More than a half-century after Wisconsin became the first state to grant government workers collective-bargaining rights, this city has emerged as a key battleground in a movement to dismantle faculty and other public unions.
A walk down State Street, which leads from the state’s flagship university here to the steps of the Capitol, illustrates the passions ignited by a controversial piece of legislation that would end collective-bargaining rights for Wisconsin faculty and staff members, rights they won just two years ago. It would also almost eliminate those rights for nearly all other state workers, including graduate students. For days, this well-trod path has played host to a processional, where unionized workers and those sympathetic to their cause carry protest signs toward Capitol Square, often chanting “Kill the bill! Kill the bill!”
The measure that has created such controversy is a “budget repair” bill that the state’s newly elected governor, Scott Walker, a Republican, says is crucial to curing Wisconsin’s fiscal ills. But many see the governor’s proposal as a political move, and one that fans ideological divides. Apart from reducing the state’s obligations to pensions and health-care benefits for university employees and other state workers, Mr. Walker’s plan takes direct aim at the very idea of collective bargaining. In so doing, it links the history of organized labor with the daunting deficits plaguing Wisconsin and most other states.
But the act of curtailing those rights does not produce immediate savings for the state, which faces a budget shortfall of $137-million this year and a projected gap of $3.6-billion in the next biennium.
The fast-tracked legislation reached a at least a temporary stumbling block on Thursday, when all of the State Senate’s Democrats went missing, leaving the Republican-led chamber one vote shy of the necessary quorum for conducting business. That prevented the measure from coming to a vote on Thursday, but Republicans planned to try to reconvene on Friday.
Similar Proposals Elsewhere
Mr. Walker’s budget-repair bill is one of the more far-reaching pieces of legislation to challenge unionization at universities and elsewhere, but similar proposals are popping up in other states. In Ohio, a Senate bill would eliminate or significantly curtail bargaining rights for faculty and staff at public colleges. A similar measure has been proposed in Michigan, where the bargaining rights of faculty and other unions are also threatened.
Responding to the legislative efforts, an official at the American Association of University Professors said in an e-mail to members that those state bills “all seek to deny public employees, including many faculty, the right to have a say in their working conditions and to bargain over wages and benefits.”
President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan also weighed in against the Wisconsin legislation on Thursday, with the president saying the effort “seems like more of an assault on unions.” The president added, in a White House interview with a Milwaukee television station, that “it’s important not to vilify” public employees “or to suggest that somehow all these budget problems are due to public employees.”
Across the country, faculty members appear vulnerable political targets, particularly as Republicans have gained control of more governor’s mansions and state legislatures. Among the efforts are a bill in South Carolina that would require professors to spend more time in the classroom and a measure in Utah to end tenure.
Cheryl L. Maranto, an associate professor and chair of the department of management at Marquette University, says there is a political wind at the backs of newly elected Republican governors, such as Mr. Walker, who have chosen to confront unions.
“My sense is that if it can happen in Wisconsin, it can happen everywhere,” says Ms. Maranto, who holds a doctoral degree in labor relations from Michigan State University and has often written about union issues.
The political palatability of confronting unions, and specifically unionized professors, makes sense to even some of Wisconsin’s strongest collective-bargaining advocates. As an associate professor of geology at the University of Wisconsin’s Oshkosh campus, Maureen A. Muldoon says she can understand why her unemployed neighbor thinks she has it easy. After all, by being tenured she has more job security than most. And her neighbor assumes that all professors make six-figure salaries, even though they don’t. Ms. Muldoon says her salary is closer to $50,000. The average pay for associate professors at her campus is about $62,000, according to the latest salary data from the AAUP.
“If you think we’re making that, and you lost your job, we’re easy targets,” says Ms. Muldoon, who attended protests at the Capitol in a crowd last week that some estimated was as large as 10,000.
Governor Walker’s bill would go after some of the benefits professors like Ms. Muldoon say they have fought for at the expense of higher pay. For instance, the legislation would require state workers to increase contributions to their pensions to 5.8 percent of their salaries, whereas some now pay nothing, according to state officials. Workers’ contributions toward health insurance would also be doubled, to 12.6 percent of the monthly premiums.
There’s no doubt that Mr. Walker’s proposal has political traction in Wisconsin, but even some nonunion Madison residents have a soft spot for the protesters. Take Dan Rawlins, a 27-year-old Madisonian who is not a member of any union and has no health-care coverage.
“People are pissed off, and I don’t blame them,” says Mr. Rollins, sipping a Miller Lite at State Street Brats, a Madison institution that was teeming with union workers last week.
Governor Walker declined an interview request made through his news-media office.
The View From Bascom Hill
Bascom Hill, the center of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, felt far removed from the Capitol dome on a brisk morning this week. The night before, dozens of often-caffeinated, sweaty students were crammed into staircases at the Capitol, protesting the legislation that would curtail or kill collective bargaining for unions in Wisconsin. Screaming “No one leaves,” many demanded to be heard well into the night, as weary lawmakers listened to testimony after testimony in opposition to the bill.
