Return to Wisconsin: The Beginning or the End?
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. - Joan Didion
In the February weeks I spent in snowy Madison, Wisconsin, that line
of Didion's, the opening of her 1967 essay "Goodbye to All That,"
ricocheted through my mind as I tried to make sense of the massive
protests unfolding around me. What was I witnessing? The beginning of a
new movement in this country -- or the end of an existing one, the last
stand of organized labor? Or could it have been both?
None of us on the ground could really say. We were too close to the action, too absorbed by what was directly in front of us.
Of course, the battle between unions, progressive groups, and
Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker is not over. Not by a long
shot. A county judge recently blocked "publication" of Walker's
anti-union legislation, saying it was possible Senate Republicans
violated Wisconsin's rigorous open records law when they rammed through a
vote on his bill to do away with the collective bargaining rights of
state workers.
The case
could end up before the state Supreme Court. But that didn't stop the state's Legislative Reference Bureau from
publishing Walker's bill anyway,
touching off another round of arguing about the tactics used to make
the bill into law. As of this writing, its actual status remains
unclear. If a judge does force a new vote, it's unlikely the outcome
will change, though even that's not certain.
Tomgram: Andy Kroll, Union-Busting or Republican-Busting in Wisconsin?
One hundred years ago, 146 people, mostly young immigrant
women, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in downtown
New York City, a building lacking sprinkler systems, fire walls, or
adequate fire escapes. Onlookers watched horrified, writes
historian Steve Fraser, as many of the trapped workers jumped to their
deaths from upper-story windows. Those below “talked of the sky raining
flaming bodies.”
Anger at the unnecessarily harsh and dangerous working conditions
that caused such a toll was widespread. One hundred thousand New Yorkers
would file past the coffins of the dead workers. Within days, 350,000
New Yorkers would take to the streets in a massive march of protest --
many, adds Fraser, “to vent their anger and express their
determination that tragedies such as this should never be allowed to
happen again.” That moment is now considered a turning point for the
movement to improve working conditions in America.
That was then, of course, and until this February, the centennial
anniversary of that tragedy would have been considered nothing more than
history, and those thinking about it sentimentalists for a bygone era
when people cared about and organized around the needs of working
people in this country. No one would have imagined that those sorts of
mass protests over the conditions of working people would ever again
leave the history books for the streets of America. But as in the
Middle East, so here, it’s often true that what no one expects or
predicts happens, that one day the streets in Madison, Wisconsin, or
Cairo, Egypt, suddenly, miraculously
begin to fill. Now, in a moment when labor is under assault and some
leading politicians seem to be dreaming of returning American workers to
a state of powerlessness not seen in perhaps 80 years, something’s
happening, even if we don’t know what it is, Mr. Jones.
What occurred in Madison may already be
altering
the normal political landscape of this country. The question is whether
it will also, perhaps in unexpected ways, create a new terrain beyond
the usual electoral politics. TomDispatch associate editor Andy Kroll
covered the Madison protests for
Mother Jones magazine and for this site in a stirring piece, “
Cairo in Wisconsin.”
Now, he begins to explore the spread of what might be called "the
Madison effect" and the changing contours of political America. (To
catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Kroll
discusses his time in Madison and the larger meaning of those protests,
click
here, or download it to your iPod
here.)
Tom
Return to Wisconsin:
The Beginning or the End?
by Andy Kroll
Either way, the meaning of Madison, and also of what similar
governors are doing amid similar turmoil in Columbus, Indianapolis, and
other Midwestern cities, remains to be seen. Without the ability to
bargain collectively, unions may indeed be fatally weakened. So, you
could argue that the wave of attacks by conservative governors will gut
public-sector unions in those states, if not wipe them out entirely.
On the other hand, those same efforts have mobilized startling
numbers of ordinary citizens, young and old, educated and not, in a way
none of us have seen since perhaps the 1930s. I know this for a fact. I
was there in Madison and watched hundreds of thousands of protesters
brave the numbing cold while jamming the streets to demand that Governor
Walker back down. The events in Madison radicalized many young people
who kept the flame of protest burning with their live-ins inside the
Wisconsin State Capitol.
What remains to be seen is whether the new spark lit by the
Republican Party's latest crusade against unions can in some way fill
the space left by those unions which, nationwide, stare down their own
demise.
"Take the Unions Out at the Knees"
Madison was the beginning. When Scott Walker threatened to use the
Wisconsin National Guard to quell a backlash in response to his
draconian "budget repair bill," it set off a month of protests. Almost
as soon as Madison erupted, Ohio Republican Governor John Kasich, a
former executive at Lehman Brothers, unveiled a union-crushing bill of
his own, known as Senate Bill 5. Kasich sought even more power to curb
unions than Walker, proposing to curb bargaining rights for all public-sector unions -- Walker's exempts firefighters and cops -- and even outlaw strikes by public workers.
