Judge blocks contentious Wisconsin union law

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

MADISON, Wis. – The monthlong saga over Gov. Scott Walker's plan to drastically curb collective bargaining rights for public workers in Wisconsin took a turn Friday that could force a dramatic rebooting of the entire legislative process.

A judge temporarily blocked the law from taking effect, raising the possibility that the Legislature may have to vote again to pass the bill that attracted protests as large as 85,000 people, motivated Senate Democrats to escape to Illinois for three weeks and made Wisconsin the focus of the national fight over union rights.

But Walker's spokesman and Republican legislative leaders indicated they would press on with the court battle rather than consider passing the bill again.

"We fully expect an appeals court will find that the Legislature followed the law perfectly and likely find that today's ruling was a significant overreach," Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and his brother, Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, said in a joint statement. "We highly doubt a Dane County judge has the authority to tell the Legislature how to carry out its constitutional duty."

Dane County District Judge Maryann Sumi granted the temporary restraining order in response to a lawsuit filed by the local Democratic district attorney, alleging that Republican lawmakers violated the state's open meetings law by hastily convening a special committee before the Senate passed the bill.

Sumi said her ruling would not prevent the Legislature from reconvening the committee with proper notice and passing the bill again.

In addition to restricting the bargaining rights, the law would require most public workers in the state to contribute more to their pension and health care costs, changes that will amount on average to an 8 percent pay cut. Walker's spokesman Cullen Werwie was confident the bill would become law in the near future.

"This legislation is still working through the legal process," Werwie said.

Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen said the decision will be appealed because the Legislature and the governor, not a judge, are responsible for enacting laws and can't be blocked in a dispute over the procedures under which a law is passed. His spokesman Bill Cosh said an appeal would be filed Monday.

Even if the Legislature is forced to come back and take up the bill again, at least one Senate Democrat will be there. Sen. Tim Cullen said he would not leave the state again.

"I think that does great damage to the institution," Cullen said. "I have no regrets about doing it once, but that was in extraordinary times to try to slow the bill down."

The Senate couldn't pass the bill in its original form without at least one Democrat to meet a 20-member quorum requirement for measures that spend money. With the Democrats in Illinois and refusing to return after three weeks away, Republicans convened a special committee last Wednesday to remove the spending items. The bill then passed with no Democrats present.

That move is being challenged in another lawsuit brought by Democratic Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, who argues that the bill as passed still should have required the 20-member quorum. A hearing on that was set for April 12.

Opponents of the law were hopeful the judge's ruling temporarily blocking enactment of the law would lead to concessions.

"I would hope the Republicans would take this as an opportunity to sit down with Democrats and negotiate a proposal we could all get behind," said Democratic Sen. Jon Erpenbach.

The head of the state's largest teachers union said the Legislature should use this as a chance to listen to opponents of the measure, not vote to pass the same bill again.

"Wisconsin's educators call upon the Legislature to take this as a clear signal that Wisconsinites will not tolerate backroom deals and political power plays when it comes to our public schools and other valued services," said Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council.

Marty Beil, director of the state's largest public employee union, said in a statement, "We are gratified to see some of our so-called `leaders' finally held accountable for their illegal actions."

Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne filed the lawsuit this week alleging the open meetings law was violated because 24 hours' notice wasn't given for a meeting of the special legislative committee convened to amend the bill.

Justice Department attorneys argued that notice on a bulletin board posted about two hours before the committee meeting was to start last Wednesday was sufficient under rules of the Senate.

The judge said DOJ couldn't show the committee was exempt from the 24-hour notice requirement. She said Ozanne could ultimately win the case and ordered Secretary of State Doug La Follette to hold off on publishing the law — the last step before it can take effect. La Follette had planned to publish the law on March 25.

Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca of Kenosha said the ruling was a move in the right direction.

"I'm very pleased," Barca said. "As you know, I felt from the moment they called this that this would be a violation of open meetings law. This is an important first step in this regard."

