Wisconsin: Making Sense of the Uprising
by C. Estelle Clark  
Wed, 03/28/2012 - 11:18am
http://labornotes.org/blogs/2012/03/wisconsin-making-sense-uprising



C. Estelle Clark reviews It Started in Wisconsin.
Ellen La Luzerne reviews Wisconsin Uprising: Labor
Fights Back
Harry Richardson reviews We Are Wisconsin

It Started in Wisconsin: Dispatches from the Front Lines
of the New Labor Protest. 
Edited by Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle. London, New
York: Verso, 2011. 181 pages.

Nothing like a mass uprising to inspire folks into
rethinking their political plans. Demonstrators came out
of the woodwork in Madison last February, taking
initiative and showing up day after day.

Madison '60s radicals Mari Jo and Paul Buhle, now
retired academics, edited the essay collection It
Started in Wisconsin. In each chapter, leading Wisconsin
activists and a few guests background and analyze
everything from the historic "Wisconsin Idea" to the
selling of state resources and the war on public
education, unions, farms, and the global economy.

Journalist John Nichols points to the state's
Progressive tradition and Fightin' Bob LaFollette as
likely bedrock for the uprising. A chapter by Paul Buhle
and Frank Emspak fills in important parts of Wisconsin's
labor history. Mary Bottari, in "The Sale of Wisconsin,"
introduces the American Legislative Exchange Council,
which created cut-and-paste legislation for Wisconsin
and the entire nation, with the aim of rolling American
society back to the 19th century. Bottari points clearly
to capitalists as a class, with their own type of
"unions" and solidarity. A chapter on the world economy
tells us what we were up against, and does it well.

I believe spirit sustained our uprising, and the book
gave state workers and people-to-people solidarity short
shrift. Probably 10,000 civil servants work near the
Capitol. When daily noon rallies there averaged 8,000,
dedicated, enthusiastic state workers were there by the
thousands. Unmentioned are heroes such as the 30
knitting ladies who parked themselves all night in the
Rotunda when rumor had it the students would be evicted.
Firefighters (briefly mentioned) made everyone's day for
months, as did the constant flow of pizza from online
orders from all over the world.

Over a half century, we have forgotten how to fight
back. We have let union leaders turn our unions into a
bargaining squad and grievance handlers. They have spent
our potential strike fund money supporting Democrats in
a legal system that doesn't serve us. They have
dismantled our greatest weapons, the strike and direct
action. Many good unionists stood strong in Wisconsin
Winter, but others held us back.

The South Central Federation of Labor, mentioned in the
book, voted to investigate and educate toward a general
strike. Something happened to founder that effort, and
the existing business unions certainly played a role. We
needed a chapter about that.

I believe we went about as far as we could go with the
leadership and organization we had. Now the workers who
came to the Capitol need to reclaim their unions and
reshape them into grassroots power bases. I weigh the
value of this book by how much it advances that purpose.
If the writing is too dense for ordinary people to
understand, that's a minus. If it reveals the nature of
classes in Wisconsin and beyond, that's a plus. If it
tells how people here and everywhere have stood up, and
what did or didn't advance their success, that's a plus,
too.

Estelle Clark works for the state of Wisconsin, a block
from the Capitol. She marched, sang, and rallied almost
every day of the 2011 uprising. A member of AFSCME Local
2748 and Madison IWW, she is also a director of the
Wisconsin Labor History Society.

Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back. 
Edited by Michael D. Yates. Monthly Review Press, New
York, $18.95, 304 pages.

As a lifelong Wisconsin resident and union thug, almost
every aspect of my life has been changed by the series
of events that began with the election of Scott Walker.
Everyone around me has felt the impact of his regime,
personally and at work.

We've seen a long list of losses: wages, benefits, clean
government, environmental protections, collective
bargaining rights, and more. But we also gained a
collective voice, evidenced by the mass rallies and a
million signatures on petitions aimed at recalling
Walker.

A collection of essays by union activists, journalists,
and academics, Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back
chronicles and makes sense of what happened. The first
section details the events that led up to the uprising
and lays out what was happening in the legislature, in
the streets, and around the state as events unfolded. We
read how Walker was elected and how unexpected were both
his attack on collective bargaining and the massive
response. Frank Emspak of the Workers' Independent News
Service says that not only is the many-sided rebellion
like the parable of the blind man and the elephant, "the
uprising was so unexpected that the blind man would have
been trampled by the elephant had he arrived in Madison
on February 14, 2011."

The book's middle section gives insightful criticisms
and suggestions on what has gone wrong with unions and
the lessons we might learn. Of particular note is labor
educator Stephanie Luce's list of lessons for
organizers. She notes that the left has often been
timid, afraid of alienating "the middle": We temper our
demands to sound reasonable and end up losing
everything. We need to be bold and inclusive, she says,
refusing to "highlight only the most 'respectable' parts
of our movement."

Luce argues against movements' basing their actions on
polling numbers or focus groups, as it was rumored that
national union operatives sent to Wisconsin were doing.
"If you base all your decisions on current attitudes,"
she writes, "you don't allow for the possibility of
people changing their mind. Taking a bold stand can
often build more support than pragmatic leaders might
have you believe."

