Teachers' role huge in protests' success

Norman Stockwell:

One year ago this week, Madison teachers voted overwhelmingly to walk off the job, and walk into the Capitol to protest the budget repair bill (later known as Act 10), which stripped public employees of most of their collective bargaining rights. As journalist John Nichols noted in a recent speech, "The teachers felt they had to go to the Capitol, because the Legislature had forgotten them."

The decision was not taken lightly, as Madison Teachers Inc. Executive Director John Matthews recalls: "I got notice of what the governor planned to include in his budget repair bill, and it was more than financial issues, it was going to start attacking workers' rights and that goes to the very core of the operation of what a union does, what it can provide for those it represents. When the word came that he was going to attempt to do away with public sector bargaining in Wisconsin, we're talking about 50 years of work that we have put into developing not only rights but wages and benefits."

Matthews noted that the timing happened to coincide with meetings that were already scheduled: "That very evening I had a scheduled meeting with the MTI board of directors and they immediately said, well, just get us the list of all of our reps and their phone numbers, we have reps at every one of 60 different work sites. ... And they sat there at that time calling those reps. ... Frequently in February and March our board of directors meeting is followed the next day by a representative council meeting. We had 120 people show up at that meeting. And I gave my same presentation, and immediately a motion came from the floor: We need to go to the Legislature tomorrow. And that motion passed immediately with little debate. The only discussion was are we gonna call in sick or are we going to call in well and simply tell the school district that we aren't going to be at work tomorrow?"

Posted by Jim Zellmer at February 15, 2012 10:09 PM
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