David Michael Miller
Jeff Plale, the now former state commissioner of railroads, is out of a job, and I don’t feel too sad about it.
No one in Walker’s office, or Plale himself, has given the exact reasons for Plale’s resignation. But Plale’s exit comes shortly after it was revealed that he had done one of the worst things you can do as a political appointee — he undercut an anecdote.
Republicans used a story about two state employees having sex at the workplace as justification to gut Wisconsin’s civil service protections. The story line was that the state was powerless to fire these fornicators because they were protected by an arcane civil service code and/or the ghost of Bob La Follette. In reality, those two employees worked under Plale. One of the employees was considered at-will and not even covered under civil service protections. Furthermore, Plale had never tried to fire them in the first place, with or without the civil service code.
While this incident happened years before Republicans mounted an attack on the civil service code, it didn’t matter. Troublesome fact-checking by reporters — thus another reason to get rid of as many public records as possible — embarrassed Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature, and someone needed to pay the price. Thus, Plale had to be “railroaded” (ha, ha) out of office.
But I can’t feel too bad for Plale, the sacrificial pawn, after he used tens of thousands of state employees as sacrificial pawns just a few years back. After the 2010 elections that swept Republicans into both houses of the Legislature, there was an attempt during the lame duck session to renew state employee union contracts.
At the time, Plale was a Democratic state senator, a lame duck one at that. He had been defeated in the primary by now Sen. Chris Larson. Larson campaigned on a platform that Plale was too conservative to represent the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee. It’s essentially the same campaign Larson is running in 2016 in his attempt to unseat the Democrat-ish Milwaukee County executive, Chris Abele.
Even though Plale was on his way out of elected office, he was one of two Democrats who blocked the renewal of the state employee union contracts. This had a huge impact on Wisconsin politics as it took away an important bargaining chip that the unions could have had during Act 10. Unions could have agreed to reopen the newly signed contracts and take benefit concessions in return for keeping collective bargaining rights. Instead, because of Plale, unions had almost no bargaining power other than their ability to order a lot of Ian’s pizzas that winter.
Shockingly, after handing the opposition party a huge victory, Plale got himself a couple of cushy appointments in the Walker administration — including railroad commissioner.
But political patronage doesn’t last forever. Gutting unions is so 2011; getting rid of civil service protections is what is in this spring. Sorry, Plale. It’s your turn to be kicked around to advance a legislative agenda.