The bill was part of Walker's solution for plugging a $137 million state budget shortfall. A part of the measure would require state workers to increase their health insurance and pension contributions to save the state $30 million by July 1. Other parts of Walker's original proposal to address the budget shortfall were removed before the bill passed last week. The Legislature planned to take those up later.

[Amphictyonis]

Unions aren't doing much to save jobs/salvage wages and benefits anyway. It's almost symbolic at this point. A right wing symbolic gesture. CA just laid off 19,000 teachers and massive lay offs in the overall public sector are on the way atop of benefit and wage cuts. What are the unions doing? SQUAT. The only reason they seem to exist these days is to help the democrat party pacify workers. Not the IWW and such of course but hell....we're not talking about socialist unions.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Which is why any real action is going to have break free of the unions.

[black magick hustla]

unions are gonna die anyway. there is so much you can do for union culture when your local prole today in the US is the fucker smoking furiously outside his wallmart shitjob.

[Tim Finnegan]

unions are gonna die anyway. there is so much you can do for union culture when your local prole today in the US is the fucker smoking furiously outside his wallmart shitjob.
That's what they said when most proles were dockers, miners, and so forth, and the unions were limited to the skilled crafts. Just because the labour movement as-is can't do the job doesn't mean that we should just abandon it altogether.

[bcbm]

That's what they said when most proles were dockers, miners, and so forth, and the unions were limited to the skilled crafts. Just because the labour movement as-is can't do the job doesn't mean that we should just abandon it altogether.

i don't think there is much of a point in trying to reconstruct past efforts that didn't get us where we wanted to go

[black magick hustla]

That's what they said when most proles were dockers, miners, and so forth, and the unions were limited to the skilled crafts. Just because the labour movement as-is can't do the job doesn't mean that we should just abandon it altogether.
i think the point is that before workers were thrown into this cramped workspaces were you worked alongside hundreds of people and they inevitably formed bonds. also, a long time ago most proles were part of what dupont calls the "essential proletariat", where union strategies made sense because workers in this industries could effectively shut down the economy. today, most of us work in serivce sectior shitjobs and i dont think union culture can come out of those workspaces for several reasons. one of the main reasons is due to the precarity of the job - people that work in shitjobs today do not plan to stay in those shitjobs forever. so nothing can be built in those spaces. what we need is to think outside union mentality and form our own extra parliamentary organs. second service sector proles are still wage slaves but they produce nothing. a lot of this service sector jobs will probably be dismantled in a theoretical revolutionary situation because they are miserable and unproductive, rather than "seized".

[Tim Finnegan]

i don't think there is much of a point in trying to reconstruct past efforts that didn't get us where we wanted to go
Who says we have to re-construct it in the same form? The Marxist-Lenistist parties achieved bugger all, too, but we're hardly about to write off the party as a form of organisation.


i think the point is that before workers were thrown into this cramped workspaces were you worked alongside hundreds of people and they inevitably formed bonds. also, a long time ago most proles were part of what dupont calls the "essential proletariat", where union strategies made sense because workers in this industries could effectively shut down the economy. today, most of us work in serivce sectior shitjobs and i dont think union culture can come out of those workspaces for several reasons. one of the main reasons is due to the precarity of the job - people that work in shitjobs today do not plan to stay in those shitjobs forever. so nothing can be built in those spaces. what we need is to think outside union mentality and form our own extra parliamentary organs. second service sector proles are still wage slaves but they produce nothing. a lot of this service sector jobs will probably be dismantled in a theoretical revolutionary situation because they are miserable and unproductive, rather than "seized".
You seem to be assuming that only the historical industrial and monolithic form of trade unionism is possible, and I would argue that this isn't true. What we need to pursue is a more organic, multi-layered form of unionism which is capable of effectively addressing contemporary class struggle. Difficult, sure, but that's part and parcel of being on the left these days. And, yes, this could and should include forms of political organisation outside both of the workplace and the state.

Also, I feel that you over-estimate the percentage of the proletariat that work in "shitjobs". Even at todays record levels, it is very much a minority.

[Rusty Shackleford]

Unions aren't doing much to save jobs/salvage wages and benefits anyway. It's almost symbolic at this point. A right wing symbolic gesture. CA just laid off 19,000 teachers and massive lay offs in the overall public sector are on the way atop of benefit and wage cuts. What are the unions doing? SQUAT. The only reason they seem to exist these days is to help the democrat party pacify workers. Not the IWW and such of course but hell....we're not talking about socialist unions.


April 4th, labor councils in pretty much every major city are calling for solidarity demos. this is nation wide, but many events are happening in CA.


aslo, a few comrades of mine are working to expand teachers4publiced.


ill be at the one in Sac at Cesar Chavez park

there are 2 or 3 evens happening simultaneously in the bay area including a student walk out at berkely i believe.

www.we-r-1.org (http://www.we-r-1.org/)

[Jose Gracchus]

Nauseates me how much of our FL rallies were taken up by Democrat opportunists who are administering the workers' their medicine everywhere they are in power across the nation at the same time. A local Democrat city commission candidate stumped on the podium, along with the local Young Dem President and a few other bureaucrats, and then couldn't even be bothered to show the solidarity and spirit the labor bureaucrats were able to in the march and protest. They quietly and shamefully melted away as soon as people began moving, chanting, acting.

And to think, their eager political brethren are inflicting the same on the other coast. Disgusting.

[Rusty Shackleford]

oh the april 4th thing is going to be loaded with democrats, thats why im thinking about bringing a red flag.

[Jose Gracchus]

:thumbup1:

We have the most vile Republican corporate criminal governor imaginable, and they still can't get their hands dirty. What are Democrats good for again?

[jake williams]

i think the point is that before workers were thrown into this cramped workspaces were you worked alongside hundreds of people and they inevitably formed bonds.
Different physical organization of workplaces, including the reduction of large scale factory work and the increase in intellectual labour done independently, does have an effect on labour organizing.

That said, labour organizing in the early decades of the 20th century had to overcome, for example, a sort of fanatical racism that is almost today incomprehensible. Many unions organized in North America had to overcome much broader language differences than exist today.


also, a long time ago most proles were part of what dupont calls the "essential proletariat", where union strategies made sense because workers in this industries could effectively shut down the economy.
What world do you live in where the economy functions without workers?


today, most of us work in serivce sectior shitjobs
The concept of the "service sector" is a bit misleading. Much of what is classified as "service sector" work is either intellectual work, often functionally more or less identical to manufacturing work, or food production, even more so.

It's true that retail workers (a disconcertingly large part of the economy for other reasons, but still a small sliver of the workforce) play a bit of an awkward-to-place role in production, but it's analogous to that of warehouse workers or even transportation workers.


one of the main reasons is due to the precarity of the job
Right - immigrant workers in the 20s had more job security than you do.


people that work in shitjobs today do not plan to stay in those shitjobs forever.
This is true. Again, it's not new, but it is a barrier to overcome. Unions must be recognized as having a role in fighting for broad class interests, not, say, McDonalds workers - if you don't want to be a McDonalds worker, that doesn't make sense.

Moving unions in this direction is exceptionally difficult.


what we need is to think outside union mentality and form our own extra parliamentary organs.
If the most effective mass organizations (to this day) that have ever existed are either impossible to maintain or no longer effective, where and how are you expecting to find something better?


second service sector proles are still wage slaves but they produce nothing.
Again, dockworkers, rail workers, etc. etc. etc.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

If the most effective mass organizations (to this day) that have ever existed are either impossible to maintain or no longer effective, where and how are you expecting to find something better?

Effective at what? Where?

