Republicans hold on in Wisconsin

As you'll have likely heard, Republicans held on to enough state Senate seats to retain control of that chamber, bad news for the liberal and union activists who aimed to roll back Republican Governor Scott Walker's attack on collective bargaining. Sometimes satire is the best solace for bad news. Try the clip below; it begins with a little inside joke about Colbert's own "Colbert Super PAC" (which he set up to show the rigor of our public financing laws), then we move on to Wisconsin.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Wisconsin's Recall Election & Americans for Prosperity's Absentee Ballot Typos
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

Wisconsin update

As you've probably heard, Wisconsin public sector unions have lost their battle in state court to declare Governor Walker's measure (the one gutting their collective bargaining rights) illegal.  The legal issue at stake was whether or not the State Senate violated Wisconsin's open meeting law when it scheduled a hurried vote when most Democratic state senators were off in Illinois; the court didn't rule on the substance of the measure.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has an update on the latest efforts by the unions to counterattack.  They've got a two-pronged strategy, political and legal.  They're trying to oust the Republican majority from the state senate via recall elections, and they are filing a suit in Federal court that claims that Walker's efforts to exempt certain union workers (notably the popular firefighters and policemen's unions, which also happened to support Walker's election) from his ruling violated the 14th Amendment's call for equal protection under the law.

Tactical legal victory in Wisconsin

A Wisconsin judge has ruled that the Republican controlled state legislature violated the state's open meeting law when it gutted the pensions and collective bargaining rights of state employees.

This is by no means a final defeat for the Republican plan: the state's supreme court may overturn this lower court ruling, and the legislature could pass the law again even if the courts do invalidate their first action. But it is a pretty clear indication of the lengths to which opponents of public employee labor unions are willing to go to attack unions.

We are part of a big fight on the national and state level that will have a tremendous impact on the status of our jobs. We are lucky to be allied with a union (IEA/NEA) that retains some power on the state and national level. They will have more power if you join them. If you're a tenured or tenure-track faculty member click here for information on how to do so.  (You won't even have to pay dues until September.)

On the collective bargaining teach-in

The text of today's DE article on yesterday's Teach-In includes some pretty representative quotations from people describing the conversation at the meeting, though the headline is unintelligible and the lead misrepresents the amount of time spent talking about the possibility of a strike.  The conversation really revolved around the threat to collective bargaining at our campus, its connection to wider trends at places like Wisconsin, and how faculty and others could better articulate their side of the story.  


My favorite part of the conversation was a point the article gets to toward the end. Ryan Netzley, whose evaluation of a recent missive from the Office of the Chancellor you may have seen on a blog near you, argued that the key to winning a broader set of hearts and minds is to get beyond the financial details and the procedural issues of collective bargaining in order to articulate the rival visions for the future of the university.  

From Wisconsin to Illinois?

Illinois isn't Wisconsin.  After all, legislators from Wisconsin and Indiana fled here.  And neither the state government nor our administration has made an open attack on collective bargaining.  Or are we too close to Wisconsin for comfort?  The administration has now cut off bargaining with the civil service union (ACsES) and with the NTT union, after short and rather cursory attempts at mediation.  And everyone expects that they will follow the same strategy with the Faculty Association.  They have declared that bargaining is at an impasse.  Is it? 

"We are all badgers now"

Stanley Fish (no great liberal on many academic issues) and Walter Michaels discuss the importance of faculty unions in today's environment on Fish's NY Times blog.