Four national polls show solid support for public employees

By Greg Sargent

The First Read gang reports that the forthcoming NBC/WSJ poll, like other previously released surveys, will show strong public opposition to rolling back public employee bargaining rights:

In the poll, a whopping 68 percent find it acceptable requiring public employees to contribute more of their pay for retirement benefits; 63 percent are fine with requiring these employees to pay more for their health-care benefits; and 58 percent are OK with freezing public employees' salaries for one year. But just 33 percent say it's acceptable -- and 62 percent say it's unacceptable -- to eliminate these employees' collective-bargaining rights as way to deal with state budget deficits.

Yes, the poll finds strong majorities want public employees to pony up more for benefits. But the Wisconsin public employee unions have already agreed to this. On the core question at the heart of the standoff -- whether it's acceptable to roll back bargaining rights -- a strong majority, 62 percent, is with the unions.

It gets better. I asked the First Read crew to send over the question's exact wording, which they graciously did. It asks whether people find it acceptable to "eliminate public employees' right to collectively bargain over health care, pensions and other benefits when negotiating a union contract."

That wording is a pretty fair approximation of what's being proposed in Wisconsin. So this should silence the talk in some quarters that polls showing strong support for the public employees are rooted in the public's lack of understanding of the issue. What's more, this is now the fourth national poll to find the public supports public employees against governors looking to roll back their bargaining rights. Gallup, the New York Times and Pew (to a slightly lesser degree) have all found the same.

Some folks on the right got very excited this morning because a new Quinnipiac Poll finds that more support limits on the bargaining rights of public employees than oppose it, 45-42. But the question wording asks whether people favor "limiting" bargaining rights. That word lends itself to open-ended interpretations and doesn't do justice to how transformative the proposal actually would be. And as noted above, NBC's more accurate description elicits far more opposition.

Indeed, the verdict is clear: Americans support public employees in this standoff. Whether that will impact the outcome of the fight, of course, remains to be seen. But the bigger story here -- one that will ripple far beyond what happens in Wisconsin -- is that public employees are not proving the easy scapegoat many predicted they would be, and when faced with the question of whether their fundamental union rights should be taken away, Americans have stepped up and answered with a firm No.

