Social unionism and the framing of ‘fairness’ in the Wisconsin uprising


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Citation: Chesters GS (2016) Social Unionism and the Framing of Fairness in the 
Wisconsin Uprising. Local Economy. 31(4): 450-465. 

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0269094216646995


Feature

Social unionism and the
framing of ‘fairness’ in
the Wisconsin uprising

Graeme Chesters
University of Bradford, UK

Abstract

The concept of ‘fairness’ has been used to frame political struggles by politicians and activists

across the political spectrum. This article looks at its use in the US State of Wisconsin during the

‘Uprising’ – a series of occupations, protests, recall elections and militant direct action that began

in 2011. These events were a response to a ‘budget repair bill’ that sought to strip public sector

union members of their collective bargaining rights and to apply severe austerity measures within

the State. This article suggests that although ‘fairness’ has a certain broad-based and intuitive

appeal, its mutability means that it is unlikely to be successful in framing a structural critique that

can build and sustain social action. Instead, it argues that framing this conflict as an uprising

suggested a more explicit form of resistance that enabled a wider mobilization, and this can

best be understood as an example of social (movement) unionism – the extension of traditional

work place rights approaches to include broader agendas of social justice, civil rights, immigrant

rights and economic justice for non-unionized workers.

Keywords

Fairness, social movement, unions, Wisconsin, uprising

The common demand, says three-time

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, is ‘‘fairness,’’
a phrase broad enough to include collect-
ive bargaining rights, resistance to cuts in

education and public services, the steady
privatizing of the university, and deep
populist rage against Wall Street, corpor-

ate power and particularly the billionaire
Koch brothers, who are considered the
deep pockets behind the Republican strat-
egy. (Hayden, 2011)

This is an extremely important symbolic

state, as this was where the union move-
ment was born. . . Wisconsin is the battle-
ground, it wasn’t a random thing. (Lane

Hall, Overpass Light Brigade, interviewed
16 April 2015)

Introduction

This article addresses the ways in which the
concept of ‘fairness’ has been used to frame
political struggles at the local level by polit-
icians from left and right, and it uses a
period of contentious municipal politics in
the US to analyse the utility of this concept

Corresponding author:

Graeme Chesters, Department of Peace Studies,

University of Bradford, UK.

Email: g.s.chesters@bradford.ac.uk

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as a means of framing appeals for more pro-
gressive forms of politics. The intention is to
bring a different lens to bear upon the con-
cept of fairness by examining how this idea
played out during what activists describe as
the ‘Wisconsin Uprising’. This was a series
of occupations, protests, recall elections and
militant direct action during 2011, in
response to a ‘budget repair bill’ that
sought to strip public sector union members
of their collective bargaining rights and
apply severe austerity measures in the
state. Arguably, ‘the uprising’ is still
ongoing, and it has formed the basis for a
re-appraisal of the relationship between
trade unions and social movements and
how issues of ‘fairness’ or perhaps more
appropriately ideas of social justice can be
maintained in opposition to the implemen-
tation of aggressive austerity measures by
municipal government.

The concept of fairness has become
increasingly popular in the socio-political
discourse of the liberal-left in the UK,
from Fairness Commissions (Bunyan and
Diamond, 2014) to campaigns for a living
wage, to permaculture activists and their
principle of ‘fair shares’ for all. It inhabits
the intersection of state and civil society,
and transgresses the boundaries of local,
national and global. Fairness resonates
with those driven by the desire to achieve
the ‘good society’, whether they are polit-
icians, activists or academics. It also suc-
ceeds in being both inoffensive and all
encompassing. Fairness is a classic empty
signifier and as such can be invested with
a variety of meanings and put to work
politically in a range of contexts and to
varying ends.

However, in a period where the social
costs of austerity economics become ever
more visible, it is also perhaps no coinci-
dence that the idea of fairness, as intuitive
a value as any, is increasingly mobilised to
ask deeply political questions. Is it fair that
in the UK a majority of those in poverty

have someone in their household in work
(Living Wage Commission, 2014)? Is it fair
for a typical CEO of a FTSE 100 company
to earn one hundred and sixty times the
income of their average worker (High Pay
Centre, 2014)? Is it fair for private debt to
become socialized and should sovereign
debt always be repaid regardless of the
impacts on society (Lienau, 2014)?

In the UK such questions of fairness and
their consideration by local state and civil
society partners in Fairness Commissions
have led to some progressive outcomes,
including the spread of the living wage
and on one occasion the reduction in pay
of a Council Chief Executive. However,
these changes are often locally imple-
mented, piecemeal and can be self-limiting
due to the partnership approach that typi-
fies many local state – civil society initia-
tives. Indeed, Fairness Commissions can
inadvertently encourage the idea that pov-
erty and inequality are a result of the local
context and might therefore only require
action at this level. This echoes the strategic
mistake of some environmental organisa-
tions during the 1990s, when faced with
the ecological impacts of rapid globalisa-
tion, which was to exhort their supporters
to ‘think global, act local’ thereby ceding
the global to trans-national corporations
and extra-national governance organisa-
tions. A mistake that was rectified by the
emergence of the alter-global movement,
most celebrated for its prominence as the
chief opposition to the corporate influenced
WTO trade discussions and economic
hegemony of the World Economic Forum
and G8 structures. The concern then is that
whilst Fairness Commissions enable some
of those involved to signal their opposition
to the restructuring of the welfare state at a
local level, they do so without necessarily
contesting the worst impacts of the social
and economic restructuring that is taking
place under the conceptual framework of
neoliberal austerity.

