We’ve been watching with great interest as events unfold in Madison, Wisconsin as the newly elected Republican governor and Republican majority state senate try to come to terms with a huge state deficit approaching three and a half billion dollars. Governor Scott Walker wants concessions from public employee unions, and he wants them by statute rather than collective bargaining which, apparently has not worked well in the past, at least not from the perspective of state and local governments. The public employee unions see this as the end of collective bargaining period, and as unabashed union busting.

Now the concessions that the State of Wisconsin are seeking involve the unions paying a larger portion into their pension plans and a larger percentage of their healthcare insurance costs. In fact the percentages sought would amount to a huge reduction in payments by private sector workers. Democratic senators have fled the state to avoid the senate having a quorum, and to avoid having to go on record voting up or down on Walker’s proposals. Watch for the same crisis to hit Ohio, Indiana, Arizona and a number of other states faced with huge budget shortfalls and deficits driven in part by public employee salaries, pensions and perks.

The unions are counting on the public to side with them against the “evil Republican rich” and uphold the rights of public employees to their contracts and collective bargaining rules that, in many case, have state and local governments in a stranglehold. In previous years that may have been the case. America loves an underdog. This time around though many folks in the private sector, or in the ranks of the retired, see the public employee unions not as underdogs, but rather as “fat cats” and special interests who see themselves not as public servants, but rather as an entitled class who should be exempt from layoffs, entitled to regular raises based on contract and seniority rather than merit, and entitled to essentially free health insurance and defined benefit pensions that nearly disappeared from the private sector over the past two decades.

This us vs. them situation is spreading and the public employee unions, rightly or wrongly, seem to be losing the public relations battle for the hearts and minds of the private sector taxpaying citizen. Even in Massachusetts, a bastion of government employee unions, one party Democrat rule, and a liberal bent, the public is developing a perception that they are being abused by the public sector. It may be jealousy. It may be misunderstanding or it may be just bad public relations on the part of the unions, but it’s real and it’s going to get uglier before this controversy is done.

Each news item describing public employees selling huge numbers of sick days back to the city or state hurts the cause. Items on the inability to fire incompetent or insubordinate or dishonest public employees without lengthy expensive processes hurt the cause. Pension abuse, police detail abuse, pay raises in times of economic downturn, suits to stop lay-offs, perks that few private sector employees could dream of and no private company could afford, drive taxpayers to distraction. The unions are having a hard time selling their underdog status to the folks who have to pay the bills.

The next few months will be very interesting around here, particularly as we head into Town Meeting season and look at municipal budget shortfalls. Something has to give. We will all get to watch the battles of income vs. outflow, cost vs. return on investment, real estate tax increases vs. status quo, perceptions vs. reality. In the end something has to give.