It's been ten years now since Mr. F. Gow (Most Recent Former Governor Of Wisconsin) foisted Act 10 upon Wisconsin's teachers and support staff, giving their bargaining rights back to them in an all but useless, skeletal frame. The mockery blistered.
Its core purposes have worked. Wisconsin taxpayers are paying less for education now. The damage to teaching and education have been ignored, and the pandemic only underscored that.
In fact, Act 10 was the culminating part of a strategy that began when the Qualified Economic Offer was introduced by Governor Tommy Thompson, eliminating raises beyond a pre-arranged legislative ceiling during budget time.
The core issue, one of abject cruelty, was ignored for the time being: Using educators' attitudes against them. But that goes back to the original arbitration law. After devastating strikes in Hortonville and Racine in the 1970s, WEAC agreed to binding arbitration to solve contract disputes without the right to strike except in extreme circumstances. At the time, it seemed to make sense. Legislators were back on their heels. But educators, too, were tired of the showdowns.
Educators don't mind being in a union, but their very nature, what made them choose education as a profession in the first place, opposes what unions have to do to gain, and regain, the respect that gets threatened with every attack.
I know. I once was one of them, and I battled those feelings. But I overcame them. I saw and felt, sometimes, how little school boards care, how out of touch they are with teachers and kids, how cheaply they thought education could continue without disturbing its basic nature.
To say that it didn't bother anybody else would be absurd, but others swallowed the mistreatment and soldiered on without discussion. They were often too cowed by accusations that they only cared about themselves. That was all kinds of nonsense, but you can't maintain respect by waiting for someone else to care. And you can care equally about kids and yourself.
It's possible. And necessary, because otherwise you'll get walked all over inside the classroom and out. The job wears one down enough: You've got to have a wind at your back somewhere to survive.
Act 10 took all the wind out of teachers' sails. They can't bargain working conditions. They can't put into a contract the prep periods, the sufficient lunch breaks, the work hours. Only traditions and the logic of people who don't work inside those buildings measure those things now. And there's nothing they can do about it, since arbitration has been removed.
To say it is unfair underestimates it. Arbitration seemed a fair way to figure things out, although preparation for them and the hearings that preceded them taxed negotiators on both sides. But it was better than the alternative. And, as we entered the 21st Century, 55% of Wisconsin's cases were being decided in favor of the school boards. So a rough balance was being struck.
But then right-wing propaganda took over, and the unions were smeared as uncaring and stealing people's money. As has been demonstrated again and again, their messaging resonated. They got out in front of liberals by a good three decades before it occurred them that they were being hustled.
You could see the sapping of power, slowly and inexorably. And now, the pandemic put educators in impossible conditions. They were doggie toys, being shaken back and forth without relief.
But the unions around the country are afraid to become strident. During the last decade, teachers in a few states got so mad they walked off their jobs and went to the state capitol. Some got their way. In other cases, they didn't. But there was little else to do. Thing was, the unions often didn't lead them. They'd been messaged into a corner, taking away the one thing they do well from the people who badly needed it and who've been made to believe unions are bad for them: Organize.
But organizing isn't enough of a reason for people to rely on them, not in the long run. Organizing doesn't appeal to people's souls. It feels like work. It's unemotional. It's the same thing they do in their classrooms. And other people proved they can organize without them.
Unions need a better place to stand, and that includes WEAC. They need to define themselves better. I spoke with its Vice-President, Peggy Wirtz-Olsen, the other day, and she told me that membership increased during the pandemic. People are wising up. They're getting tired of the abuse.
But they need one more place to go: The right to strike. If you get to take away educators' rights that they once had, it's only fair to have the countervailing right to choose not to work, to use the ultimate weapon to get someone to address your concerns.
It doesn't mean that all locals would take a strike vote immediately or even seriously consider it at first. But without it, locals have absolutely no weapon with which to fight back. They must acquiesce to Act 10 and wait for Godot for Democrats to tip the scales back in their favor, what with gerrymandering unarrested.
With that weapon, unions can measure circumstances and put their support behind those locals who are getting the worst of it. They can test-measure the public's acceptance of the new reality, one local at a time. And they can slow down the removal of rights with such a warning hanging over school boards' heads.
Of course they won't get it: Republicans are in overwhelming majorities in both houses. But it's the positioning that will get people's attention. And some of the more libertarians among the Republicans will be tempted to approve, because it's a libertarian position that's being touted. Freedom? How can you deny it here?
It doesn't have to be a shout out. It's merely logical. It can be a negotiating position fashioned out of whole cloth, no less valued been though no negotiating is considered feasible: If you insist on Act 10, we insist on demanding the right to strike.
Risky? Perhaps. But since no strike is ensuing it is at least a claim that can engender conversation.
Trust me: This won't scare the conservatives and blind followers of ex-. If it scares anyone, it will scare the liberals who may then feel that they have nowhere to go. In the miracle event of an improvement in conditions and atmosphere, though, such a position can be withdrawn or measurably reduced.
But it must be taken now. The question must be asked soon, lest WEAC slide into regrettable irrelevance to anyone but its members. Quoting 1776: Is anybody there? Does anybody care?
Radical? Once it would seem to be such. But what's being done to educators right now, at least in Wisconsin, is radical. They are now in chains. They need to have the opportunity to be radical right back.
Act 10 grips educators in an iron fist. The right to strike, if only symbolic for now, serves to loosen it. Let's find out. Nothing left to lose.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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