OPINION


The virtual paid ads started not long after the session ended. Then came the mailers. The AFL-CIO, headquartered in Washington, D.C., has decided that a Wyoming legislator who voted to stop using public payroll systems to collect union dues deserves to be made an example of.

I’ll take that as a compliment.

HB0178 was a modest bill. It would have prohibited public employers from processing automatic payroll deductions for certain union organizations, the Wyoming Education Association and Wyoming Public Employees Association, among them. These employees are all paid from your tax dollars. The bill didn’t abolish any union. It didn’t strip anyone of their job or their paycheck. It simply said that Wyoming taxpayers should not be in the business of serving as a billing department for political organizations that routinely lobby against taxpayer interests. Governor Gordon vetoed it. The House fell short on the override. The AFL-CIO won this round.

But the underlying question isn’t going away, and the volume of outside money being spent to silence it tells you everything you need to know about the stakes.


The fundamental problem with public sector unions

There is a meaningful difference between a union in the private sector and a union in the public sector, a difference so significant that Franklin Roosevelt, one of the most labor-friendly presidents in American history, opposed collective bargaining for government employees. In a 1937 letter, FDR wrote that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” He understood what we seem to have forgotten: in the private sector, unions and employers have competing but legitimate interests. Management wants to maximize profit; workers want to maximize wages. The tension is real, and the negotiation is genuine.

In the public sector, that dynamic doesn’t exist. Government employees don’t bargain against a corporation’s shareholders. They bargain against the taxpayer, and the taxpayer isn’t at the table. The officials sitting across from the union at the bargaining table are often the same politicians that union helped elect. The incentives are inverted. There is no natural check on what gets promised because the people making the promises aren’t spending their own money. Every dollar of salary, benefit, and pension concession comes from the public, from you. The “employer” can simply raise taxes or cut services to cover the cost. That is not collective bargaining. That is a closed loop that excludes the people actually paying the bill.


Wisconsin showed it can be done

In 2011, Governor Scott Walker signed Act 10, stripping most Wisconsin public employees of collective bargaining rights beyond base wages, capping wage increases to inflation, requiring annual union recertification votes, and eliminating automatic dues collection.

The response was fierce. Protesters occupied the state capitol. National union money poured in. Recall elections were launched. The establishment predicted collapse.

None of it came true. Wisconsin's budget stabilized. Walker survived the recall. Act 10 survived the courts. And the teachers' union lost roughly 60 percent of its membership once dues became voluntary. When workers were given a choice, most chose to keep their money. That alone is instructive.

 

Wyoming should go farther

HB0178 was a first step, yet it was vetoed. But the right policy, the honest policy, is to go further. Wyoming should prohibit collective bargaining for public employees entirely, as North Carolina and South Carolina have done for decades, as Wisconsin effectively did in 2011, as Utah attempted in 2025 before union pressure caused a reversal.

This is not anti-worker. Public employees in Wyoming are compensated with salaries, benefits, and retirement packages funded entirely by taxpayers. They have civil service protections. They have due process rights. They have access to the courts. What they should not have is a government-subsidized system that allows an organized political interest group to extract resources from taxpayers, elect sympathetic officials, negotiate with those same officials, and then use the resulting contracts as leverage to extract still more resources, all while the taxpayer watches from outside the room.

 

On the AFL-CIO

Let me be direct about what is happening here. A national labor federation is spending money in Wyoming to punish a state legislator for a vote on a state bill. Their interest is not in Wyoming’s schoolchildren or Wyoming’s public servants. Their interest is in protecting a system that routes union dues through government payroll, a system that funds political action committees, lobbying operations, and electoral campaigns, nearly all of them directed at one party and one set of policy outcomes. Hardly any unions send donations to conservative legislators. Guess who is getting these donations?

When they come after legislators who question that system, they are not defending workers. They are defending the system itself.

I voted for HB0178 because I believe Wyoming taxpayers deserve a government that works for them, not one that moonlights as a collection agency for organizations working against them. The governor disagreed. The voters of Wyoming will have their say.

I am not backing down.

Ann Lucas is the Elected Representative for Wyoming’s 43rd House District