Nancy Harrington — their teenage children in tow — walked the picket line outside the nursing home where she was a medical aide, protesting the lack of a pension plan for the unionized work force.

But those days of family solidarity are gone.

Harry now blames years of union demands for an exodus of manufacturing jobs from this blue-collar city on the shore of Lake Michigan. He praises new Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker for attempting to strip public-employee unions of nearly all of their collective- bargaining rights. Protesters opposed to Walker’s plan have held steady at the Wisconsin Capitol for nearly three weeks, though their overnight sit-ins ended Thursday with a judge’s order.

“I’m sorry, but the unions want to yell; they want to intimidate,” says Harry Harrington, 69.

“They want to be heard,” retorts Nancy Harrington, 66.

The Harringtons typify the new national reality for labor unions. Support is no longer a sure thing from the middle class — not even in a city long considered a union stronghold in the state that gave birth to the nation’s largest public-employee union. National polls show that the portion of the public that views unions favorably has dropped to near- historic lows in recent years.

But surveys also show a public uneasy with attempts to weaken union bargaining rights by emboldened Republican governors who swept into power in the 2010 elections. A Pew Research Center poll released last week found more adults nationwide sided with unions than the governor in the Wisconsin dispute.

For unions, the political standoffs occurring in states such as Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio are a make- or-break moment — a chance to repair tarnished luster or risk sinking toward irrelevancy among the American public.

The decline in union power in Racine perhaps is best symbolized by the area near Roosevelt Park, where a monument dedicated by the AFL-CIO honors the Depression-era president who signed a 1935 federal law guaranteeing collective-bargaining rights. Not far away is a tall chain-link fence protecting the vacant plot of the old Case Corp. farm-equipment factory, which was razed a few years ago after the company merged with another corporation and then downsized.

CNH Global N.V., the successor company, still operates in the area. And the city remains the home of S.C. Johnson & Son Inc., which makes cleaning products and bug sprays, and vehicle- radiator maker Modine Manufacturing Co. Yet other companies have scaled back or shut down, resulting in the loss of a third of Racine’s manufacturing jobs in the past 20 years, according to federal Bureau of Labor Service statistics.

As the jobs have diminished, so have the union ranks. But the problem isn’t solely about fewer members. It’s also that more people have come to perceive union employees as the beneficiaries of cushy pension and health-care plans that others no longer enjoy, and even attribute union gains to business losses.