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In examining the concept of fairness that
is underpinning such initiatives, this article
will attempt to draw some lessons from an
international context and to look instead at
an instance of conflict, rather than cooper-
ation between the local state and civil soci-
ety. It will look specifically at the US State
of Wisconsin and its checkered history as a
beacon of progressivism in the context of
US public policy and labour relations.
From analysis of how the concept has con-
tributed to state–civil society relations his-
torically, to its role in animating forms
of contentious politics that have emerged
in recent years. I will discuss how the pre-
sumption of ‘fairness’ as a basis for public
policy has a long tradition in this state,
under the auspices of what its citizens
refer to as the ‘Wisconsin idea’. A form of
‘progressive’ politics that is closely asso-
ciated with the founding and emergence of
the State itself, and one that includes an
emphasis upon progressive taxation, work-
ers rights, opposition to corporate power
and tight controls over political influence.
I will also describe how the ‘folk memory’
of this tradition played into the highly
public struggle to defend and maintain col-
lective bargaining rights. These included
payments of ‘fair share’ fees by non-union
employees, which were targeted by the
incoming Republican Governor – Scott
Walker, a tea-party movement endorsed
politician whose political support base and
campaign contributors were ideologically
opposed to the trade union movement. It
will describe how the discourse of ‘fairness’
was employed by the Governor, the labour
movement and others and how it helped
frame the largest labour protests in the US
for decades, and it will question the utility
of the concept as a means of representing
and defending the principle of collective
social and economic goods.

In doing so, I argue that the experience
of Wisconsin public sector workers and
those that engaged in the uprising highlights

the potential of ‘social unionism’ or ‘social
movement unionism’ (Clawson, 2008;
Fairbrother, 2008; Moody, 1997). I use
these terms interchangeably as I suggest
there is little difference between them for
analytical purposes. However, I recognise
they tend to be representative of specific
forms of political and cultural expression.
Social unionism is a term most familiar
from Italian political theory whilst social
movement unionism has its roots in the
UK/US tradition. In essence, both terms
describe the extension of traditional work
place rights approaches to include broader
agendas of social justice, civil rights, immi-
grant rights and economic justice for non-
unionised workers (Chesters and Welsh,
2010: 156–157). It suggests that this
approach is evolving rapidly, as changes to
the law on both sides of the Atlantic
increasingly diminish the opportunity for
more traditional repertoires of union
engagement and their capacity to exert col-
lective pressure through formal channels.
Social unionism tends to be motivated by
an analysis of the ideological and conflictual
nature of the politics underpinning debates
about what is fair and therefore is oriented
to a more strategic and long-term commit-
ment to struggle. This is increasingly evi-
dent in both contexts as a response to the
narrowing of the political opportunity
structure, in the shape of further restrictive
trade union legislation. This includes, in the
UK, the Trade Union Bill 2015-16, which
the Trade Union Congress (2015) has sug-
gested ‘threatens the basic right to strike’
and will necessitate a return to wider
forms of collective action.

In addressing these issues I am seeking to
understand how the concept of fairness is
operationalised in such contexts, the differ-
ences in local state–civil society relation-
ships, and the contrasting experiences on
either side of the Atlantic. Underpinning
these observations and at the heart of the
article is an analytical model that provides

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for the mobilising frame of ‘fairness’ to be
analysed separately from the normative and
moral presumption of what is fair between
individuals, thus privileging the concepts
political utility rather than its use as a
means to measure the outcomes of policy.
In addition to the secondary literature, this
article is also informed by material from
interviews carried out with civil society
activists, trade union organisers and others
who participated in the protests in
Wisconsin during 2011. These were con-
ducted in spring 2015 as part of a broader
undertaking to research the dynamics of
community responses to events that are trig-
gered by actors outside their community,
and which provoke fundamental challenges
to the community’s ideas of justice, their
collective identity and their ability to with-
stand and respond to shock or trauma.

Understanding the
Wisconsin idea

In 1911, the Wisconsin legislature passed
the first worker’s compensation law in the
US, providing aid to those injured in their
jobs. By doing so, Theodore Roosevelt
argued that Wisconsin had become ‘literally
a laboratory for wise experimental legisla-
tion to secure the social and political better-
ment of the people as a whole’ (Stein and
Marley, 2013: 64). Wisconsin was also the
first state to introduce unemployment insur-
ance, and this action coupled with the
prominence of many of its legislators and
academics helped set the example that
helped shape the New Deal and the imple-
mentation of a national Social Security
program.

Wisconsin was the bastion of a form of
social and political progressivism that had
numerous roots; it was a free-state and a
centre of abolitionism from its foundation
in 1848 and was an important destination
for a generation of ‘forty-eighters’ who emi-
grated from Germany to settle in

Milwaukee after the failed 1848 revolutions
in Europe. These German émigrés brought
with them a tradition of Socialist politics
that took root in the state and Wisconsin
was home to one of only two Socialist sen-
ators that served in the US Senate. This
tradition lasted well in to the mid 20th cen-
tury, with Milwaukee having a Socialist
mayor until 1960. The history of progressiv-
ism in the State, however, is probably a
more powerful influence, and it is most
often characterised in the form of Robert
La Follette (1855–1925), a former
Republican then progressive Governor,
who became Senator of Wisconsin and
who fought a Presidential campaign for
the Progressive Party gaining 17% of the
votes in the 1924 election. ‘Fighting Bob’
campaigned to be President on a platform
of opposing corporate power, nationalising
the railways and utility companies, greater
protection for trade unions and civil liber-
ties, and in opposition to American imperi-
alism in Latin America.