The book's final section covers a wide array of examples
of struggles, from the longshore workers of Longview,
Washington, to the Packers of Green Bay, Wisconsin, to
workers fighting wage cuts in upstate New York. Authors
connect the dots between the cost of war, the effects of
racism, the decline of support for public services, and
our inability to launch a viable alternative to the
two-party system.

With a good collection of essays, the reader may not
always agree with each assessment. As a union staff
representative, I don't believe the unions' efforts
behind the scenes were given as much credit as they were
due. Union staff spent hours and hours garnering the
large numbers of ralliers, providing coordination at the
rallies, and contacting members one on one to encourage
attendance.

The events of the Wisconsin uprising continue to unfold
on an emotional rollercoaster. This book provides a
basic framework to continue the discussion.

Ellen La Luzerne is a staff representative for the
Wisconsin Education Association Council.


We Are Wisconsin. 
Edited by Erica Sagrans. Tasora Books, published by
Itasca Books. 295 pages. Check out your local bookstore
or download a PDF at Wearewisconsin.com.
by Harry Richardson

As soon as Governor Scott Walker was inaugurated, he
immediately set about stripping away the bargaining
rights of most public workers, exempting firefighters
and police.

We Are Wisconsin is a good primer of what happened but
not why.

Many of the book's short essays were written on the
spot, during or just after the two-week occupation at
the Capitol. Replete with personal stories and tweets,
it does a good job of describing the feel of the
"Wisconsin Rebellion" that took place last winter and
spring.

One of the most moving sections belongs to Tony Schultz,
a third-generation farmer from the activist group Family
Farm Defenders, who reaffirms the solidarity between
farmers and workers, an "old and sacred alliance of
producers."

Another comes from Sigrid Paterson, who grew up near
Walker in their small hometown. The governor and his
allies had tried to suggest "outside agitators" drove
the resistance.

What the book lacks is much analysis of why the uprising
happened and what might be next.

An exception is Noam Chomsky, who emphasizes the key
role played by labor in the Egyptian uprising as well as
the Madison variant. He offers a brief overview of
recent labor history and concludes, "In different ways,
the fate of democracy is at stake in Madison, Wisconsin,
no less than in it is in Tahrir Square."

Why didn't the energy of the Capitol occupation spur
greater confrontation?

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a member of the University of
Wisconsin-Madison Teaching Assistants Association, says
the grassroots faction in the occupation wanted the
Capitol action to continue and help build "new networks
focused on escalating direct mass pressure on the state
government and its corporate backers."

But the Democratic Party leadership and labor leaders
wanted to maintain control over the situation and
channel people into recall efforts. They were eventually
successful and effectively demobilized protesters,
guiding them toward activities Democrats and labor
leaders were more comfortable with and fit more easily
into their ideology.

What Might Have Been
We Are Wisconsin considers what might have been. The
essay "Wisconsin's Lost Strike Moment" theorizes that
the escalating series of events, including rallies
around the state, protests at banks and fundraisers, and
the Capitol occupation should have led to a one-day
strike. Such a move was necessary to confront Walker's
threat to fire public workers, the essay argues, but
"union leadership responded with words not actions
thereby severing the chain of escalations and accepting
defeat."

There is little to indicate how such a walkout could
have occurred other than spontaneously, however. Walker
seemed ready just to fire anyone who went out, creating
his own PATCO moment. He would have gotten rid of the
most militant workers and put down the rest in one fell
swoop.

But it is worth recalling that the teachers, spurred on
by their Madison branch, actually called meetings and
democratically decided to pursue a "sick-out."

Other union leaders didn't support a walkout, and public
sector work culture is anti-walkout. The teachers, on
the other hand, had been tempered by years of attacks.

In my union, AFSCME Local 171, the blue collar and
technical workers on the University of Wisconsin campus,
activists opposed the AFSCME state council chief's
decision to accept wage and benefit concessions that
would hurt the rank and file, while he defended
collective bargaining (and the dues checkoff that
maintains his position).

But we were outvoted at our member meeting. Most saw the
concessions as a necessary tactic in an effort to try to
maintain anything.

Lacking the support of the state leadership and without
a big enough activist base, job actions were not
practical, no matter how much we may wish otherwise.

Kim Moody's essay reminds us that unions don't grow
incrementally but rather in the crucible of struggle.
Somewhat hopefully, he suggests that Wisconsin's
uprising could lead to a "volunteer army" for labor to
bring the question of labor rights to the "level of
national rights it ought to be."

Thousands of members have been involved in gathering
signatures to recall Walker, though too few seem ready
to rebuild their unions. Whether this is the volunteer
corps Moody--and most of us--hope for remains to be seen.

Harry Richardson is a member of AFSCME Local 171 in
Madison.

____________________________________________

PortsideLabor aims to provide material of interest to
people on the left that will help them to interpret the
world and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

PS Labor Archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate