Wisconsin Uprising, 2011-2012

WISCONSIN UPRISING, 2011-2012. In response to the Republican-sponsored Act 10, which effectively struck down public sector unions, huge crowds formed in Madison, the capital city, for months on end, attracting national media attention for a time and infusing hope into the labor movement and the Left. Supporters of worker rights, the majority of whom belonged to no union, continued to turn out for months, with high spirits of solidarity. In the end, defeat seemed to offer stark lessons.

Newly elected in 2010, Wisconsin Republican governor Scott Walker shrewdly promised to reduce government spending without revealing that he intended to end public sector unionism. Later, he carefully and deceptively promised that measures taken would not affect union members in the private sector. Thus Walker managed to capitalize on a wide, post-recession resentment against public workers who kept their pensions and health benefits while former blue-collar workers among others had lost both, thanks to the closure of factories, unemployment, and downward mobility.

Walker and the GOP’s strategy harkened back to the conservative and corporate offensive against public sector unions exemplified in President Ronald Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers in 1981. Across the board, during the next several decades, the labor movement had been pushed to the defensive, with diminishing ability to pressure Democratic allies to protect earlier victories. Collaboration with NAFTA and other factory-killing agreements poisoned the well for Democrats. The conservative victory in 2010 and the dramatic shift rightward within the Republican Party set the stage for what followed.

Act 10, passed by the Republican-dominated legislature in early 2011, threatened to eviscerate collective bargaining for all public workers. The Teaching Assistants Association (TAA) of the University of Wisconsin-Madison took the lead. Initiating a peaceful occupation of the Capitol after hearings on the bill were closed, the teaching assistants sat in and precipitated the unprecedented occupation lasting several weeks and bringing together people from across the state and far beyond. This occupation shaped a drama that garnered great public attention, inspired oratory, and dramatic theatrical-style events, such as the march of Madison firefighters into the Capitol led by bagpipers. The Capitol building itself quickly became, in effect, a supportive community. Childcare was provided, arts and craft corners were organized, and free food was made available. Volunteer cleaning crews kept the grounds in order. The TAA organized a worldwide communications center in a conference room reserved by a supportive legislator, while speeches and drumming were constant in the Capitol rotunda. Participants in the daily singalong sometimes included three generations of a longtime Wisconsin family and attracted hundreds of participants.

Protesters meanwhile circled the blocks around the Capitol, and their numbers grew daily despite bitterly cold weather and frequent snowfalls. Crowds swelled to the tens of thousands, occasionally hundreds of thousands. When not marching, they listened to singers, musicians, and a wide variety of speakers. Teachers and social workers, disproportionately women, made the crowds and the speaker lists unique for union events. Representatives of the National Nurses United kept up a steady presence. High school student s marched from their schools to the Capitol. Humorous, sarcastic signs directed at Governor Walker and his Republican supporters appeared freshly every day, greeted with applause and laughter. Major figures of the Left beyond Wisconsin came to boost spirits, including filmmaker Michael Moore, actor Tony Shalhoub, and singers Tom Morello and Anne Feeney. A handful of national union presidents put in an appearance, led by the retired president of AFSCME, Gerald McEntee, whose initiative had helped bring down AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland in 1995. US President Barak Obama declined requests to appear in support of the strikers and the community. A few outstanding local orators, but especially journalist John Nichols, gave frequent interviews on MSNBC, most frequently on the labor-friendly Ed Schultz’s show.

The main body of local Left veteran activists, drawn from a large pool and a variety of radical organizations found their way to the marches as well as onto the speaker’s platform. Participants in the antiwar movement of the 1960s-1970s, grown old in the struggle, were found here, joined by many active in the Latin American support movements of the 1970s-1990s, civil rights, gay and lesbian movements, Native Americans and their supporters, immigrant rights advocates, environmentalists, supporters of the Palestinians, and opponents of the US invasion of Iraq. Voces de la Frontera, a Milwaukee-based non-profit focused on worker and immigrant rights, organized daily buses to Madison. Community radio station WORT and its news program Labor Radio, old friends to local protests and protesters, documented the events, including original protest music. Later, in the fading months of the protests, homeless activists worked to supply food and shelter. Leftwing visitors from Chicago, Detroit, and elsewhere came to distribute leaflets and sell party newspapers.