A powerful legacy of La Follette and the
history of socialist and progressive politics
in the State is what is known as the
‘Wisconsin idea’. This is an idea whose
implications are not always easy to grasp
and it sometimes leaves those outside of
the state confused by its apparent role in
the wider community mobilisation and its
opposition to attacks on public sector work-
ers. During two days in April 2015, I inter-
viewed five prominent local trade union and
community activists and I asked each of
them how best to summarise this idea. All
of them described the wider public as hold-
ing a belief in the civic duty of those in
power to pursue a form of progressive pol-
itics within the state, i.e. ‘the search for
truth and fairness in public life by the
University and public officials’ (Civil society
activist, interviewed 16 April 2015). In this
instance, my respondent wanted to empha-
sise the role of the University of Wisconsin
in providing research led guidance to those

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in public life, and indeed the University has
a long and proud history of working closely
with legislators to these ends. So much so,
that it has effectively written this ‘idea’ in to
the mission statement of the University,
which dedicates itself to extending know-
ledge, searching for truth and improving
the human condition, all familiar refrains
for a public University. It is perhaps strange
then, that the present State Governor –
Scott Walker – attempted to have this idea
removed and replaced in 2015, substituting
instead, in typically neoliberal and man-
agerialist fashion, a commitment to ‘work-
force readiness’.

This move was later dismissed as an
administrative error after considerable out-
rage and protest and these responses shed
some light on the apparent power of the
Wisconsin idea. It is less the expression of
a commitment to values of the public good,
to fairness in public life and to the implemen-
tation of these values through social policy
that worried the Governor. After all, these
values are open to reinterpretation through a
conservative lens. Rather it is the way in
which these commitments have been histor-
ically realised and the association of these
ideas with progressivism and with those
who used such ideas to great effect during
the mobilizations in 2011. The Wisconsin
idea is a key part of the folk memory that
recalls the influence of ‘progressive’ values in
state politics, and is closely associated with
the policies pursued by La Follette himself –
progressive taxation, workers rights, oppos-
ition to corporate power and political influ-
ence, the extension of democratic
accountability and opposition to predatory
wealth. La Follette believed the values of
the University and its aim to search for
truth and to build the good society were con-
sistent with these policies and therefore the
University and the State should be synchron-
ous in their approach to realizing such poli-
cies. When the Mayor of Madison – Paul
Soglin – stated that a common demand of

those protesting the Governor’s attacks on
public sector union rights was ‘fairness’, he
was both acknowledging that the conflict
went beyond the workers themselves and
invoking the collective ideal associated with
the Wisconsin idea. It was an appeal to a
form of progressivism that is rooted in the
apparatus of the local state, and set deep
within the public education system, but
which also has a historical resonance with
wider notions of citizenship. This version of
the Wisconsin idea links fairness to a set of
political objectives, some of which can
appear as radical now as they did
when they were first articulated a hundred
years ago.

The up-rising

‘Uprising sounds spontaneous, it is not
being raised up, it is spontaneously up-
rising.’ (Kaja Rebane, Madison community
and trade union activist, interviewed 15
April, 2015)

Tyranny and oppression are just as pos-
sible under democratic forms as under
any other. We are slow to realise that dem-

ocracy is a life; and involves continual
struggle. It is only as those of every gener-
ation who love democracy resist with all

their might the encroachment of its ene-
mies that the ideals of representative gov-
ernment can even be nearly approximated.
(Robert La Follette in Nicholls, 2011)

In early 2011, the Wisconsin ‘wave’ of pro-
tests (Fithian, 2012: 381; Nicholls, 2012)
brought global attention to what might
otherwise have been a little local difficulty
for a rising star of the Tea Party movement
within the Republican Party – Governor
Scott Walker. Huge mobilisations took
place in Wisconsin between February and
June involving protests of over one hundred
thousand people and the occupation of the
State Capitol Building in Madison for over
three weeks.

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This was the result of the Governor’s
plans to reduce benefits for public sector
workers, requiring payment of health care
provisions and increasing their contributory
payments to pensions, but more pro-
foundly, it also sought to limit the collective
bargaining rights of public sector workers
and effectively de-recognise their unions.
The resulting resistance, which was wide-
spread and involved private as well as
public sector workers, campaign and com-
munity organisations as well as just trade
unions, led ultimately to the Governor
facing a recall vote. This was prompted by
the collection of over nine hundred thou-
sand signatories to a Gubernatorial recall
motion, which amongst multiple recall elec-
tions for other elected politicians of both
parties, was something that had only hap-
pened twice previously in US history. These
actions and the response they elicited are
important in a number of ways. The actions
of the Governor were a dramatic illustra-
tion of what Naomi Klein (2007) has
referred to as the ‘shock doctrine’ of neo-
liberalism. In this instance a right-wing
Republican Governor, backed by wealthy
Tea Party donors, sought to capitalise on
the financial ‘crisis’ as a justification for fur-
ther, arguably ideological attacks, on the
public sector and its workers by using the
familiar arguments of deficit reduction and
the desire to balance budgets. However, the
mobilisation of those targeted and their
wider group of supporters also provided a
very graphic illustration of the political pos-
sibility of occupying public buildings and
public spaces. Reintroducing a repertoire
of collective action, which, whilst not unpre-
cedented in the US, had not been a feature
of contemporary politics and which was to
prove an inspiration for some of the early
occupy movement (Nicholls, 2012).

