Mr. Walker, who has called public sector workers “haves” and private sector workers “have-nots,” said in an interview last week that he was looking for a long-term solution to Wisconsin’s budget problems. “We’re asking for a reasonable amount from state and local workers,” he said, “and most people in the private sector will say what we’re asking for is pretty modest.”

Robert B. Reich, who was secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, said he saw the effort to curtail bargaining rights as a politically motivated act by Republican governors. “Wisconsin state workers have already signaled their willingness to give the governor what he wants in concessions  they just don’t want to give up the right to bargain,” said Mr. Reich, one of the more liberal voices in the Clinton White House. “We’re likely to see the same pattern across the country. This is exactly the pattern we’ve seen over the last 20 years in the private sector.”

But some labor leaders said the governors were overreaching, and could create a measure of public sympathy for government employees’ unions by shifting the conversation from whether they earn overly generous benefits to whether they should have the right to negotiate at all. “I think it’s been a galvanizing force, a seminal moment for American labor,” said Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

Art Pulaski, the chief officer of the California State Labor Federation, said the Wisconsin standoff could encourage some Republican governors to take a harsher stance in bargaining. “But for those with a more moderate stance, those not tied to the Republican strategy, I think they’re going to hold back, and say: ‘Wait a minute. The response is so vigorous and spontaneous and strong, we have to be careful how far we go on this,’ ” he said.

But focusing national attention on public employees’ benefits could put unions on the defensive in many states. Thomas A. Kochan, a professor of industrial relations at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he thought unions were increasingly recognizing reality. “There has to be a new bargain in the public sector on pension costs and health care costs, and to get out front on it,” he said. “That helps them take that issue off the table and to focus on the issue of worker rights and the attack on unions.”

Anti-union groups, seeing this as their moment, are urging governors not to settle for economic concessions. Tim Phillips, head of Americans for Prosperity  a conservative, free-market advocacy group that was created and financed in part by the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch  said Mr. Walker should push for a “complete victory.”

“If you just did the cuts to pension and benefits without the changes to collective bargaining,” Mr. Phillips said, “it helps in the short term, but over the long term, benefits will creep back up again.”