Repairing Democracy's Institutions? A View From Wisconsin's Teacher Unions

• In Event: Teachers Strike! Comparative Perspectives

Abstract

Today, teachers in the United States constitute both the largest sector of unionized employees and the most vulnerable as a shifting political economy threatens public institutions and their workers. Understanding the limits and possibilities faced by teachers’ unions yields significant insight into the U.S. labor movement and struggles for public education.
This presentation focuses especially on the historical dilemmas faced by Wisconsin teacher unionists. As the first state to grant collective bargaining rights to public sector employees, and the most aggressive to take them away, Wisconsin provides resources for teachers unions nationwide. Governor Scott Walker’s landmark legislation slashing collective bargaining for public sector employees – of which teachers constituted the largest sector – set a precedent for other states, including Michigan, Ohio and California. Understanding the trajectory of Wisconsin teachers union casts light on future struggles.
As public-sector unions such as teachers’ unions used the boon of post-war liberalism to form their political power, they imported many of liberalism’s key contradictions: its formation of racial contracts, its misappraisal of affective labor, and its opportunistic collective action logics. I suggest cracks within liberalism weakened the political power of teachers’ unions, disempowering a feminised workforce. Using a historical case study of teachers’ strike in rural Wisconsin in 1974, I examine how the tenuous solidarity afforded by liberal accords made teachers’ unions more vulnerable to future neoliberal offensives on public education and its workers. The aftermath of the strike generated an opportunistic labor movement in which workers pursued their interests through legal provisions rather than by developing teachers’ broader community and labor solidarities, subverting feminist possibilities of teachers’ unions.
In Wisconsin, these fault lines in teachers’ unions became fractures. A weakened teachers’ union in Milwaukee left public education without strong defenders as the school privatization movement took hold in the city. As the choice movement in Milwaukee grew, so did the political forces opposed to the eradication of teachers’ unions. By 2011, these forces had gained control of the state legislature and governor’s office. They had sufficient power to radically alter the legal terrain of public sector unions.
Yet the fractures of teachers’ unions power have provided opportunities for reformations. Today, a committed group of teachers, parents, and community activists have begun organizing to not only halt the advance of privatization forces in Milwaukee, but also to re-envision public schools. This group – a community coalition spearheaded by the teachers’ union - has advocated for more democratic management of schools. They have called attention to the racially unjust policies within and around schools. They have demanded better recognition of intellectual and care labor required of good teaching. Their efforts have, to a degree, been successful. To date, Milwaukee is the only public school district that has more than once resisted attempts for state and mayoral takeover plans.
Their example forces an important question. How do tears in democracy’s institutions – public schools and teachers’ unions -- provide opportunities to repair and regrow the fault lines embedded in teachers’ unions formation?

Author

• Eleni Schirmer, University of Wisconsin - Madison