41st Annual Conference Report
The labor movement has endured years of back-sliding, but times are changing, opening up opportunities for unions to grow in both strength and size.
That was the message told to those attending the 41st Annual Conference of the Wisconsin Labor History Society on Saturday, Nov. 12, at the Madison Labor Temple. Lane Windham, keynote speaker and Associate Director of the Kalmanovitz Institute at Georgetown University, told the 70 persons attending that in the last 40 years “we have never witnessed a moment like this. It’s a time of opportunity.”
“There’s far more public awareness of the poor treatment of workers,” she said, calling attention to polls that 71% of Americans now support unions, the highest level since 1965. Also, the nation currently is seeing a “new era of protest,” covering climate change, Black lives matter, gay rights, women rights and others, she said.
Windham noted that since the 1970s there has been a major shift in cultural attitudes, particularly among younger workers. “The Gen Z generation [1995-2009] is the most pro-union,” she said. “And, it’s the first time since Vietnam [in the 1960s and 70s] that liberals have moved in with unions.”
Yet, union organizing is facing tough response from managements. “Employers are digging in more than ever to resist a union revival,” she warned.
The decline of unions, she said, began in the 1970s when the roots of growing economic divide began to develop. The causes can be blamed on several factors:
- Some major employers that traditionally accepted unionization began to join in union-busting efforts.
- Many employers were willing to break the law, according to data from the National Labor Relations Board that shows an increase in unfair labor practice complaints.
- Employers also began to rely more and more on union-busting professionals, as was shown by onetime union-buster Martin J. Levitt in his book, “Confessions of a Union-buster.”
- Employers used the “gig economy” to break unions, using every opportunity to turn employees into contractor status.
- The move of jobs from industrial states to Mexico or overseas, creating plant-closings and thus destroying the heavily unionized workplaces.
Unions fought back, as shown by the 400,000 who showed up in Washington D.C. for Solidarity Day in 1981, but Windham said, the event got little notice by the media and the public and its impact was limited. Union organizing during the 1980s fell back to one-fifth of the level activity from previous decades, she added.
Even with increased publicity in recent years, the level of activity has still not increased. Most of the campaigns, she said, cover a relatively few workers. She said “we’re at a moment theat we need to rethink ways to organize.”
Windham acknowledged that the “decks are stacked against workers” to win NLRB organizing elections. The U. S. is the only nation in the world where workers toil under the “at will” concept, meaning the boss has virtually total freedom to fire a worker without cause.
She said the nation is “at a pivot point in worker organizing.” The workplace, always one of the least democratic of institutions, is a cauldron of change, she said, and now the principle of at-will employment is being challenged.
“It’s time to look for new ways to empower workers,” Windham concluded. Workers are successful in National Labor Relations Board cases and many in our society have recognized a new social contract in which workers should be treated democratically. “A union is about democracy in the workplace,” she said.
Bosses look to rightwingers to fight unions
While Windham traced the history of union-busting in the last few decades, it was for Joanne Ricca, retired legislative representative of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO, to trace roots of anti-unionism to the growth of the far right movement, beginning with the John Birch Society that developed after World War II. One of the founders of the Birch Society, she said, was Fred Koch, founder of Koch Industries, who was “virulently anti-union.” Wealthy rightwingers like Richard Scaife heir to the Mellon fortune and Richard Coors of the brewing family helped fund a more active Far Right movement into the 1970s.
Ricca called attention to the notorious 1971 memo by corporate attorney Lewis F. Powell to the U. S. Chamber of Commerce that called upon the business community to take action to protect the free enterprise system. Powell said the societal changes wrought by the anti-war movement of the 1960s, the civil rights efforts and the growing demand for women’s rights were endangering capitalism. He called for the business community to get deeply involved in public policy, part of which meant destroying the labor movement.
And get involved in political action the corporate community did. They found willing allies in the Far Right Christian community, which corporations supported through funding and other means, Ricca noted.
She said union members must be alert to the “bait and switch” tactics of the rightwing by searching out single issues, such as gun control or abortion, to cynically manipulate public opinion.
“The very existence of unions as effective organizations to represent the economic issues of working people is threatened,” Ricca concludes. “This is a sophisticated, determined, corporate-funded right –wing movement that will not automatically be swept back by some hoped-for political pendulum. It will not dissipate on its own. It needs to be challenged and defeated.”
In a comment, Ken Germanson , former WLHS president, called attention to rightwing efforts in Wisconsin, singling our the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), the MacIver Institute and the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce for their longterm dedication to stifling worker rights.
Jon Shelton, who moderated the session, noted that WILL had checked the syllabus he uses in teaching at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay. He said that WILL did a study to show how professors may be indoctrinating their students in various progressive causes. He commented: “The bosses are organized. This isn’t a spontaneous thing that happened. The only way we beat them is by organizing ourselves.”
