Wisconsin is a better place for working people than it was in March.
Just over 15 years ago, a Republican trifecta led by then-Gov. Scott Walker turned an election win into an assault on the state’s working families.
This April 1, pro-labor judge Susan Crawford beat Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel by 10 points, holding a pro-worker majority on the state’s Supreme Court just as it is about to face a flurry of cases critical to labor.
Crawford won despite Schimel receiving at least $25 million of support from Elon Musk and affiliates.
At nearly $100 million, the campaign was the most expensive judicial election in U.S. history because of what hangs in the balance. Wisconsin implemented some of the harshest anti-union policies north of the Mason Dixon line including the infamous Act 10, which kneecapped public sector unions in Wisconsin and stripped at least 1,000 IBEW members of their contracts and union membership.
The Trump administration has announced plans to bring many of these same policies to the entire nation, but if they die in Wisconsin, their future everywhere else may well be in doubt, said Government Affairs Director Dean Warsh, a native of Wisconsin.
“Without this win, we were cooked,” he said. “The game was rigged against anyone who thought workers deserve a fair shake. This doesn’t solve every problem, but we are in a much better position than we would have been.”
There are several potentially transformational court cases that hung in the election’s balance, said Sixth District International Representative Bob Koerschner. The most critical will determine the fate of unions in the state and the fairness of the state’s election maps.
The first to come up will likely be a challenge to Act 10.
Act 10, passed in 2011 under Walker, requires each public-sector bargaining unit to recertify every year with a majority of the members of the unit, not a majority of the vote. Even more damaging, it prevented public unions from negotiating anything but wages, which were capped at the rate of inflation.
Most units fell apart. If they did get raises, benefits were cut, Koerschner said. Outside of wages, there was no agreement that the state couldn’t unilaterally change or ignore.
“It decimated the public-sector unions. The IBEW had a Local 195 in Milwaukee. A 10-member local. They were bridge tenders. They hung in for 10 years but couldn’t negotiate anything. They could not recertify and now they are gone,” he said. “We lost probably 1,000 members total.”
Years of legal challenges against Act 10 crashed into the state Supreme Court. Almost as quickly as they were filed, they failed.
Until last December, when a circuit court judge ruled that more than 60 sections of Act 10 violated the state constitution’s guarantee of equal protection to all citizens.
Judge Jacob Frost immediately stayed his decision pending an appeal to the state Supreme Court, and the fate of that decision was a critical issue in the election.
Crawford was clear that she believed Act 10 was unconstitutional. Schimel was equally clear that a vote for him was a vote for saving so-called right-to-work.
“If we lost that seat, we would lose this at the Supreme Court,” Koerschner said.
Now the Wisconsin organizers are combing through contact lists from before Act 10 passed to reorganize all the public-sector workers who lost their unions, including IBEW members.
“Some units stayed together through all of this. Some fought for years but faded away. Every organizer is going to have 100 calls to make,” said Kim Moon, professional and industrial lead organizer in the Sixth District.
Eau Claire, Wis., Local 953 organizer Nick Webber is one of the people reaching out to old contacts.
Act 10 was catastrophic for Webber’s family. He was a freshman in high school with two younger brothers, and both of his parents were public school teachers.
“We joke that it ruined Thanksgiving, but it wasn’t funny. When it passed, things looked terrible. They had the governor and supermajorities in both houses and the Supreme Court. It was terrible,” Webber said. “And it is terrible. First-year teachers’ kids are eligible for free and reduced lunch. People don’t like that.”
Calling the many municipal utilities and electric cooperatives the union used to represent has been sobering.
“Our local had 12 muni contracts that didn’t disappear overnight. Some were happy to kick us in the shins and shove us out the door. Others were concerned. Taking away the union’s ability to bargain beyond [inflation] hurt the companies. They are $8 below where our rates are at co-ops and investor-owned utilities, and they lost a ton of good workers,” Webber said.
Webber found only a handful of workers left over from the pre-Act 10 era and who know how to negotiate.
“I showed them the old contracts: ‘You lost this, you lost this, you lost this.’ Things like standby pay. They don’t have that anymore, and they had no idea,” he said.
That is what the people who passed these laws were relying on, Webber said. People wouldn’t remember what they had or some hard-learned lessons from the beginning of the labor movement.
“We had private-sector union members back then who said: ‘[Forget] those teachers. They won’t come after us.’ They did. They went straight on to right-to-work. And they keep pushing. Companies are getting too bold,” he said.
Repealing Act 10 will not lead to lasting change, however, until the state’s political system produces outcomes consistent with what the state’s voters want.
“Wisconsin is pretty near 50-50, but you’d never know it from our Legislature and congressional delegation,” Warsh said.
Republican legislators in 2010 redrew the boundaries of electoral districts. Since 2010, Republicans have had an average of 60% of the seats in both houses. That’s about 10 percentage points higher than the previous decade.
“Nothing else changed but the way district borders were drawn,” Warsh said. “We politely call it gerrymandering, but there is no polite way to describe what it has done to working families in Wisconsin.”