The announcement of a Budget Repair
Bill on 11 February 2011 might have
appeared likely to be inconsequential. It
was evident that an incoming Republican

Governor would wish to put their stamp
on the state’s fiscal policy but few expected
how quickly this bill would transform the
political context. Wisconsin had been hit
particularly hard by the outcomes of the
financial crisis and the attendant recession
in 2008–2009, and this led to the state facing
a significant shortfall for the budgetary
period from June 2009 to June 2011.
Whilst this deficit had been tempered by a
one-off injection of aid from the federal eco-
nomic stimulus plan, there was every
expectation that the incoming Governor,
elected in December 2010, would seek to
reform the budget for the remaining
period. However, what few realised was
that Walker’s plan was to roll in to this
bill the inclusion of a full-scale attack on
the collective bargaining rights of public
sector trade unionists.

Walker had arrived in office on the back
of a wave of Tea Party support which
included significant financial backing from
billionaire industrialists the Koch Brothers,
as well as a range of highly influential
conservative foundations and campaign
groups – including the Bradley Foundation,
whose President and CEO had been
the Chair of Walker’s campaign to become
Governor. The Bradley Foundation
donated approximately $350 million to
conservative groups and arts organizations
between the years 2001 and 2010 (Stein and
Marley, 2013: 35). The agenda of these sup-
porters and the various think tanks they
funded is free market fundamentalism
allied to social and religious conservatism
and they left very little time in proclaiming
what they believed to be an appropriate
course of action. The John K MacIver
Institute for Public Policy, a small
Madison based think tank funded by the
Bradley Foundation immediately set out
their priorities for the new Walker adminis-
tration, including curtailing the role of the
public sector unions, who might otherwise
be a barrier to further neoliberal reforms.

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In this sense what happened on 11
February, should have been expected, but
the history of the state, the Wisconsin idea
and the sharply, but equally divided polit-
ical allegiances of the electorate, led many
to believe that Walker would avoid mount-
ing such a direct attack on the trade unions.

One of the first things we might observe
then is the ease with which it is possible to
underestimate a newly empowered political
opponent driven by an ideological commit-
ment. Even if that opponent is operating
within a political opportunity structure
that would appear antithetical to their
cause. In this instance, a context framed
by socio-historical ideas of fairness rooted
in a collectivist idea of the good society with
a finely balanced and evenly divided elect-
orate. We might also note that this initiative
was far from isolated and appeared to be
part of a wider ideological and strategic
attack mounted against organised labour,
as similar initiatives were unfolding in
Michigan, Indiana and Ohio. In this context
it is prudent then to look for indications of
the issues around which struggles might
take place, and the potential for conflict
here was evident as early as 7 December
2010, when Walker was reported as ‘mulling
over abolishing public sector unions’ at a
press dinner (Stein and Marley, 2013: 38).
Whilst some of those attending the dinner
seem to have considered this as little more
than wishful thinking on his part, Walker
and his team were not only planning such
a move they were also preparing a contin-
gency plan in the event of a concerted
response by the trade union movement.
The budget repair bill included sections to
deal with potential protests including indus-
trial or collective action involving strikes,
protests, walk-outs, etc. These included the
ability of the Governor to declare a ‘state of
emergency’, after which he could sack any
public employee who went out on strike, or
whom engaged in some other form of work
stoppage, delayed or damaged the work of

the government, or who was absent for
more than three days from work without
evidence they were ill.

The assertion of such powers enables us
to recall the classic criticism of the ‘state of
exception’ (Agamben, 2005), where consti-
tutional rights can be suspended, super-
seded or rejected under the authority of
sovereign power. Therefore, even within
representative democracies the state nearly
always reserves the right to absent itself
from democratic accountability, to domin-
ate the production of meaning via its ease of
access to the media and to utilise extra-judi-
cial measures of disciplinary control where
deemed necessary. In the run up to the
announcement and in addition to the emer-
gency powers Walker imagined claiming
under the proposed bill, he was also in
close contact with the National Guard and
worked on a plan to deal with the potential
of a strike by guards at one of the state
prisons. Indeed, it was reported that
National Guard officers in plain clothes
went as far as to visit prisons to assess the
logistics of taking over control in the event
of a strike breaking out (Stein and Marley,
2013: 69).

However, the difficulty with this plan was
the presumption that the Republicans
would be able to move sufficiently quickly
as to have the bill passed before the protests
and other forms of collective action began,
thereby allowing the provisions within the
bill to be utilised to control protests against
the bill. Put simply, the intention was to
create a situation where people could not
protest against the bill because the bill
itself made it unlawful. The timetable pro-
posed by Walker was to unveil the bill on 11
Friday February, formally introduce it to
the legislature on Monday, 14 February,
hear testimony for and against the bill at a
Budget Committee meeting on Tuesday,
before passing it through both chambers –
the Senate and Assembly – by the end of the
week, Friday, 18 February. The problem for

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the Governor was that any fiscal policy put
to a vote had to take place when the state
government was quorate, a simple require-
ment given it merely required elected repre-
sentatives within state boundaries to be
called to the house. However, this was
quickly confounded as the Senate
Democrats agreed to leave the state on
Thursday of that week, depriving the
Senate of the quorum needed and beginning
what turned out to be a rather lengthy stay
over the border in Illinois.

