Walker confident right-to-work will withstand court challenge

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A spokeswoman for Gov. Scott Walker says he is confident Wisconsin’s right-to-work law will withstand a court challenge filed Tuesday.

The Machinists Local Lodge 1061 in Milwaukee filed suit against Walker on Tuesday, seeking a declaratory judgment and a temporary restraining order against the right-to-work law Walker had signed the previous day. A hearing has been scheduled for 9 a.m. March 19 before Judge William Foust in the Dane County Courthouse.

A woman who answered the phone at the machinists’ Milwaukee office referred questions to Fred Perillo, a labor lawyer. Perillo could not be immediately reached.

Laurel Patrick, a spokeswoman for Walker, said in an email, “We are confident Wisconsin’s freedom-to-work law is constitutional and will be upheld as it has been in federal court.”

Republican state lawmakers, in the weeks before they passed right-to-work legislation, said they were purposefully trying to put forward a “clean” bill that would be easy to defend in court. Some legislative leaders had talked at one point of exempting the trades from right-to-work but backed away after some questioned whether carve-outs for a particular industry would make the proposal susceptible to legal challenges.

The right-to-work laws adopted by Michigan and Indiana in 2012 have withstood court challenges. Republican lawmakers have said Wisconsin’s law was modeled on Michigan’s.