2011 Uprising was inspiration for future
The “Wisconsin Uprising of 2011” was likely the most massive demonstration in the state’s history, but it failed to stop the passing of Act 10 that effectively killed collective bargaining rights for most public employees. Two who participated in the rallies agreed during a morning panel discussion that the effort by Wisconsin workers and their allies likely set an example of the power that can be created by solidarity.
Kevin Gundlach, currently president of the South Central Federation of Labor, was a member of AFSCME Local 705 and a longtime Dane County worker at the time. He told several anecdotes that symbolized the solidarity that surrounded the efforts. He said his local was bargaining a new contract when rumors began floating that Scott Walker’s Administration was about to use the “nuclear option” that would negate state employee bargaining rights. He told of joining picket lines on Feb. 11, 2011 around the governor’s mansion and at the home of Scott Fitzgerald, then State Senate Majority Leader.
He recalled that the governor’s chief of security greeting picketers and telling of the support of many security officers for the union demonstrations. Support from throughout the state was so widespread that it was hard to find enough busses to bring demonstrators to Madison.
Adrienne Pagac, currently managing director of UW’s Havens Wright Center for Social Justice, was an active member of the Teaching Assistants’ Union (TAA) in 2011 and first heard of Walker’s plan to attack public workers from a column in the Isthmus, Madison’s alternative newspaper. Union officials, she said, at first didn’t believe the report, claimed to be a leak from a legislative staffer. Soon TAA leaders realized the threat was real and organized an effort to deliver valentines to legislators on Feb. 14 – an act that led to the first night of occupation of the Capitol Building. It was an occupation by union supporters that lasted many months.
“It was amazing what workers were doing across-the-board,” Gundlach said in summarizing the actions, in which as many as 150,000 showed up for weekend rallies at the Capitol.
Workers from all types of trades, ethnicities and levels participated creating “a sense of solidarity that crossed a lot of boundaries that we didn’t know even existed,” Gundlach said.
Nonetheless, the grassroots effort failed to halt passage of Act 10 and the enactment of the state’s first right-to-work law four years later. Act 10 truly crippled the state’s public employee unions, both at the state and municipal levels. Pagac and Gundlach said it required every local unit to recertify annually requiring a vote of 50% plus one from among all workers in the unit, thus counting every non-vote as a “no.” Also the law restricted the topics of bargaining to wages and benefits, limited pay boosts to the rise in the cost-of-living, and eliminated collection of Fair Share payments from nonmembers and removed dues checkoff.
Pagac said that as a result union membership in the state dropped dramatically from 13.3% in 2011 to 7.9% in 2021. “This is about taking power from workers,” Gundlach said.
Even so, it was noted that the Uprising proved to be an event that inspired working people and others to mobilize for justice, impacting movements like Occupy Wall Street later in 2011 and Black Lives Matter.
Both Pagac and Gundlach questioned the wisdom of following the Uprising with an effort to recall Walker, which failed. Others had suggested doing a general strike, but Pagac said she doubted the strike would be successful because too many workers were apathetic.
Both panelists called for stepped-up organizing. Pagac warned that organizing ‘is a long process,” and can’t be done overnight. Gundlach agreed, suggesting that every union member should become an “organizer” in their interactions with other workers, friends and family members. “Everyone should be able to do these things,” he said.
Read a report written on the 10th Anniversary of the Uprising in Payday Report.
New militancy brings hope for workers
Discussion in an afternoon panel, “Winning the Fight Against Union-Busters – Now and in the Future,” centered around several current campaigns, both which indicate growing militancy among workers. Colin Gillis, leader of the nurses union at UW Hospital, said the Service Employees Local 1199 campaign to enter into a labor contract with the University Hospital clinics faced legal obstacles around the Act 10 rules that ban collective bargaining contracts for public workers.
He said the union workers had to turn to direct action by threatening a strike that was averted when the hospitals agreed to seek legal opinions on whether they could enter into bargaining with the union. “Our campaign moved from a passive, elected official-dependent strategy to presenting a credible threat of an unprotected mionority strike in September of this year,” he said. The strike threat brought the hospital officials to the table, along with Gov. Tony Evers, to hammer out the agreement.
“The only way we moved our elected officials,” Gillis said, “was through direct action.” He acknowledged such actions must be coupled with political action to win a contract with more wages, benefits and conditions of employment.
Referring a sign at the Madison Labor Temple that said “Direct Action Gets the Goods,” Gillis said that in his experience direct action, or at least threat of director action “does indeed get the goods.” Union militancy and labor law reform “go hand-in-hand,” he added, and labor needs to be engaged in both at the sametime in order to win.