Whether the Senate Democrats would
have taken this action without the mass
protests that broke out at the start of that
week is debatable, but this exodus marked
the culmination of a remarkably quick and
determined response by trade unionists and
community activists. Some of which had
been in preparation through formal AFL-
CIO channels in the weeks leading up to
the bill, whilst other actions resulted directly
from the democratic culture inculcated by
advocates of the Wisconsin idea. As word
spread over the weekend that the bill con-
tained a major attack against the public
sector unions, a well-organised exponent
of the Wisconsin idea, the Teachers
Assistant Association, a union for graduate
student employees at the University of
Wisconsin, became one of the first to take
collective action alongside students protest-
ing anticipated cuts to the University’s
budget.

The protests on Monday, 14 February
2011 were valentines themed, and the
TAA had planned to participate prior to
the announcement of the budget repair
bill. Their aim was to deliver hundreds of
valentines cards to the Governor’s office
from students and graduate employees, pro-
claiming their love for the University and
opposing any cuts that might be forthcom-
ing. In the event, however, it turned in to a
far more raucous and determined oppos-
ition rally with close to a thousand pro-
testers entering the Capital Building and

demanding to see the Governor. This initial
rally would set the scene for the protests
that followed in the coming weeks, but it
also heralded something quite different, a
level of militancy and creative disruption
that confounded the Governor and his
team and surprised many political
commentators.

The Governor and the Republican
majority had been expecting protests and
the possibility of strike action, but this
was envisaged as happening after the bill
had passed and including only public
sector workers. They, of course, could be
presented as having benefits that were in
some ways superior to those in the private
sector, and so the Governor had planned a
classic divide and rule strategy, playing off
one sector of workers against another.
However, this plan failed to take account
of the preliminary work carried out by the
Wisconsin AFL-CIO, which had begun
holding meetings amongst labour leaders
from public and private sector unions in
anticipation of an attack on union rights.
Therefore, as the students, TAA protesters
and others marched on the Capitol
Building, two dozen officials from private
and public sector unions were able to hold
a joint press conference a short distance
away, denouncing the bill and declaring
their opposition to it and solidarity with
each other. Speed of action, organisation
and communication between different sec-
tors of the labour movement were therefore
tactically important in heading off this
potential line of attack.

The following day, one of the first in line
to give evidence to the joint finance commit-
tee against the bill was Kaja Rebane, a TAA
member and social justice activist who
entered the Capitol Building alongside
cleaning staff. Thereby securing herself the
possibility of providing testimony before
the arrival of ‘Americans For Prosperity’,
a Bradley Foundation funded campaign
group who were being bussed in to support

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the repair bill. The TAA would go on to
play an instrumental and highly effective
role in these early days of the protests,
providing ‘two of the main cogs’ for the
occupation that followed:

‘TAA had a war room or control room in
the capitol. . . they took it over and set up
shop. . . they had an internet set up, a media
set up, martialling for peace keepers and
food for protesters.’ (Kaja Rebane,
Madison community and trade union activ-
ist (TAA), interviewed 15 April, 2015)

As the crowds at the capitol building
swelled and increasing numbers of public
sector workers signed up to provide testi-
mony, there was evidence of a further and
significant mobilisation against the bill, the
presence of public school teachers, some of
whom had spontaneously organised a ‘sick
out’ phoning in sick to attend the rally in
Madison:

I was teaching 4th grade in a public school
and the night they dropped the bomb there

was a union meeting in our union hall, at
nine thirty at night, and we had two hun-
dred teachers turn up. Our union was tell-

ing us we couldn’t do anything but our
members were saying: ‘‘No, we want to
call in sick and go to Madison’’. So I

want to say it came from the union, but
it came from the membership, it was
organic, people who had never given a
rip about politics were pissed off! (Joe

Brusky, ‘released’ union official for the
Milwaukee Chapter of the Wisconsin
Education Association Council (WEAC),

interviewed 16 April, 2015)

The hearing of the finance committee contin-
ued until 3 a.m. Wednesday morning – 16
February, when Republican members left
and it was then continued by Democrats
throughout the remainder of the night,
allowing protesters to effectively occupy the
Capitol Building overnight and establishing
a platform for a much longer and more orga-
nised occupation. On Wednesday morning,
Madison’s superintendent for education

closed the schools in the City and some sur-
rounding areas, as 40% of the 2600 public
school teachers in the district phoned in sick
to attend the protests. On Thursday, these
closures increased as teachers from across
the state joined the protests in Madison.

Walker’s plan was to exclude both police
officers and fire fighters from the full
impacts of the bill and yet both sets of
employees rallied to support their public
sector colleagues, with fire fighters and on
one-occasion police officers taking turns to
sleep over in the Capitol Building. Indeed
the regular parade of fire fighters with
attendant pipe and drum bands became a
major feature of the protest over the follow-
ing days. For the next three weeks with the
Senate Democrats exiled outside the state to
avoid the bill being passed, the capitol
building occupied, and protests involving
both public and private sector workers
growing exponentially, activists’ description
of an ‘uprising’ appeared justified. As Kaja
Robane, the activist who sneaked in to give
evidence that Tuesday morning puts it:

This was a historic moment and people
wanted to have their individual experience
of it – there was this collective efferves-

cence thing that happened. The first
noon protest there were ten thousand,
the next noon protest there were twenty
thousand. I remember looking across the

crowd and being amazed how quick it had
grown, and thinking ‘‘oh, maybe we do
actually have a chance’’ and that sense of

power built and we started feeling con-
nected and powerful. (Kaja Rebane
Madison community and trade union

activist (TAA), interviewed 15 April 2015)

Thus it appeared as if the Wisconsin idea
had been given a material form beyond
that of the plaster bust of ‘Fighting Bob’
La Follette on the first floor of the Capitol
Building. The idea had found a means of
defending itself, an idea of fairness rooted
in the collective good, was being fought for
by ‘those of every generation who love

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democracy (and) resist with all their might
the encroachment of its enemies’ (Robert
La Follette, in Nicholls, 2011).

The end of the beginning:
The recalling of politicians
and activism?

Over the next month, there were numerous
protests in the capitol including a mass
demonstration by over one hundred thou-
sand people, with participants coming
from a range of civil society organisations
and community groups, representing faith
groups, parental organizations, agricul-
tural workers and both public and private
sector workers. In a particularly strident
demonstration of solidarity from outside
of the public sector unions, small farmers
organisations formed a tractor blockade
which encircled the capitol building,
whilst luminaries of the political and cul-
tural left, including Michael Moore, Jesse
Jackson, Susan Sarandon and Tom
Morello descended on Madison to partici-
pate in rallies and give speeches to the
assembled crowds. The uprising became a
national and international event, with pro-
testers articulating common cause with
Egyptian activists in Tahrir Square via
placards and twitter feeds, whilst the
local pizza restaurant was inundated with
orders from across the country and the
wider world, with people sending ‘solidar-
ity pizza’ to those occupying the Capitol
building. As Fox news ran ever more
extreme denunciations of the occupation,
using library footage of protesters clashing
with police, albeit in front of palm trees,
and therefore evidently not in Wisconsin.
Activists responded by arriving in neatly
printed palm tree t-shirts, some even carry-
ing inflatable palm trees or on one occa-
sion a palm tree ‘liberated’ from a green
house to be deployed as a satirical
symbol of disgust with the right wing
news media.

However, despite such creative and
determined collective action, and although
almost every means available to those
opposing the bill was utilised over the next
month, on 9 March Senate Republicans
managed to propose a revised version of
the bill which could pass without the pres-
ence of the Democratic Senators. This was
signed in to law by Governor Walker on 11
March 2011, almost exactly a month to the
day since the first public notification of the
bill was made. Although some commenta-
tors anticipated this might be the end of the
uprising, in many respects it continued to
strengthen, but it also begun to have its
energies channelled towards the aim of
mounting a recall campaign. This is an
electoral measure that enables the recalling
of politicians to face a new election on pres-
entation of a petition signed by twenty five
per cent of the electorate that voted in the
previous election. Whilst recall is a powerful
and comparatively common means of
addressing dissatisfaction with elected rep-
resentatives, many activists felt that whilst
this might be inevitable, in that someone
was bound to initiate the process, it would
also divert energy away from the emergent
and grassroots nature of the struggle:

What happened in the arc of this whole
thing is that it was extremely grass-roots

and it then got immediately choreo-
graphed by institutional politics, particu-
larly by the larger unions and the

Democratic Party. . . any militant or rad-
ical actions got redirected in to recall pol-
itics and party political discourse. (Lane

Hall, Overpass Light Brigade, interviewed
16 April 2015)

This is a point that is reiterated powerfully
elsewhere (Conatz, 2015) and it speaks to
the tension in holding together a coalition
of actors whose experiences and chosen rep-
ertoires of action are divergent beyond a
protest or march through which to illustrate
what De Nardo (1985) and Della Porta and

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Diani (1999) call ‘the logic of numbers’. As
these authors suggest the logic behind such
protests ‘is the same as that behind repre-
sentative democracy’ (Della Porta and
Diani, 1999: 174) namely, it suggests that
the majority outside the Capitol Building
are not being represented by the majority
inside. It was therefore inevitable that
given the option to recall the Governor
and to prove this ‘logic’, those whose frame-
work of reference was institutional politics
would pursue such an option.

The dilemma in Wisconsin however was
that the repertoires of collective action
deployed, had from the beginning, involved
more militant and creative tactics, including
occupations, and wildcat strikes and the
‘collective effervescence’ this produced
would inevitably be curtailed as the tactics
turned back towards the familiar strategy of
petitioning for an election. Alternatively, an
unsuccessful attempt at a recall motion
could diminish the numerical logic for
change and might well have irrevocably
split the movement, diminishing the cap-
acity for mobilisation established through
the networks of opposition that had
emerged. The desire to avoid such a split
was a significant motivating factor given
the breadth of support for the uprising
and despite vocal criticisms of the recall
strategy the resulting effort by activists
across all groups demonstrated a significant
commitment to maintaining unity amidst
diversity.

The recall motion required a huge invest-
ment of energy by the activists concerned,
as they returned to their own localities to
raise the petition required, but it also pro-
vided an organised platform for the con-
tinuation of the struggle and further
potential for tactical innovation. Indeed,
one of the most notable outcomes was a
new protest repertoire, the tactic of ‘light
brigading’, the use of illuminated signs
held by activists on various overpasses
during the long dark nights of the

Wisconsin winter. This technique was
invented and pioneered by members of
what latterly became the ‘Overpass Light
Brigade’ who consider their activities as
establishing a ‘people’s bandwidth’ and it
has since been adopted by ‘light brigade’
chapters across the US and internationally.
The effort for the recall across civil society
organisations in the State demonstrated the
depth of the uprising and after a mere thirty
days the mobilisation for the recall motion
collected nine hundred thousand signatures.
This was roughly 23% of the eligible elect-
orate and the equivalent of 46% of those
that had voted in the previous election.
In total, approximately four hundred thou-
sand more than was required to trigger the
election. Although Walker narrowly won
the Gubernatorial recall election, there
were a further four senate recall
elections, the outcome of which led to the
Democrats gaining control of the Wisconsin
Senate. Walker was also subsequently
alleged to have been at the centre of
a plan to illegally coordinate fundraising
efforts with a number of outside conserva-
tive groups to help him in the recall election
and if proven, this would mean he had
bypassed state election laws, an allegation
that remains a live issue and is presently
before the US Supreme Court.