As in Madison, thousands of protesters poured into the Ohio Capitol
in Columbus -- that is, those who got inside before state troopers locked and blocked the doors.
They brought megaphones and signs saying "Protect Workers' Rights" and
"Daughters of Teachers Against SB 5." And in response, like Scott
Walker, John Kasich has shown not the slightest willingness to
negotiate; earlier this month, he promised to sign the bill into law as soon as the legislature approves it.
Meanwhile, the union-busting movement continues to spread. Iowa's House of Representatives, controlled by Republicans, passed its own law
in March gutting collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions.
The measure, nearly identical to Wisconsin's, would have made it to the
desk of Republican Governor Terry Branstad, who backed the bill, and
into law had the state's Democrat-controlled Senate not killed it on the spot.
In early March, Idaho's legislature voted to eliminate most bargaining rights for public school teachers, not to mention tossing out tenure and seniority. Two separate anti-union bills
are wending their way through the Tennessee legislature -- one in the
state House that resembles Idaho's, and another in the Senate that aims
to outlaw collective bargaining for teachers altogether.
And now comes Alaska, one of the latest states to join the fight. There, on March 21st, a Republican state legislator introduced a measure
nearly identical to Wisconsin's that would strip most public-sector
unions of the right to collectively bargain on health-care and
retirement benefits. By one estimate, more than 20 state legislatures are considering bills to limit collective bargaining for unions.
Not to be forgotten is Indiana, where Democrats in the legislature's
lower chamber camped out beyond state lines for more than a month (as
had Wisconsin Senate Democrats before them) to protest multiple pieces
of legislation that would hurt unions and public-education funding. Theyreturned to Indianapolis on Monday to cheers from supporters, their protest having killed a bill that would have made Indiana a "right to work" state while undermining support for other anti-union measures.
Even
if, in the end, its lawmakers don't any pass anti-union legislation,
Indiana is already illustrative of what happens when collective
bargaining is wiped out. With a flick of his pen, Republican Governor
Mitch Daniels banned it for state employees in 2005 by executive order.
The result, as the New York Times reported,
was significant savings for the state, but skyrocketing health
insurance payments and a pay freeze for state workers. Management fired
more experienced employees who would have had seniority under old union
rules. And union membership among state workers dwindled by 90%, with
one former labor activist claiming workers, fearing repercussions from
their bosses, were afraid to pay union dues.
Not that unions can't exist in states without collective bargaining
rights. In Arizona and Texas, for instance, unions still operate, even
though both are heavily conservative "right-to-work" states, which means
employees can opt out of union membership but still enjoy the wage
increases and benefits negotiated by unions. Still, in those states,
organized labor's influence pales when compared to that of unions in
Michigan or Wisconsin.
Then there are the political ramifications. Elected officials in each
of these embattled states denied that any political motives lay behind
their bills, but that’s obviously not true. Public-sector unions like
the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees are a
pillar of support for the left wing of the Democratic Party. Knock out
the unions, and you effectively "defund" that Party, as my colleague
Kevin Drum put it recently.
Despite their pleas of ignorance, Republicans in Wisconsin, Iowa,
Tennessee, Ohio, and every other state where legislation of this type is
being considered understand perfectly well the damage their bills will
inflict on their political opponents. As the top Republican in the
Wisconsin Senate said,
"If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices
of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is
going to have a… much more difficult time getting elected and winning
the state of Wisconsin."
Indeed. So, in one sense, the intensifying assault on unions across
much of the nation may represent an ending for a labor movement long on
the wane and at least 30 years under siege by various Republican
administrations, national and state. It is visibly now in danger of
becoming a force of little significance in much of the country.
This is exactly what conservatives and the GOP want. As a director
for the Koch brothers-backed advocacy group Americans for Prosperity recently admitted,
"We fight these battles on taxes and regulation, but really what we
would like to see is to take the unions out at the knees so they don’t
have the resources to fight these battles." If the bills mentioned here
make it into law, the power wielded by public-sector unions -- to fight
for better wages and benefits, to demand a safer workplace, to elect
progressive candidates -- will wither. And with history as a guide, if
union clout fades away, so, too, does the spirit of democracy in this
country.
"If you look at the last 150 years of history across all nations with
a working class of some sort, the maintenance of democracy and the
maintenance of a union movement are joined at the hip," Nelson
Lichtenstein, a professor and labor historian at the University of
California Santa Barbara, said recently. "If democracy has a future, then so, too, must trade unionism."
