Gutting Public Unions: A Response

Gutting Public Unions: A Response

The author of Government Against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences responds to William Jones’s review.

To the Editors:

It is oddly gratifying that William P. Jones thought my book, Government Against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences (Oxford 2015), important enough to deserve an all-out, no-holds barred attack. However, his review is so misleading and inaccurate that it reflects poorly on Dissent.

Jones misrepresents my book in multiple ways, For instance, he frames it as about Scott Walker and Act 10 in Wisconsin. While those things are touched on, of course, the book does not specifically defend Governor Walker or Act 10. In fact, I give neither sustained attention.

Jones displays the disturbing habit of lifting phrases out of context and retrofitting them to his polemical purposes. For instance, he writes that I say that “Walker’s law stands as a model for addressing ‘one of the diseases most incident to contemporary American democracy.'” But any mention of Walker and the sentence he quotes are pages apart in my text. It distorts my text to put them together. Another example: he picks a couple of the books epigraphs (the epigraphs!) and says I misinterpret them. Yet I don’t ever interpret any of the epigraphs. The quotes—by Franklin Roosevelt and George Meany—don’t even appear at the head of the chapter that Jones goes on to criticize. I could cite many more examples because Jones does this sort of thing in nearly every paragraph. It’s distorting and manipulative.

Jones impugns my scholarly integrity. A pointed essay I wrote a few years prior to the publication of my book is offered up as an “explanation” for what Jones judges to be my “tendency to ignore obvious contradictions in his thesis, rely on scholars who share his ideological background while ignoring those who contradict him, and support his argument through theory and speculation more often than empirical data.” While he says that he notes the prior essay not to “discredit” me, that’s clearly his point. He concludes his review by calling me a “small government ideologue.” However, I never take a position on the size of government in the book. It’s presumptuous and mendacious of Jones to suggest that he knows what I think when I never argue to that effect.

Jones also gets basic facts wrong. Taking one of a few possible examples, he says that “as a state employee in Wisconsin, I’m clearly more invested in this debate than [DiSalvo] is.” But I am a New York State employee and an agency fee payer in a collective bargaining unit. These are facts that I mention in the book, facts that he chose to ignore. Jones’s attempt to undermine my credibility and elevate his own is risible.

I’m well aware that public sector unions are a hotly contested topic and that their supporters will defend them from their critics. Nonetheless, other liberal magazines (The American Prospect and In These Times) published critical reviews of my book that remained within the cannons of seemliness and good taste. I thought that Dissent had higher standards than to let its reviewers stoop to name-calling, ad hominem attacks, and intellectual dishonesty.

Sincerely,

Daniel DiSalvo

William Jones responds:

I’m sorry that Daniel DiSalvo found my review misleading. This was certainly not my intention, as I believe it critical that the generally pro-union readers of Dissent understand and take seriously his argument. That said, I’m not sure what to make of his complaint that I framed the review around Scott Walker’s gutting of public sector unions in Wisconsin. DiSalvo has written approvingly of that attack, in the book and elsewhere, and Walker was then riding it to a lead in the GOP primary. I’m equally puzzled by his claim not to have interpreted the epigraphs by Roosevelt and Meany. Only four pages into the book, he wrote: “Both were concerned about [unionization’s] negative implications for democratic practice, the health of public finances, and the quality of government services.” I mentioned my status as a Wisconsin state employee in the spirit of full disclosure, and listed DiSalvo’s affiliations with conservative publications and think tanks because they seem equally relevant for assessing his objectivity. DiSalvo makes no effort to address my extensive criticism of his scholarship, so readers will have to evaluate that on their own.