What’s fair?

If the ‘common demand’ of the protesters as
claimed by the Mayor of Madison was ‘fair-
ness’ and this amounted to a defence of col-
lective bargaining and opposition to cuts to
education and public services, then it was a
correspondingly opposed account of ‘fair-
ness’ that was also claimed to be at the
heart of Scott Walker’s assault on the
status of public sector unions, most notably
on the idea of compulsory membership of a
trade union as a condition of employment,
the so called ‘union’ or ‘closed’ shop. In the
UK legislation designed to restrict closed

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shops began with the 1980 Employment Act
and the pre-entry closed shop was made
unlawful ten years later under the 1990
Employment Act. However, in the US
where union negotiated contracts, some-
times called security agreements, have
often been regarded as a bulwark for
employers against strike action, it remains
a requirement of some workplaces that
employees join a union on taking up
employment. Alternatively, employees can
make a ‘fair share’ payment to the union
to cover the costs of collective bargaining
conducted by the union, as the recognised
representative of the workers and from
which they are likely to be a beneficiary.

The argument for such fair share pay-
ments is founded in a classical argument
from rational choice theory, namely the
‘free-rider’ paradox. Olson (1968)
attempted to explain why a rational egoistic
person would participate in collective
action, when they might benefit from such
action irrespective of their participation.
Putting to one side the inherently problem-
atic category of the ‘rational’, a classic for-
mulation of this problem for rational choice
theory is the example of union membership.
Why would a rational person entering a
workplace join a union when wage increases
and improvements to working conditions
negotiated by the union would be received
by all the workers, unionised or not? The
somewhat conservative argument of the
trade unions is that in delivering contracts
that are mutually beneficial for employers
(no strike arrangements), and employees
(better pay and conditions), they incur
costs that are covered by union dues and
that those who are not paying such dues
should consequently pay their ‘fair share’.
It is the compulsory aspect of such pay-
ments that Walker highlighted as a threat
to individual freedom and as workers
being coerced in to paying union dues,
some of which would be channelled to sup-
port Democrat politicians. Walker thereby

framed the terms of the conflict as his
opposition to politically motivated work-
place organizing, proposing instead the
‘right to work’.

Olson (1968) responds to the ‘free rider’
paradox by formulating a ‘logic of collective
action’, which argues that actors engage in
collective action when there are selective
benefits to be gained from such participa-
tion. He distinguishes between collective
and selective benefits, and argues that
where a collective actor is sufficiently large
that a benefit will accrue to those outside its
membership regardless of their actions, the
rational individual is indeed unlikely to par-
ticipate. However, selective benefits that are
contingent upon participation could also
explain processes of mobilisation, because
they allow an individual to rationalise col-
lective action in terms of individual gain. In
the example of union membership, these
benefits can include acceptance by fellow
workers, combined with an acknowledge-
ment of the self-interest in the union’s main-
taining its bargaining position, or because
of certain tangible selective benefits such
as those now being offered by unions,
including legal assistance, professional
development education, or certification for
teaching staff, etc. The obvious problem
with Olson’s thesis is its tendency to express
motivation in purely instrumental terms,
and it has been criticised on these grounds
(Hirschmann, 1982). However, the imple-
mentation of the budget repair bill, other-
wise known as Act 10 has forced many
unions to address some of the self-interest
motivations that Olsen highlights, as one
union organiser puts it:

If there is a silver lining in Act 10, we have
had to really build value in our members
for why they have to join a union, because

now it’s a decision they can make. As a
union we have had to switch from a con-
tract model to actually organizing or

members. . . so now we have to educate
our members about why they have to be

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in a union. 69% of our members have

signed up. (Joe Brusky, union official for
the Milwaukee Chapter of the Wisconsin
Education Association Council (WEAC),

interviewed 16 April 2015)

Whilst Act 10 has inevitably and severely
impacted trade union membership across
the public sector, its presentation by
Republicans as an unmitigated victory for
freedom of choice is questionable. Their
argument was that many union members
were coerced into membership and that
this was unfair to those who wanted to
retain their full earnings and not pay
union dues or fair share payments. In the
context of a neoliberal austerity plan where
health and pension contributions for work-
ers would also be increased, Walker’s
expectation was that the opportunity to
off-set some of these increases by avoiding
union dues would be an overwhelmingly
tempting proposition. After all what good
is a union defeated, a union without recog-
nition or the power to bargain collectively?
Putting these questions to trade unionists,
community activists and others elicited
some interesting responses:

We may have lost our collective bargain-

ing but we haven’t lost collective action, and
collective action is how we win things, we
can as a group of teachers still do things

collectively and still win those same
fights. . . we’ve been successful and we’ve
won victories. (Joe Brusky, union official

for the Milwaukee Chapter of the
Wisconsin Education Association
Council (WEAC), interviewed 16 April
2015)

So I agree a political scientist would see it
as a defeat, they would look at the political

efficacy, the historian, however, would say
‘‘Yes, but history’s not over.’’ We can see
it in the socio-poetic configurations, we see

it all the time, if we have a Black Lives
Matter rally or an education rally, a lot
of the people active and organising are

people we know from the uprising. The

uprising feels ongoing, these feel like new

manifestations of the ruptures, but I see
them as very much part of the same
thing. (Lane Hall, Overpass Light