The Radicalization of Tom Bird
If the events in Wisconsin and elsewhere do signal an end, they may
also mark a beginning. I saw it in the outpouring of protesters in
Madison, the young and old who defied convention and expectation by
showing up day after day, weekend after weekend, signs in hand, in snow
or sun, to voice their disgust with Scott Walker and his agenda. For me,
the inspiration in that crowd came in the form of a tall,
string-bean-thin 22-year-old with a sheepish smile named Tom Bird.
Bird's radicalization, if you will, began innocently enough. As he
told me one evening, when the news leaked out about the explosive
contents of Walker's bill, his reaction was typical: angry but resigned
to the fact that, in a GOP-controlled legislature, it would pass. "What
was I going to do about it?" was, he said, the way he then felt.
Bird was no labor activist. Far from it. A master's student in
nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he felt at
home in the world of plasma physics. He'd opposed the Iraq war, but
collective bargaining, walkouts, picket lines… well, not so much. He
joined his first student-organized march from the university campus to
the Capitol downtown in the days after Walker announced his bill more
out of curiosity than indignation. He was, he told me, just tagging
along with a friend.
Yet something kept pulling him back to the growing protests. He'd
drop in on the demonstrators on his way to and from campus, wading
through the throngs of people, admiring the signs taped to the walls of
the Capitol rotunda, taking in the exhortations of the speakers at its
center. The first night he spent in the Capitol, Bird testified in the
all-night hearings taking place by reading a statement once given by
Clarence Darrow, the famous civil liberties lawyer, in defense of a man
named Thomas I. Kidd charged with treason for inciting workers to
unionize in Bird's hometown of Oshkosh. And in doing so, Bird felt
something new: an urge to be part of a movement.
Day after day he gravitated closer to the drum circle and the
speaker's pulpit, the beating heart of those Capitol protests. And then,
one day, someone handed him the megaphone. It was his turn to speak. He
hadn't necessarily planned this, so feeling the energy of the moment he
simply stepped up and said what he thought. Before long, he was an
activist whose impassioned cries rang out in the rotunda as loud as
anyone's. Any time I ventured into the Capitol I looked for Bird, with
his Wisconsin baseball cap, lining up new speakers and keeping the drums
beating. Someone even dubbed him "Speaker of the Rotunda."
Bird and his newfound activist friends even organized the disparate
groups inside the Capitol -- the medic team, university teaching
assistants, protest marshals, and more -- into the Capitol City
Leadership Committee. The CCLC, while short-lived, was created to ensure
that the protests remained safe, peaceful, and forceful. It had its
own leadership structure and governing bylaws. Once the police squeezed
the protesters out of the Capitol for good, instead of dissolving and
disappearing, the group evolved into the Autonomous Solidarity Organization, an outfit now determined to continue the fight for workers' rights and social justice.
I've thought a lot of about Bird since then. If a 21-year-old plasma
physics geek can be transformed into an activist in mere weeks, then
maybe the crushing effects of Walker’s and Kasich's bills and all the
others can be channeled into new energy, into a new movement. It may not
look like organized labor as we’ve known it, but it could begin to fill
a void left in states where governors and legislatures are gutting the
unions.
In Wisconsin, the upcoming weeks will put this new energy to a test.
Right now, campaigns are underway to recall eight Republican state
senators for their support of Walker's "repair" bill; in the case of GOP
Senator Randy Hopper, opponents have already collected enough
signatures, including that of Hopper's estranged wife, to demand a
recall vote. And on April 5th, Wisconsinites will go to the polls to
choose between a liberal candidate and a corporate-backed Republican for
a seat on the state Supreme Court. That race is the first since the
protests, and so could be the first true test of whether the crowds that
stormed the Capitol can translate their anger into pressure at the
polls.
No one can say for certain what Wisconsin, or Ohio, or Iowa will look
like if organized labor is whacked at the knees. Will public-sector
unions find a way to reinvent themselves, or will they slide into
irrelevance like so many unions in the private sector?
As grim as the bills may be, I can't help but feel hopeful, thinking
about the massive protests I witnessed in Madison. I particularly
remember one frigid night, when a group of protesters and reporters
adjourned to a local bar for beers. At some point, Tom Bird bounded in,
so full of energy, moving restlessly between our table and another with
friends.
At one point, he rolled up his sleeve to reveal a scrawny bicep. Some
of his fellow activists, he told me, wanted to get tattoos of one of
the most enduring images from the protests, a solidarity fist in the shape of Wisconsin. "Except on mine," he told us, "I want the Polish version: Solidarnosc."
That, of course, was the labor movement that, after a decade-long
struggle, helped bring down the Soviet Union. Who knows what could
happen here if Bird and his compatriots, awakened by the spark that was
Madison, were to keep at it for 10 years or more? Who knows if Wisconsin
wasn’t the beginning of the end, but the beginning of something new?
