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Op-Ed
Jan 7, 2025, 5:03 PM CST
Guest column from Michael Rosen and Charlie Dee, retired faculty from Milwaukee Area Technical College and former leaders of American Federation of Teachers Local 212.
This column is from The Recombobulation Area, a weekly opinion column and online publication founded by Dan Shafer, now part of the Civic Media network. Learn more about The Recombobulation Area and subscribe here.
Scott Walker’s infamous Act 10 was a highly partisan political bill that has done enormous damage to Wisconsin’s economy and exacerbated the hollowing out of our middle class. He fueled a politics of resentment that divided families, communities and our state long before Donald Trump emerged as the prince of grievance politics.
Now that Dane County Circuit Court Judge Jacob Frost has ruled that Act 10 is unconstitutional, Republican leaders with straight faces claim that Frost’s ruling was – hold your breath – “political” and trot out the same false claims that they used to justify it originally.
Walker and the GOP have always been patently dishonest about Act 10. He did not run for office in 2010 on a platform of cutting public employees’ wages and eviscerating the 50- year collective bargaining rights of teachers, social workers, correctional officers and snowplow drivers.
However, immediately after his election, he declared war on Wisconsin’s 300,000 public servants, whom he characterized as “the new haves.” He tried to convince private-sector workers that public employees were somehow making their lives worse, pitting them against each other.
Private sector workers were vulnerable to this scapegoating because their weekly earnings, which had increased by 62% between 1947 and 1972, stagnated. In many cases, earnings then actually declined as corporate America launched what United Auto Workers President Douglas Fraser called “one-sided class war” against the nation’s working class.
Of course, this was a highly cynical “divide and conquer” politics that Walker admitted to billionaire donor Diane Hendricks, promising her – but not the public – that he would next go after private-sector unions and make Wisconsin a “right to work” state. Then, despite promising during his campaign that he was opposed to attacking private-sector unions, he did just that.
While Walker initially claimed his rationale for Act 10 was fiscal, he later admitted that Act 10 was a “first step” in an effort to “conquer” Wisconsin’s unions.
The fatal flaw in Act 10, however, was that Walker didn’t attack all public employee unions. No, he made the overtly political choice to let the unions that had supported him, police and fire, off the hook and left them with the unfettered right to engage in collective bargaining.
Judge Frost’s ruling makes clear that Walker had no legal right to deny unions to some public safety occupations, like Capitol police, state troopers and conservation wardens, while allowing others to have rights to negotiate.
His ruling struck down 60 sections of the law including provisions
The most bald-faced of the Act 10 lies is Walker’s and Robin Vos’ claim that it helped the state’s economy. In reality, it has severely damaged our economy in a myriad of ways.
While Wisconsin’s economy continued to grow modestly following Act 10, poverty rates and inequality grew, labor participation rates declined, and job creation paled compared to neighboring states like Minnesota that did not wage a war on their working class.
In the year following Act 10’s passage, only seven states and territories had worse job-creation records than Wisconsin. During Walker’s entire first term, Wisconsin’s job creation was worse than any bordering state, and we placed 40th nationally in job creation.
As a result, despite promising to create 250,000 private-sector jobs during his first term, Wisconsin created only half that amount. In fact, Walker never fulfilled that campaign promise. When he left office, Wisconsin ranked 34th in job creation. This explains why Walker was willing to stick taxpayers with a $4.5 billion invoice to pay for his sweetheart deal with Foxconn, timed to help his presidential ambitions, despite Foxconn’s record of reneging on job-creation promises in Pennsylvania, Vietnam, Brazil and Indonesia.
The only “positive” metric Act 10 supporters can cite is to add up the amount our state’s public employees have been mandated by Act 10 to pay for health insurance premiums and pensions. Yes, those requirements reduced state and local governments’ costs by shifting those expenses to public employees.
However, the impact on employees and the state economy overall was as negative as it was predictable. The state’s K-12 teachers, for example, experienced a 19% drop in median total compensation between 2010 and 2022. Public workers earning $50,000 a year saw their take-home pay shrink by about 8.5% according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau at the time.