A strong union within a health care facility makes for better care for the patients, he said. “If we had a strong militant union with full recognition . . . We would have a hospital that was safe for our patients and safe for our staff where bedside nurses and support staff were part of the conversation on policies.”
He noted all workers in a hospital are critical to a patient’s care; if the rooms aren’t cleaned on time, many patients may be waiting in emergency rooms or kept waiting. He called attention to the state’s many nursing homes; these workers need to be organized because they currently are often “treated like trash.”
Pat Raes, president of SEIU Local 1199, described the working conditions nurses face in the current day. “Nurses have busy lives and they are being asked to come in constantly to work,” she said. Hospitals and nursing homes use peer pressure and guilt to persuade nurses to work, while home care workers, who earn but $11 to $13 an hour, must clock in with their cell phones to record their home visits.
Going back in history, she said that when nurses at the Meriter Hospital in Madison organized in 1979, they were making the same wage as the cashier working at Kohls, that was $3.50 an hour. She noted, too that the nurses organized to eliminate favoritism in which certain nurses would get better assignments, higher pay and more favorable schedules.
Also, the union is seeking to organize nursing homes throughout the state, she said. The goal is to get the nursing homes under a master contract so that wages, hours and benefits can be bargained all at once. She noted that winning decent contracts in the medical industry has resulted from much support from other unions.
“We need to do right by everyone,” Raes said. “We need to find ways to get beyond ‘us’ and ‘them’ and get to ‘we’ — ‘we the people.’”
Meanwhile, some 800 workers, members of UAW Local 180 at CMH Industries in Racine, have been striking since May, John Drew, retired UAW representative, told the conference. Historically, he said, the local held a strong position in relations with the company, then known as J. I. Case, thanks to a union council that coordinated bargaining throughout Case’s many plants. Now, CMH, a division of Fiat, has taken a hard line against the UAW locals at its only two remaining plants, in Racine and Burlington IA, both of which are on strike.
Yet, the strikers are holding firm, Drew said, even though CMH has brought in strikebreakers and cutoff health insurance. Weekly UAW strike benefits and the continuation of health insurance by the union has helped, he said. The Racine strike dramatizes the new militancy among workers, it was noted.
Drew who retired from American Motors in Kenosha looked back on his life, commenting, “I want people to have what I have. I am an accident of when I was born.” He noted he was able as a young man to get a good UAW-represented job at AMC and retire to health care benefits and a pension. He called for renewed emphasis on rebuilding the manufacturing in the U. S. with decent jobs.
Immigrant rights called a ‘worker issue’
Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, Milwaukee, said the effort to protect the rights of immigrants is a “bottoms-up” movement, as witnessed by the mass rallies the organization has been mounting in Milwaukee. The causes of immigrant workers is indeed “a worker issue,” she said. She thanked the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO and many unions throughout the state for their support of Latino causes through participation in Voces’ “Day without Latino Workers” marches.
A particular troubling issue involves Section 27-G of the immigration law that permits police officers to randomly stop citizens who look suspicious to prove their immigration status. While most local police authorities do not utilize the law, eight Wisconsin counties do. The practice is a serious infringement of individual rights, she said, since it often means stopping persons just because of how they look or speak.
There is a definite need for immigration reform, which failed to pass the U.S. Senate by one vote. She characterized the effort to pass such reform as “swimming upstream.” Yet, Neimann-Ortiz said “if the movement is strong enough we can do anything.”
Another major fight involves the granting of rights for immigrants to have drivers’ licenses, she said.
About a dozen members of Voces de la Frontera attended the conference and much of the presentation was translated into Spanish by Luz Sosa, vice-president of WLHS and a member of AFT Local 212 at the Milwaukee Area Technical College. Sosa also moderated the afternoon panel.
Ricca wins Society’s Lifetime Award
The organization’s annual Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Joanne Ricca, first president and longtime board member of WLHS. She was praised for her continued volunteer work in maintaining the continuity of the Society. Ricca, whose early career involved organizing for several unions, is a retired legislative representative of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO.
She was praised for “being the glue that held this organization together for 41 years,” by Ken Germanson, president emeritus, who presented the award. He noted she has been dedicated to the cause and has been particularly talented at assuring that the work of the Society is done in a timely manner.
The plaque she received cited the fact that she was a founder of the Society and has continued to serve it with dedication in doing work that was “unsung,” meaning that she worked behind the scenes to keep the Society growing to become one of the strongest in the nation.
She began working for the Wisconsin labor movement in 1972 as an organizer for AFSCME, Local 1199, SEIU and the the former Allied Industrial Workers union. She is now retired after working 24 years on the legislative staff of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO.