Posts tagged MacIver Institute
Americans for Prosperity Leads Employee Rights Act Coalition
September 8, 2025 // Protect workers’ right to a secret ballot in union elections. Preserve flexible self-employment career-paths across American industries. Protect small businesses that operate as franchises and vendors for other businesses. Give workers control over their personal information during union campaigns. Allow workers in Right-to-Work states to opt out of union representation. Require opt-in consent for union political spending. Prohibit mandatory DEI mandates in union contracts. Ensure only citizens or authorized workers vote in union elections.
New report puts Act 10 savings at nearly $36B
March 19, 2025 // "Those savings don’t just exist on paper. They have a real impact in the real world," MacIver CEO Annette Olson said. "Thanks to Act 10, today Wisconsin is considered to be one of the most financially responsible states in the country with routine budget surpluses, a robust rainy-day fund, and a fully funded state pension system.” To get to its $35.6 billion savings price tag, MacIver added the $13.8 billion in employee pension contributions since 2012 under Act-10, and the $21.8 billion in total health care savings since 2012 from Milwaukee, Milwaukee County, the DPI and the State Health Insurance Program.
Opinion: Imagine there’s no public employee unions
February 21, 2023 // But try as President Joe Biden has, it just hasn’t been enough. Automation (including not only factory machinery but also the gig economy), trade, high-profile union corruption cases, failing pension funds, and a string of adverse court rulings are among the many factors rendering private sector unions irrelevant to workers in most modern fields. This has led the unions to desperate measures, such as organizing esoteric, low-income professions, including graduate student teachers and video game testers. Yet the story is quite different for unions in the public sector. The unionization rate of public employees remains robust, at more than 33% of all government workers nationwide. Local government workers are the most likely to be unionized, at a rate of nearly 39%, and public sector union members are concentrated in states that mandate collective bargaining. The states with higher rates of unionization seem to correlate with the nation's least functional state governments: California (54.5%), Illinois (48.7%), New York (66.7%), and New Jersey (59.3%) among them. As their private sector cousins starve, public employee unions are fat and happy — a strange development, given that there was no public sector collective bargaining at all 70 years ago, when unions were at their apex.
Act 10 Savings Tops $15 Billion Since 2011
March 27, 2022 // Before the unions convince you that contributing 12.6% towards health insurance is an unfair and undue burden, think about this. A state employee in Wisconsin pays $2,952 a year for the regular family plan with dental. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average annual worker premium contribution is $6,015 a year. State employees pay roughly half of what the average taxpayer pays for health insurance and the state employee is receiving platinum coverage for that reasonable amount.