It was a freezing afternoon in February 2011 as I marched up State Street to the Wisconsin State Capitol. I was between undergraduate classes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when I caught word that a group of graduate-student workers were delivering valentines to Republican Governor Scott Walker and holding a rally at the Capitol urging him not to abolish their collective-bargaining rights. I had some time to kill and was curious about the action, so I marched along with them.
On the Capitol steps, I learned that Walker was proposing drastic legislation, known as Act 10 â ostensibly a âbudget repair billâ â that would strip away the collective-bargaining rights of public-sector workers. It would effectively kneecap the unions that represented my graduate-student teaching assistants, K-12 teachers, public-works employees, and other public-sector workers. The legislation would force public-worker unions to re-certify themselves annually by obtaining a majority âyesâ vote from all of those eligible in their bargaining units who are present at the recertification, not simply a majority of votes cast; those who donât attend, therefore not voting, are counted as a âno.â Unions would only be allowed to negotiate over only base pay and were banned from deducting dues from workersâ paychecks. Contracts would be capped to last only one year. All of this added up to a law that would make it quite difficult for public-sector unions to survive over time, and for the ones that do to be less effective in bargaining for its workers. This legislation was particularly egregious because Wisconsin was the first state to grant public-sector workers the right to unionize, in 1959. It seemed as if Republicans believed that if they could pass this law in Wisconsin, they could pass it anywhere.