On Tuesday, Gov. Scott Walker warned Wisconsin 's Legislature that if his "budget repair" bill does not pass, he will issue pink slips to 1,500 state employees, starting next week. Walker issued the ultimatum to lure home Democratic state senators who fled to Illinois to avoid giving Republicans quorum for a vote on the bill, which would cripple public-employee unions. State workers, undaunted, called for continuing protests -- rallies at the Capitol are now ending their second week -- and many workers are vowing not to leave until assurances are made that public-sector unions will remain strong.
Governors and legislatures across the nation are threatening similar attacks on public-sector unions. The swell of support for the Wisconsin unions has been immense; people all over the nation have sent food and supplies to protesters. The backlash has been equally strong, with Walker maintaining that he will not compromise on his budget. TAP talked to Joseph McCartin -- a Georgetown University history professor and an expert on 20th-century U.S. labor, social, and political issues -- about the protests in Wisconsin and what they mean for the rest of the country.
In other states in which the governor or the legislature has an anti-union agenda, labor has only managed to bring out much smaller crowds. What makes Wisconsin special?
Wisconsin has a long history of important labor battles. From the Bay View riot that occurred when militiamen fired into a crowd of strikers who were seeking an eight-hour workday in Milwaukee in May 1886 -- an event that helped spark what labor historians call "the great upheaval" -- to the firing and permanent replacement of striking teachers in Hortonville in 1974 that presaged President Ronald Reagan's busting of PATCO [Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization] seven years later, Wisconsin has attracted more than its share of turning-point labor conflicts.
I would attribute this to the demographic, political, and cultural characteristics of the state. Wisconsin is in many ways a swing state. In electoral terms, it can go in either conservative or liberal directions. In the 1950s, the state was home to both the nation's leading anti-communist, Joseph R. McCarthy, and the nation's leading socialist mayor, Frank Zeidler of Milwaukee. ... Wisconsin politics can tip significantly to the left or the right quickly and has done so in the past.
What would a win in Wisconsin mean for the labor unions there and around the country?
Simply forcing Gov. Walker to drop his effort to strip collective-bargaining rights from public workers would constitute an important victory for labor, since the passage of Walker's legislation seemed all but assured 10 days ago. If Walker can be stopped, it would discourage other governors from following his lead. The Wisconsin protests and solidarity actions around the country have already made clear that anti-union aggression will be resisted, and this might have already had an impact. Ohio's Republican state Senate has already scaled back the degree to which they are seeking to reduce bargaining rights in the Buckeye State.
What was the last labor strike that lasted this long? Were the stakes this high?
Well, this is technically not a strike per se. Some workers have refused to work in order to join the protests. Really, it is a political standoff more than a strike. But in some ways, it recalls the Flint, Michigan, sit-down strike of 1936-37, which lasted for 44 days. The stakes could prove as high today as they were in 1937. The difference then was that labor was organizing and on the offensive, whereas this is mostly a defensive fight, though one that has galvanized people both in Wisconsin and beyond.
Now it seems as though politicians are exploiting economic unrest among private-sector workers without good benefits to turn their anger toward dismantling unions. Has there always been this union/anti-union divide?
It is a time-honored tactic. It plays out in more volatile ways when it comes to public-sector conflicts since the employer in those cases is the state and its revenue source is the taxpayer. Public-sector workers ultimately have to make their case to taxpayers. It becomes more difficult to do this in the kind of environment that we have now. Not only are many people suffering due to the effects of the Great Recession, but also, this period comes after many years in which real incomes have not been rising for a large slice of the American workforce while at the same time benefits have been eroding (rising health-care costs and increasing levels of retirement insecurity). Anti-unionists tried to turn private-sector workers against public-sector workers during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s as well. But the crisis wasn't as severe as the current one, and the 1970s crisis came after years of real wage and benefit growth in the private sector. So that divide-and-conquer strategy gained less traction than it threatens to gain now.
The problem that the critics of public-sector unions would like us to forget, of course, is that the main reason why public-sector workers have become vulnerable to political vilification is not that they have been greedy but rather because private-sector workers have been faring so poorly and feel so hard-pressed. But lowering the incomes or eroding the benefits for public-sector workers will not solve the problem for their counterparts in the private sector. In fact, it could exacerbate the problems of private-sector workers by further eroding the middle class upon whose consumption habits so much of our economy depends.
Are unions really a thing of the past, as Kevin Drum opined in Mother Jones? Is there anything that could take their place?
Unions are a thing of the past. But they are also very likely to be a thing of the future, for nothing can really take their place. Unions exist because workers need to be organized in order to get a fair share of the productivity gains they produce. As unions have weakened over the past generation, inequality has grown. This is no coincidence. In many ways, unions are more needed today than they were a generation ago. This does not mean that tomorrow's unions will look like the unions of today and yesterday. Forms of organization have changed as workers adapted to new historical eras and new economic trends. We are in the midst, I think, of such a period of adaptation and reconfiguration. This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.