The strategies of public unions complicated the picture. Viewing thousands on the street or inside the Capitol below, the state leadership of these unions met continuously in a hotel suite, establishing a distance from the protesters that never narrowed. Certain throughout the opening weeks that an agreement on concessions could be made with the governor, union leaders continued to emphasize labor’s alliance with Democrats. AFSCME leaders conducted repeated polling to assess public opinion, in hopes of influencing political decisions.

The Wisconsin Education Association Council did succeed in reaching every teacher in the state, but advised not to engage in any work stoppage and opted instead to come to Madison to demonstrate in an organized way only on weekends. A careful plan of Madison teachers to close the schools was not considered, and unlike the successful teachers’ strikes in several other states a few years later, the prospect of a wildcat strike never loomed here.

Before the break in the cold weather, Democrats who had fled the state to prevent a quorum and thereby halt the final vote on Act 10 faced the crushing reality that Republicans had been able to enact the measure without them. Leading Democrats began to call on demonstrators to abandon the daily marches and instead to focus all efforts on organizing a recall of the governor and vulnerable Republicans in the legislature. A venerable proviso in the state constitution enacted under the leadership of Robert M. La Follette a century earlier, “Recall” had long been accepted by both parties as a check upon unwarranted power. It now seemed especially applicable. Massive petitions circulated during the following months, signed and returned, and recall elections duly scheduled.

The demonstrations around the Capitol took months to wind down and then resumed on a favorable weather weekends through mid-2012 and even beyond, with tens of thousands of participants on some days. In the meantime, the struggle of Wisconsin public employees had become a cause celebre for the progressive sectors of the labor movement nationally and especially for socialists in assorted unions.

The recall campaigns, with some a few exceptions, failed to unseat Republicans, above all Governor Walker. Contrary to pledges made to the building trades in particular, Walker led the successful legislative effort to enact Right to Work legislation in the following years. Under the new rules, public service unions lost up to 90 percent of their members, along with budgets to influence future legislation. Private sector unions also suffered, if not nearly so badly.

During the latter days of mass mobilization, a small group of local IWW members and sympathizers passed out GENERAL STRIKE signs from their own local print shop. These signs, carried by a handful of marchers, at best arrived too late. Such a general strike, belatedly discussed in the regional labor federation, would have required extensive preparations of members. Other potential solidarity actions, such as massive civil disobedience or even blocking the Interstate leading into Madison, seemed too far out of line to consider, let alone attempt. Nor was the Left prepared to lead the discussion of more modest work actions that might have been successful in helping to stem the outward flow of public sector union members. The defeat both demoralized leftwing union members and removed their once-strong base of support within the labor movement.

A leftwing voice in the Wisconsin Uprising and its aftermath remained most vivid in the Solidarity Singalong, the longest-surviving, continuous labor chorus held on a daily basis in US labor history. The repertoire throughout expressed the timbre of the Henry Wallace Campaign of 1948, or of Pete Seeger’s later decades of singing-and-picketing, with regular participants often trained in church choirs of their youth. The weekly Solidarity Singalong, which met daily at noon, ended only in 2018 with Walker’s defeat in the gubernatorial election.

Buhle, Mari Jo and Paul, eds. It Started in Wisconsin. New York: Verso, 2013.

Nichols, John. Uprising: How Wisconsin renewed the politics of protests from Madison to Wall Street. New York: Nation Books, 2012.

Yates, Michael. The Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012.

Film DVD, “Divided We Fall” written and directed by Katherine Acosta, New Day Films, 2012.