HOW BAD ART KILLED GOOD LABOR REFORMS

The controversy in Augusta began with an anonymous letter faxed to the office of Maine’s Republican Gov. Paul LePage. The 7-by-36 mural in the lobby of the Department of Labor “is nothing but propaganda to further the agenda of the Union movement,” the author wrote on Feb. 24. “I felt for a moment that I was in communist North Korea where they use these murals to brainwash the masses.” Mr. LePage may have agreed that the mural was subversive, but his decision to pick a fight with the unions over it has merely subverted more meaningful labor reforms.

Democratic Gov. John Baldacci’s labor department commissioned the $60,000 mural in 2007 to give New England’s sleepy backwater an image makeover. Labor unions were tired of people romanticizing Maine as a bucolic countryside with to-die-for lobster; they wanted people to learn about the state’s labor conflicts. The mural’s artist, Judy Taylor, says she never intended the mural to be political. “It’s about history,” she tells me.

To call it North Korean propaganda may be a bit of a stretch, but consider some of the images depicted on the 11-panel mural. One panel shows dour children with bandaged fingers holding tin buckets. Another depicts sickly women in a factory crying because their managers have locked them in during a fire. (The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which the panel represents, occurred in New York City). In another, a policeman roughly restrains a shoe-mill striker as a choirboy covers his eyes.

After reportedly receiving several complaints from businesses about the mural, Mr. LePage ordered it removed—despite never having seen it. It was too “one-sided,” he claimed, adding that it set the wrong tone for a department that’s supposed to be a neutral arbiter between employers and employees.

The mural was taken down in late March—over a weekend when nobody was around to raise the alarm. When labor activists found out, they rallied at the statehouse. Many tied the controversy to the collective-bargaining brouhahas sweeping Midwestern states like Wisconsin and Ohio, which made many of Maine’s moderate Republicans skittish. The Republicans “in all of these states don’t respect workers’ rights. They’re trying to drive us into the ground,” Emery Deabay, vice president of the Eastern Maine Labor Council, says.

Maine’s labor unions suffered a huge blow last year when Republicans took both the state legislature and governorship, so the mural gave them a cause to rally behind. “We all owe Paul LePage a debt of gratitude,” says Scott Cuddy, a member of the local electrical workers’ union. “He jump-started labor activism in Maine.”

In April, several labor activists and artists filed suit against the state to restore the mural to its former location. They argue that the removal of the mural violates their free-speech rights. “This is a tremendous act of censorship,” says plaintiff Natasha Mayers. The judge has issued a preliminary ruling in favor of the governor, but a final decision isn’t expected until this fall.

The Obama administration also weighed in on the labor dispute. Gay Gilbert, a senior administrative official in the Department of Labor, sent Mr. LePage’s labor department a letter in April demanding that the state return the roughly $60,000 in federal grant money that it used to commission the mural. The governor’s office hasn’t responded since it’s waiting for the judge to issue a final ruling.

The biggest fallout, however, has occurred within the Republican caucus. The labor protests unsettled GOP lawmakers who didn’t want to be seen as “taking on” the unions. “Our relationship with the unions has always been respectful,” state senator Richard Rosen says. Eight Republican state senators published a public letter to Mr. LePage in the Portland Press Herald expressing their “discomfort and dismay” at the fact that he has picked “a personal fight not worth fighting.”

They may have been right. The mural protests put Republicans on the defensive and weakened their resolve to pursue labor reform. Soon after the protests over the mural broke out, Republican legislators dropped a right-to-work bill and shelved “fair share” legislation that would have lifted the requirement on nonunion government workers to pay “service fees” to the unions. They also dropped legislation to allow employers to pay teenage workers a sub-minimum “training wage” for their first 90 days on the job.

The only labor fight Republicans didn’t back down from was one in which they faced little resistance—a ban on government-mandated project-labor agreements. The agreements often require contractors to pay into unions pension and health-benefit funds—even if the workers they employ are non-union. They also generally require contractors to pay workers the union-wage rate. But Mr. Cuddy of the electricians’ union tells me that law isn’t much of a blow to the unions since they’ve never tried to force the state to use PLAs.

When I asked the governor’s office whether the mural dispute has distracted Republicans and hurt Mr. LePage’s chances of passing significant labor reforms like right-to-work, Press Secretary Adrienne Bennett replied that the mural only “became a distraction because of the media frenzy. It shouldn’t have been done at that time.” But does he still think it was wise to remove it? “Yes.”

The governor is confident that his legal case for removing the mural is solid. What’s not so solid is his support from Republican lawmakers who think that he mishandled the mural dispute. The governor will now have a harder time getting them on board for right-to-work legislation and pension reforms.

Every new governor has a long list of battles that he’d like to wage, but the smart tacticians only pick the ones that are worth fighting and that they can win—and still have enough allies to continue the war.

Ms. Finley is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com.