As the labor movement braces for a second Trump term, union members and their leaders are celebrating a major victory over a controversial law that stripped public sector unions of collective bargaining rights.
In response to a lawsuit alleging that a notorious law passed by the former Republican governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker in 2011 is unconstitutional, a county judge ruled on Monday that more than 60 sections of the law and several sections of a follow-up law in 2015, Act 55, are unconstitutional.
Walker called the decision “brazen political activism at its worst” and Republicans plan an appeal.
Thousands protested the introduction of the law, which crippled unions’ funding and powers. Following the passage of Act 10, several Republican-dominated states pushed to pass similar legislation, including Florida which passed a similar law in May 2023 targeting public sector unions, and Iowa, which passed legislation that took away collective bargaining rights from many state employees in 2017.
Act 10 stripped collective bargaining rights from thousands of state employees in Wisconsin, limiting their ability to bargain solely on wage increases that cannot exceed inflation. It also forced public sector labor unions to annually vote, with a majority of members participating and voting, to maintain certification.
“We were kind of just demonized, not just teachers, but public sector workers in general,” said John Havlicek, a high school Spanish teacher in La Crosse, Wisconsin and former president of the La Crosse Education Association which represents teachers in the school district. “Teachers don’t go into it for the money but I also have groceries to buy and bills to pay and stuff like that. A lot of public sector workers, in my experience teachers, really felt like we were being scapegoated. It was really bad.”
The act has had a significant impact on union membership, pay and benefits. In 2010 Wisconsin had a union density rate of 15.1%. That number dropped to 8.4% in 2023.
The law also forced public sector workers to pay more for healthcare and retirement benefits, resulting in around an 8.5% decrease in their pay for workers making $50,000 a year.
An April 2024 report by the Wisconsin department of public instruction found teacher pay had declined from 2010 to 2022 by nearly 20% and about four out of every 10 first year teachers either leave the state or the profession after six years.
Public school funding also drastically declined in Wisconsin after Act 10 was enacted. Per pupil spending in Wisconsin out paced the national average by around $1,100 per student in 2011 and was $327 per pupil lower than the national average in 2021.
A study published in 2018 by Jason Baron, assistant professor in economics at Duke University, blamed a 20% drop in average student state test scores in Wisconsin on the law.
“We saw school districts just tossing out 50 years of labor agreements that had been reached in our contracts,” added Havlicek. “The biggest things that we talked about we can no longer talk about. It’s not salary and benefits, those things were limited by state budgets anyway. It was all the other things like how many classes you can teach, how many kids can be in a classroom, all kinds of stuff that would be considered working conditions.”
He explained he’s “optimistic” about the ruling to overturn the law, but if it withstands appeal it remains uncertain how long it will take to get back what teachers lost with their union contracts and restore the working conditions they had prior to the law.
“A cohesive staff, people that are dedicated, who are willing to make teaching a calling in life, a lifestyle built around being an educator, is achieved by having an experienced veteran staff with low turnover. We’ve lost that, and I don’t know how long it’ll take to get that back,” he said.
Police officers, firefighters and other public safety officers were exempted from the Act 10 legislation.
Ben Gruber worked as a firefighter-paramedic in Wisconsin when the law was enacted, so he was unaffected until 2019 when he became a conservation warden, a job that was covered by Act 10.
“There was a pretty drastic change for me,” he said. “I went from having full collective bargaining rights, the ability to have a say in my working conditions and contract and a grievance procedure to immediately that stuff was gone,” said Gruber, who is currently president of AFSCME Local 1215 and a plaintiff in the lawsuit against Act 10.
Gruber argued the impacts of the law have been drastic on public sector workers in Wisconsin, from stripping workers of their rights to deteriorating working conditions and compensation.
“It’s really impacted our ability to provide the highest quality service that we can to the public as public servants,” he added. “We’re all here to serve the public, and all we ask in return is a voice in our working conditions. I think one of the impacts that’s often overlooked is the cost associated with all of the illegal terminations, discriminatory promotional practices, the lack of accountability for management and the loss of talent and professional experience that we see in increased turnover and hiring, all those hidden costs that don’t get talked about and really are a degradation on our ability to go out and provide that really strong public service.”
Since Act 10 was passed in Wisconsin, employee turnover for state employees soared; retirements increased from 3.3% in 2010 to 6.8% in 2011. Non-retirement separations, resignations and terminations, increased from 2.8% in 2010 to a record high in 2022 at 11.7%, according to a June 2023 report by the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
“Act 10 stripped workers of the freedom and power to have a voice on the job to bargain wages, benefits and working conditions,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “There are many fights still to come, but this decision stands to make a huge difference for educators, nurses and public service workers and the people they proudly help each and every day.”
Republican proponents of Act 10 have appealed the court decision and are planning to seek a stay of the law pending appeal in a fight to preserve the law, citing budget savings from the law that have come from shifting benefit compensation for retirement pensions and health insurance onto employees.
Walker, who lost re-election in 2018, criticized the decision and claimed collective bargaining “is not a right. It is an expensive entitlement.”
