How Milwaukee teachers fought back
"In 2011, as the Great Recession hit public coffers, Wisconsin’s Republican governor Scott Walker addressed a purported budget crisis by attacking public workers. Walker’s signature bill, Act 10, struck down public-sector unions’ ability to automatically collect dues and limited bargaining to wages capped at inflation. Teachers could no longer negotiate class sizes. Nurses were forced to accept mandatory overtime. Unions lost money and members. Similar anti-union legislation quickly spread across the United States. These state-level offensives culminated in a national policy shift in the summer of 2018, when the Supreme Court’s Janus ruling made it illegal for public-sector unions to automatically gather dues from employees. Critics wrung their hands and pronounced it a nail in the coffin for public unions. What started as a Wisconsin union problem has now become a national one.
Yet today, teacher militancy sweeps the nation. Teachers from West Virginia’s fifty-five counties filed onto picket lines, the second time in a year. Strikes have surged across Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, and California. Chicago charter school teacher unionists are fighting against the racist project of education privatization. Amid this burgeoning resistance, Wisconsin unionists appear a cautionary tale of defeat, the concussed victims of a brutal first round. Union members made up less than 14 percent of the state’s workforce before Act 10; four years later they were barely 8 percent. Teachers were hit especially hard by the bill. Many fled the profession; more than 10 percent of teachers in Wisconsin quit the year after Act 10, a spike from the 6.4 percent exit rates the year before. This contradictory landscape raises a question: are today’s teachers’ unions the victorious challengers of capitalism, or among its many victims?
What constitutes success for a movement, and what constitutes defeat? The long history of Wisconsin’s largest teacher union local, the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association (MTEA), helps us answer this question. MTEA rebuffed solidarity with civil rights and labor groups in its first decades in order to secure bread-and-butter benefits for its predominantly white teachers. MTEA’s narrow self-interest fueled the conservative movement that led the charge against public education and teachers’ unions. Yet, starting in the mid-1980s, MTEA activists began forging a new vision for teacher unionism and public education. This vision has been exported to teachers’ union’s nationwide, thanks to their local activism and their nationally circulated progressive education magazine, Rethinking Schools. Today, MTEA proudly declares itself a social justice union, with racial justice and strong community relations central to its mission.
If we measure unions’ successes exclusively in terms of the short-term outcomes—did they get the goods, did they defeat the bad politicians—we ignore the broader scope and power of union activity. Workers’ collective power does not only come from these wins; it also comes from creating and nurturing a space for future movements and activists to take root. This dimension of unionism takes time and can be difficult to detect. But such tasks are arguably the more vital project of a union: to change workers’ sense of what is possible, to sow solidarity, to bring faraway aspirations into reach. . ."
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