When teachers, snowplow crews and fish-hatchery employees have less money to spend, the rest of the population suffers. The gap between Wisconsin’s median household income and Minnesota’s more than doubled during this period, so now the average Minnesotan makes $17,060 more than the average Wisconsinite.
Any serious analysis of Act 10’s impact must include the effect this decline in workers’ discretionary income had on Wisconsin’s Main Street businesses like barber shops, restaurants, grocers and car dealers. Under Walker, Wisconsin’s growth rate fell to 10.3%, far behind the national growth rate of 17.1%.
Another costly byproduct of Walker’s attack on the state’s public employees has been growing and costly labor shortages. The Department of Corrections (DOC) reports significant shortages due to Act 10 retirements and an inability to recruit new officers to staff our state’s prisons.
By 2021 and 2022, DOC employees were routinely working multiple 16-hour shifts each week, sometimes as many as four in a row. The percentage of unfilled openings at the state’s maximum-security institutions climbed sharply as a result, exceeding 50 percent at four of the six prisons.
This crisis created by Act 10 forced the legislature to approve raises for guards, but significant vacancies still exist because correction officers have no effective way to address safety and other employment concerns without union representation.
A shortage of teachers also developed as teacher retirements surged, and enrollment in teacher preparation programs plummeted in response to ACT 10. These shortages have increased costs for school districts from Kenosha to Superior as districts poach teachers from other districts, spend additional money recruiting and training new teachers, with some forced to go to referendum to cover operational costs.
Let’s face it, though, the alleged “benefits” of ACT 10 were always the cover story to hide the real purpose: partisan politics.
Walker, Vos, the Republican Party and right-wing organizations like Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce wanted to knee-cap both public and private sector unions because unions had been the state’s strongest voices for fair taxation, funding public schools, the University of Wisconsin and technical colleges, apprenticeships, Medicaid expansion and needed social programs like subsidized childcare. Additionally, most unions had been dependable supporters of Democratic Party candidates with money and volunteers.
The irony is that Walker and his allies seemed to understand the importance of unions much better than some Democratic Party leaders, many of whom view unions as simply one among many interest groups.
Unions are democratic organizations that do much more than bargain for compensation. They help create a culture of solidarity among their members that influences the broader community. Union members work together, party together, hunt and fish together, celebrate births and graduations together. They support each other during hard times.
Unions create social bonds by sponsoring recreational activities like golf outings, bowling leagues, basketball and baseball teams. They interact with the broader community by organizing Dr. Martin Luther King birthday celebrations, holiday parties, and retiree meetings. Several studies make clear that union membership reduces racial resentment among white workers making them less likely to be attracted to the politics of racial resentment and scapegoating that Republicans excel in.
If one ignores all the financial and social destruction of Act 10 and views it through an exclusively partisan lense, Walker’s decimation of unions has changed how workers relate to their communities. Instead of an identity based on the job and union, workers’ identity is shaped more now by communities of grievance fostered by talk radio, right-wing social media and Fox News.
Judge Frost’s ruling on Act 10 has been appealed by the Republican legislature to a Waukesha appeals court because Waukesha is a reliable Republican County. But we anticipate the union plaintiffs will ask the State Supreme Court to bypass the appeal process and directly take up the case — and we’d encourage them to do just that.
Wisconsinites are tired of leaders not seizing the moment. Democrats controlled the Wisconsin legislative and executive branches in 2008 but failed to increase the minimum wage. Both the Carter and Obama Administrations had legislative majorities but failed to pursue labor law reform designed to ensure employees’ right to organize and engage in collective bargaining.
It is essential that the Wisconsin Supreme Court agree to accept this case immediately. After all, it will ultimately end up on their docket anyway. The Court expedited essential cases dealing with gerrymandering and women’s reproductive freedom that were fundamentally about the democratic rights of Wisconsin citizens. This case is just as crucial for Wisconsin’s economy, quality of life and democracy.