Check my sig:

"The class struggle is the movement of class society. Organizations can be destroyed, leaders murdered, education transformed into barbarism; but the class struggle cannot be disposed of, except by the setting aside of classes. The very destruction of the legal labor organization is a better indication than anything else of the deepening of the class struggle, though this is not to proclaim the revolutionary quality of the parties destroyed." - Paul Mattick

[jake williams]

Effective at what? Where?

Check my sig:

"The class struggle is the movement of class society. Organizations can be destroyed, leaders murdered, education transformed into barbarism; but the class struggle cannot be disposed of, except by the setting aside of classes. The very destruction of the legal labor organization is a better indication than anything else of the deepening of the class struggle, though this is not to proclaim the revolutionary quality of the parties destroyed." - Paul Mattick
I don't exactly agree. Certainly class struggle itself transcends organizations, in a sense - it takes a particular organizational form at any given time.

That said, the form of the labour union is a particularly effective one as has been demonstrated by history. Unions have been the leading force in the historical achievement of labour rights, public services, and historic gains for the working class in general. Are there other types of organizations which exist outside unions and have made major qualitative gains for the working class?

[PhoenixAsh]

Isn't this a little bit of good news? I am confused here?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Are there other types of organizations which exist outside unions and have made major qualitative gains for the working class?

Permanent organizations? No. Which is exactly why workers must move beyond and outside of such things.

"One of the things George Rawick said is, 'Unions don’t organize workers. Workers organize unions.' Workers’ self-activity does create organizations create unions and other institutions, which may become bureaucratized and turn against the worker. Unions are not a secret plot designed to fool the workers. Workers organize them and then they get out of control." - Martin Glaberman

The biggest advances have come out of revolutionary struggles, and the bodies created in the midst of them: strike committees, assemblies, councils, communes.

[NoOneIsIllegal]

I overheard a conversation a while back where a republican said: "Budget cuts are one thing, but this is a budget massacre."

Not revolutionary, but I'm glad one republican isn't 100% batshit insane.

[bcbm]

Who says we have to re-construct it in the same form? The Marxist-Lenistist parties achieved bugger all, too, but we're hardly about to write off the party as a form of organisation.

speak for yourself


Also, I feel that you over-estimate the percentage of the proletariat that work in "shitjobs". Even at todays record levels, it is very much a minority.

http://www.stlrcga.org/x507.xml

[Tim Finnegan]

speak for yourself


http://www.stlrcga.org/x507.xml

Trade, Transportation and Utilities: 19%
Leisure and Hospitality: 10.7%

I'd say that 29.7% is a minority, and all the more so given that the number of non-"shitjobs" in those industries suggests it to be an over-estimate. :confused:

[bcbm]

i would include more than those as service industry, and they dwarf something like, say manufacturing.

[Tim Finnegan]

Well, it really doesn't help that you've not actually defined what a "shitjob" is, nor explained how one infers the number of such jobs from the statistics offered. "Service industry" doesn't really cut it.

[bcbm]

why would i define a term i never used? i took it as meaning more or less service sector jobs, possibly low-skilled ones like mcdonalds or wal-mart or w/e. these are certainly a big part of employment in lots of places, especially rural areas, and in general i think they make up a not insignificant part of the economy especially as compared to essential industries.

[Tim Finnegan]

why would i define a term i never used?
Well, you seemed to be taking up Maldoror's position, so I assumed you were of a mind on that one.


i took it as meaning more or less service sector jobs, possibly low-skilled ones like mcdonalds or wal-mart or w/e. these are certainly a big part of employment in lots of places, especially rural areas, and in general i think they make up a not insignificant part of the economy especially as compared to essential industries.That's true, but they're still a minority. The service sector predominates, that's certainly true, but only a minority of employees dwell in quite the same low-level precarious employment that Maldoror was suggesting as the contemporary norm. (In fact, I'd say that the idea of any "normal" proletariat is a dead end- the only reason it appears to make any sense historically is because the majority of workers of various skills levels and occupations were involved in commodity manufacture in broadly similar environments, not because the form their individual employment took was particularly similar.)

