Sweet, Sweet Victory

On Tuesday, the battle for employee freedom won an important victory against Big Labor's campaign to take over the Wisconsin State Senate.

And your National Right to Work Committee stood strong in the fight, making sure the pro-forced unionism politicians couldn't hide their record of waste and corruption.

As you know, Governor Scott Walker led a brave legislative effort to roll back union-boss power over Wisconsin state workers, including repealing most withholding of forced dues from paychecks.

Big Labor responded with unrestrained fury.

After the Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected one spurious legal attack on the bill earlier this summer, Tuesday's election returns landed another blow against the union bosses' all-out assault to repeal Governor Walker's government-sector monopoly bargaining reforms.

Thanks to the mobilization of Right to Work supporters like you, Governor Walker did not back down this March in the face of teacher union "sick-outs," hysterical protests, and union-label Democrats in the State Senate fleeing the state to stall the debate.

Ultimately, the bill passed -- ending Big Labor's ability to force tens of thousands of state and local government workers to pay union dues just to get or keep a job.

And that threatened to hit the union bosses directly in the pocketbook.

But even Big Labor's high command knows that Right to Work is popular with the American voters. Poll after poll shows that 80 percent of Americans support the principle that no worker should be compelled to join or pay dues to a union to get or keep a job.

It's no wonder then, despite a $20 million campaign to recall supporters of the labor law reform bill, that Big Labor-backed challengers in the recall election were terrified to even mention the forced-dues issue.

The National Right to Work Committee blitzed the districts with three separate mailings totaling almost 200,000 pieces of mail, making sure constituents knew where each candidate stood on forced dues, and asking them to call the pro-forced unionism politicians and demand they change their ways.

The people of Wisconsin took care of the rest.

In the end, only two of the six Republicans lost, keeping Republicans in the majority of the State Senate. And two union-label Democrats still face recall challenges of their own next week.

The union hierarchy-backed candidate won in District 32, where Barack Obama, a forced-unionism proponent, overwhelmingly won in 2008 with 61 percent of vote.

The other incumbent who lost this week had been dogged by a tawdry infidelity scandal, yet his union-label opponent only scraped by with 51 percent of the vote -- hardly a rebuke of employee freedom.

And next week, incumbents Jim Holperin (D-12) and Robert Wirch (D-22) -- who opposed the government-sector Right to Work law -- face recall elections.

Back in March, instead of facing Wisconsin's budget crisis and standing up for workers, State Senators Holperin and Wirch stole a play from Big Labor and fled to Illinois to avoid voting on the labor law reform bill.

Their recall opponents, on the other hand, have each pledged 100 percent opposition to forced unionism.

If either of those races don't turn out Big Labor's way, rank-and-file workers in Wisconsin will have even more reason to question how union bosses are spending their forced-dues money.

One failed $20 million forced-dues campaign later, the case to end forced dues once and for all just got even stronger.

Sincerely,