After 16 months of strife, and seemingly endless recall elections, the final vote was cast in Wisconsin.  Governor Scott Walker retained his position and can serve out the remainder of his term.  Meanwhile, a total of three Republican State Senators were recalled, changing power in the Senate from a 19-14 edge for the GOP to a 17-16 advantage for the Democratic party.

But, some questions linger....
1.  Who will be teaching Wisconsin children 5-10 years from now?

• The hubbub started with Gov. Walker asking public employees (primarily teachers; firefighters and police were exempted) to increase their contributions to health care and pensions without an increase in pay.  The unions negotiated a tradeoff of a wage freeze for better pensions and health care.
• Not only is pay stagnant, there is some concern that given how pay is defined in the Act that eliminated collective bargaining rights, teachers may face as much as a 30% pay cut to accompany those increased benefit contributions.
• Many of the most experienced teachers retired before Walker's rules went into effect for the 2011-2012 academic year. Class sizes have increased in many districts.  Many adjunct/substitute teachers had to be hired.  Quality is impacted.
• Morale has already been negatively impacted; do you think many teachers were emboldened by Tuesday's election results?  Will the stress be significant enough for many to simply throw in the towel and look elsewhere?
• If I'm 18 years or younger, I've just spent 16 months watching my teachers being vilified; referred to as "thugs" and "parasites."  Am I going to be rushing into college and declaring my major as elementary or secondary education?  
• If I am completing my education degree, will a Wisconsin school be my first or even second job choice?

2.  If I am a parent and on the job market, is Wisconsin now going to be a destination where I might considered working, given the turmoil that has gone on?  As 800 million was cut from the education budget, am I going to get the same quality education for my children that existed 2 years ago? 

3. If I am a business looking to relocate, or currently operating in Wisconsin, will there be long-term concerns about the educational preparedness of the workforce 10 years down the road?  Will whatever tax incentives provided to locate here be enough to counteract the likely increased training costs that will be borne by the organization?

The state of Wisconsin has seen some tumultuous times with the election of Scott Walker as Governor, and the subsequent effective end of collective bargaining for most state employees.

However, one of the more intriguing outcomes from the 2011-2013 budget bill is the University of Wisconsin is charged with redesigning its human resource system.  Titled the "Human Resource Design Project," a group, known as the Badger Working Group, comprises representatives of employee and governance groups, and is guided by the following principles:

• Be transparent and collaborative.
• Include regular consultation with the elected governance bodies of the faculty, staff and students; alternative, nonelected groups may not substitute for the formal governance processes.
• Include stakeholder consultation and participation.
• Maintain open communications with UW System, which also will be developing a new personnel system for all system employees except those at UW-Madison.
• Include an examination of other organizations, particularly higher education institutions, with the goal of identifying best practices for UW-Madison.

Robert Lavigna, UW-Madison's Director of Human Resources, talks about the new Human Resources Design Project in the video below:

This project has significant involvement from a wide variety of constituencies across the UW-campus.  According to Darrell Bazzell, University of Wisconsin-Madison vice chancellor for administration:

This project is organized into an advisory committee and 11 work teams that represent stakeholders from across the campus, including faculty and staff, labor organizations and students. This diversity is allowing a wide range of perspectives to be represented. More than 150 members of the campus community are on these work teams, drafting initial recommendations to reform our personnel system. Part of their responsibility is to share information about the teams' progress with their constituent groups.

The project has not been without its hiccups in its early stages as there was concern whether meetings were transparent enough to allow the many voices to be heard.

It will be interesting to see how this project unfolds.  The old proverb of a "A camel is a horse designed by a committee" comes to mind.

Do people really want to see how the HR sausage is made?

Last night, in a bold move, Republicans voted 18-1 to strip collective bargaining rights from many of Wisconsin's public employees (remember that Police and Firefighters were not part of this bill).  Gov. Walker, in addressing this end run, stated:

In order to move the state forward, I applaud the Legislature's action today to stand up to the status quo and take a step in the right direction to balance the budget and reform government. The action today will help ensure Wisconsin has a business climate that allows the private sector to create 250,000 new jobs.

While I am a simple HR professor, I am curious what kind of business climate he has fomented that will not only create 250,000 new jobs, let alone find the bodies to fill them?

1.  He has already rejected $810 million from the Federal Government to support a high speed rail from Milwaukee to Madison, a project that could've created 13,000 jobs
2.  His new budget cuts $834 million from education, a move that will, no doubt, impel many long-time quality educators to take early retirement as well as force schools to layoff or fire many other employees to meet budgets.

So far, I'm seeing jobs being destroyed, not being created.  Leaving the previous points aside, if I am a business looking to relocate, or an investor looking to put my money somewhere:
1.  Is Wisconsin stock now rising?
2. Do I want to put my time, energy, and resources into an economy with an angry electorate?  
3. Will I expect my labor force to be better prepared for the working world when class sizes will continue to grow and quality teachers will inevitably look elsewhere for employment?
4.  Where are the quality employees going to come from, particularly since more and more employers are not even looking at individuals who are unemployed?
5.  Wisconsin has already been experiencing a perceived "brain drain" problem.  Will the current events improve or exacerbate this issue?



From the employee side, what do people look for from a job?  A 2007 survey by the Center for Excellence in State and Local Government Excellence (while somewhat dated, I would expect the results to be similar today) indicated the top 4 items desired:
1.   Health insurance - For public sector employees in Wisconsin, this has certainly gotten weaker.
2.   Having job security - again, the actions of last night have made this weaker
3.  Being in an environment with clear policies and procedures - certainly with collective bargaining rights being stripped, many public employees now have less voice in how those policies will be made.
4.  The retirement plan - again, it has become a less attractive commodity in Wisconsin

If I am an education major, will I want to go work for a Wisconsin school district where budgets are tighter than ever before and I have less rights, less benefits, and have been demonized by my state government?  Who is going to find working for Wisconsin schools suddenly more attractive? If I am looking to relocate my family, will I be looking to move to Wisconsin, in light of recent events?

Tensions remain high here in Wisconsin as the standoff between Gov. Walker and the public employee unions continues unabated.  Some have directed their anger at the so-called "Wisconsin 14;"the 14 Democratic State Senators who engaged in a "foot filibuster" by leaving the state to prevent a quorum on the budget repair bill stripping Wisconsin public sector unions of their collective bargaining rights.  Some have argued that these Senators should be back in Wisconsin doing their jobs and letting the budget bill come up for a vote accordingly.

I would be much more sympathetic to this view, if I didn't just live through repeated use (or abuse) of cloture votes, filibusters, and appointee holds by the minority party in 2008-2010.  In a decade where winning 51 percent of the vote was considered an electoral "mandate," the 2009-2010 US Senate was limited in their ability to pass any legislation, despite Democrats having a 57 to 41 majority.  Cloture votes preventing even a debate on a bill, let alone an up or down vote, occurred in record numbers.  Similarly, Obama appointees are repeatedly denied an up to down vote due to Senate holds (see one example here), with far more appointees being held up than the previous administration.

While I would appreciate more transparency by both parties, here's one solution to the cloture problem: treat cloture votes like the NFL Instant Replay rules.  In the NFL, Coaches get two challenges during the course of game to challenge a referee's call.  Strategy certainly comes into play as they have to decide when to make such a call; use them up too early, and you don't have any remaining to challenge a bad call made late in the game.

So, give each Senator two opportunities to invoke cloture in the course of the year.  Prior to 2007, the highest number of cloture votes in the past 88 years was 82.  Limiting opportunities to invoke cloture to two per year would bring such political tactics more in line with historical norms.