Anticipating a Republican presidential bid by Scott Walker, the two-term governor of Wisconsin, both The New York Times Magazine and The Washington Monthly recently published lengthy articles about him. (The Times feature, which is in the magazine this weekend, was published online Friday.) Both articles focus on Walker’s successful battles with labor. As they should: If he runs for president, his record of union-busting will be at the very center of his campaign.

Walker’s first labor fight came in 2011, when he pushed through a bill that stripped the state’s public employee unions (firefighters and police officers excepted) of most of their collective-bargaining rights. It also forced the unions to make higher pension and health care contributions. There was a huge outcry, with union members and activists storming the Statehouse, and Democratic legislators fleeing the capital to prevent a quorum. But Walker not only got the bill passed, he then survived a recall election spearheaded by the labor unions. The fight over Act 10 — as the law was called — is the focus of The Washington Monthly article, written by Donald F. Kettl, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.

Having crippled the public sector unions, Walker more recently put the hurt on the state’s private-sector unions, signing legislation that made Wisconsin a right-to-work state, meaning that unions could not force employees to join a union or to pay dues. That bill became law in March; it is the focus of Dan Kaufman’s article in The Times Magazine.

As the two magazine articles make clear, there was no pressing need for either law. At the time he proposed Act 10, Walker claimed that busting the public employees’ unions was necessary because Wisconsin was facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit, and that the deficit couldn’t be closed, as he told Chris Wallace of “Fox News Sunday,” “with the current collective bargaining laws in the state.”