[bcbm]

all sectors of the economy are a minority when compared to the whole, with even the biggest topping around what 20% or something, but looking at trends i think more people are being pushed into that sector and it is where a lot of the "job creation" we hear about is actually happening.

[Tim Finnegan]

all sectors of the economy are a minority when compared to the whole, with even the biggest topping around what 20% or something, but looking at trends i think more people are being pushed into that sector and it is where a lot of the "job creation" we hear about is actually happening.
Fair enough, but that doesn't mean it's particularly productive, as Maldoror suggested, to assume minimum-wage retail employees as the default form of the contemporary proletariat, and go from there. Intellectually, that's no better than the old-style factory fetishism, and in terms of practical effectiveness, far worse.

[ckaihatsu]

I received the following email and I'm placing it under quarantine for observation.

It made me realize that there's an additional way to tell when the bourgeois system is in a profound crisis -- besides the usual turns to themes of youth, nature, and religion -- there's also the turn to *small-town America* -- ! (It was Chicago for Obama's presidential election campaign in 2008, and now it's Stevens Point, WI, as the campground for the morass that passes for politics these days.)








UPDATE: Wisconsin


Chris,

Amazing! With 99% of precincts reporting, we're winning the Wisconsin Supreme Court race by 369 votes! We have a real chance to defeat Scott Walker's candidate and win a race that pundits thought would be an easy Republican win.

Republicans declared class warfare against the middle class. In this election, working families fought back -- and we are on the verge of winning.

Today, we are hosting a special briefing for those like you who have been part of our Wisconsin campaign -- featuring two “Wisconsin 14” leaders.

Democratic Senate leader Mark Miller and progressive rising star Chris Larson will talk about Tuesday's election and the big recall campaign ahead, plus take your questions. Click here to RSVP for today's briefing, which begins at 12pm Eastern.

Members of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy for America made a whopping 96,945 phone calls to targeted voters through our “Call Out The Vote” program this past week. Together, we made the difference in this race!

Thanks for being part of this important fight. And for being a bold progressive.

-- Stephanie Taylor, Adam Green, Amanda Johnson, Michael Snook, Keauna Gregory, Jason Rosenbaum, and the PCCC team




Want to support our work? We're entirely funded by our members—no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs. Chip in $3 today.
Paid for by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee PAC (www.BoldProgressives.org) and not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. Contributions to the PCCC are not deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes.


--
You can unsubscribe from this mailing list at any time.

[Dunk]

Republicans declared class warfare against the middle class.

http://www.alltogethernow.org/images/loony.jpg

[ckaihatsu]

Republicans declared class warfare against the middle class.


The bourgeoisie's fight against inequality....


(8'p

[PhoenixAsh]

well...I heard the reps did just find 7500 votes just laying around somewhere in favor of "their" judge. There now is not a chance in hell the democrat judge is going to win.

[ckaihatsu]

---





[...]

The latest turn of events in the judicial election underscores the dead-end of the perspective promoted by the unions and their left-liberal allies of channeling working class opposition to Walker’s attacks behind the Democratic Party. The unions opposed calls for a general strike and closed down strikes and mass protests in favor of electoral campaigns—first the judicial election and then efforts to recall Republican state senators.

The focus on the Supreme Court election and recall drives was from the beginning a diversion, whose main purpose was to demobilize the working class. The unions insisted from the outset that they would not oppose Walker’s demands for sweeping cuts in public workers’ wages and benefits and sought to offer up these concessions in return for Walker dropping provisions that threaten the unions’ income flow—including an end to the dues checkoff and yearly elections for union certification.

The Democrats, for their part, made clear that they supported cuts in wages and benefits and attacks on health care, education and other social services.

Absent the mass industrial mobilization and independent political organization of the working class, the ruling elite will impose by any means—legal or illegal—measures to further impoverish working people and criminalize all forms of collective working class resistance.

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/apr2011/wisc-a09.shtml