Those protests were not unnoticed by Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin, chancellor of the Madison campus, whose office sits atop Bascom Hill. As the leader of the state’s flagship, where faculty and staff are not unionized, Ms. Martin is striking what she admits to be a difficult balance in her response to the governor’s plan.
Through a series of public statements, the chancellor has tried to show empathy for demonstrators, while at the same time appreciating the fiscal realities facing the state. Moreover, Ms. Martin fears that state cuts in the university’s budget, perhaps as much as 15 percent, may be part of the biennial budget.
In two official statements about the legislation this week and in an interview with The Chronicle, her public comments have evolved. Her first statement, on Monday, was measured, expressing some concerns about the bill’s consequences but taking no specific position on the legislation. Instead, it welcomed “dialogue and good-faith discussions.”
But in a statement issued two days later, the day after protests began in earnest, Ms. Martin suggested “in the strongest possible terms” that lawmakers slow down the push to enact the legislation.
“Before curtailing collective-bargaining rights that have been in place for years, I am asking legislators to step back and make a sincere effort to develop more creative solutions,” Wednesday’s statement read.
Ms. Martin’s message was welcomed by unionized Madison graduate students, in particular, who earlier in the week had said they were unsure of the level of the chancellor’s support. Magda Konieczna, a doctoral student in journalism and mass communication, said that Ms. Martin’s statement on Wednesday was helpful to the cause of unions and positioned the chancellor alongside “the winning team.”
“The bill is egregious, and I suspect she knew that right away,” said Ms. Konieczna, who was a fixture at the Capitol throughout the protests.
The politics facing Ms. Martin are unusual. At the same time that many of her faculty and students, including unionized graduate students, are pressing for solidarity with state workers, the Madison campus is pushing to be treated differently by the state from every other public-university campus.
Ms. Martin has been pressing a proposal known as the New Badger Partnership. The central thrust of the plan is that Madison should be freed from many of the dictates of the state, allowing the flagship more flexibility to do its business.
“A major research university is not like other state agencies,” Ms. Martin says.
Among other things, Ms. Martin says she would like to see Madison freed to use tuition dollars without restriction. That would include steering tuition money from students of greater means toward those in financial need.
While that sort of tuition redistribution effectively happens already through institutional aid at many colleges, Ms. Martin concedes that the idea of overtly declaring that one student’s tuition should subsidize another’s is controversial.
In defense of Madison’s reach for greater flexibility, Ms. Martin posits that the distinguishing feature of an enterprise like the state’s flagship campus is that it is a global competitor in a fierce marketplace. That necessarily means that some of Ms. Martin’s arguments are rooted in the notion that well-paid professors should continue to be well paid. A strong research institution that attracts them will lift the state economy, she says.
Ms. Martin’s plan is one the governor appears to be considering, and how much independence Madison might receive worries officials at the university system. Some have questioned whether the Madison campus, which is politically powerful, is quietly breaking away from the pack during the most challenging economic period in recent memory.
In a letter to Mr. Walker, system officials raised concerns that the governor’s budget for the 2011-13 biennium, which is expected to be introduced early next week, would remove Madison from the university system and create an independent board of trustees for the campus. In so doing, the state would return to “competing systems” that 40 years ago “gave rise to wasteful duplication, unnecessary competition, and conflicts,” wrote Kevin P. Reilly, the system’s president, along with other system officials.
Ms. Martin’s response probably did little to allay their concerns.
“If UW-Madison were to be separated from UW System, the university could be a test case that paves the way for other institutions in the system to benefit from such flexibilities,” she said.
Interest in Unionizing
As political dynamics unfold in the state, professors on the Madison campus say they are watching with interest and concern. Like many at Madison’s peer institutions and other state flagships, nonunion professors are not rushing to be part of collective bargaining.
In 2009, Wisconsin lawmakers gave academic employees at all of the state’s public colleges the right to vote in favor of unionization, and at several campuses they have done so. Unions have been recognized on the University of Wisconsin campuses at Eau Claire and Superior. Elections have also been requested by faculty members on four other campuses: La Crosse, River Falls, Stevens Point, and Stout.
Faculty on campuses with strong histories of shared governance sometimes scoff at the notion of unionization, and there’s probably no shortage of that sentiment on the Madison campus, says Judith N. Burstyn, chair of the Madison Faculty Senate’s executive committee, known as the University Committee. At the same time, many professors are sympathetic to unionized graduate students and other state workers whose collective-bargaining rights are threatened, she adds.
“It’s entirely possible that because of the governor’s action there may suddenly be a lot more interest in unionizing,” says Ms. Burstyn, a chemistry professor.
As for the governor himself, Ms. Burstyn says he’s regarded by many professors with substantial skepticism. Observers of his campaign say Mr. Walker had a singular focus on jobs that seldom mentioned the role of postsecondary education, and the governor’s lack of a college degree is often cited as a weakness or blind spot. Mr. Walker attended Marquette University, but moved on to a job in marketing and development at the American Red Cross without completing his degree.
“We get the sense that he doesn’t value higher education,” Ms. Burstyn says. “We get the sense he doesn’t value education at all.”