Brigade, interviewed 16 April 2015)

Conclusion: Fighting the
‘fairness’ of austerity –
The rise of social unionism

‘The daily, months-long cooperation
between the Madison and state police, fire-
fighters, teachers, construction workers,

students and homeless people far surpasses
the momentary links between ‘‘Teamsters
and Turtles’’ at the WTO protests in
Seattle in 1999.’ (Hayden, 2011)

Tom Hayden’s argument that what hap-
pened in Wisconsin was at least, if not
more important, than the mass mobilisation
against the WTO in 1999 is an interesting
one. The movement that was building
before the WTO protests and the movement
those protests helped to shape, reconfigured
links between organised labour and envir-
onmentalists, it helped stall the WTO nego-
tiating process and empowered some of the
smaller countries in their negotiations by
providing them with allies in the street
(Chesters and Welsh, 2006).

If the uprising in Wisconsin is to be judged
to have an equivalent impact, then it will be
because of the example of social unionism it
provides, and because of the learning that
emerges regarding opposition to austerity
narratives and the mobilising potential of
socio-political affects. By this, I mean recog-
nition that the affective dimension of politics,
here elaborated through a folk memory of
the Wisconsin idea and the tradition of pro-
gressivism, can provide a real impetus
towards sustained resistance. Intuitions of
fairness, shared feelings of injustice, informal
solidarities, friendships and common cul-
tural experiences can be as important in
mobilising people as specific opposition to
particular policies or legislation, and

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maintaining and developing capacity for
mobilisation can only be sustained in this
way:

‘It’s hard to think of the movement as a fail-

ure, when before there’s a group of people
who were just so apolitical and then after it
there’s this huge network of people who are

now active.’ (Joe Brusky, union official for
the Milwaukee Chapter of the Wisconsin
Education Association Council (WEAC),

interviewed 16 April, 2015)

‘Friendship too, the personal richness of

radically expanding my social circle to
this massively diverse group, personally
this has been hugely rewarding, and

that’s hard to quantify.’ (Lane Hall,
Overpass Light Brigade, interviewed 16
April, 2015)

The mobilising potential of affective relation-
ships for social movements has long been
recognised (Jasper, 1997), and the capacity
of these affects to shape patterns of cogni-
tion, build networks and sustain emergent
and dynamic movements has also been
described in some detail elsewhere (Chesters
and Welsh, 2006; Protevi, 2009). The
dilemma arises when we consider what fram-
ing strategy might multiply the power of
these socio-political affects and how the rela-
tionship between the different organisational
cultures of political parties, trade unions and
social movements shape how opposition to
austerity narratives can be framed.

In considering the concept of ‘fairness’, it
is important to be aware of its mutability as a
frame. This is a concept that has an intuitive
appeal and might appear to offer leverage
against the framing of austerity, particularly
given the disproportionate impacts of auster-
ity measures upon the poorest and most dis-
advantaged. Yet, politically, ‘fairness’, as is
demonstrated in the Wisconsin experience,
is an empty signifier, and one that can be
invested with meaning from the left and
right. Scott Walker began his campaign for
Governor with his own ‘brown bag

movement’ encouraging voters to pack their
own lunch in order to ‘afford Wisconsin
taxes’. He also made much of holding on to
his ageing car, a ‘1998 Saturn with more than
one hundred thousand miles on it’, as well as
taking a voluntary pay cut as a Milwaukee
County Executive, all of which he suggested
were actions intended to keep government
spending down (Stein and Marley, 2013:
22). Whilst these things might be considered
trivial, and his opposition certainly treated
them as such, they invoke a narrative of sac-
rifice that enables the idea of fairness to sub-
sequently be employed against those
defending what are perceived to be estab-
lished interests. The narrative becomes
‘we’ve all made sacrifices, so it’s only fair
that those in the public sector should do so
too’. In the UK the equivalent narrative of
recent Conservative and coalition govern-
ments has been ‘we’re all in it together’, an
idea which was ridiculed for being espoused
by Eton educated millionaires, and yet the
idea of fairness underpinning a common pur-
pose and that purpose requiring cuts to social
expenditure has indeed gained traction.

Analysis of frame ‘alignment’ – the ability
of political actors to align the views of a wider
public with their own – provides us with a
means for understanding the cognitive work
movements do in elaborating symbolic
appeals that can mobilise sections of a popu-
lation. Often this can occur through reference
to a shared cultural heritage or other com-
monality such as a history of progressivism
or the more ambiguous concept of the
Wisconsin idea. As Della Porta and Diani
(1999: 75) have argued, frame alignment ‘pre-
supposes a dynamic relationship between the
development of a movement and the cultural
heritage of both the country in which it oper-
ates, and of its institutions’. Therefore, in con-
ducting frame analysis we engage in a means
of interrogating the processes by which a
movement accesses cultural resources and
attempts to produce interpretations that res-
onate with a broader constituency.

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I would argue therefore that the claim by
Madison Mayor Paul Soglin that the
common concern underlying the Wisconsin
wave of protest was ‘fairness’ only tells a
small part of the story. As Tom Hayden
argues, ‘fairness’ can substitute for concerns
about collective bargaining it can also indi-
cate dissatisfaction with corporate influence
in politics and with the austerity agenda of
cuts to education and public services.
However, the concept of fairness is also hos-
tage to the structural and situational
context in which such judgments are made,
and by using it as a tool for mobilisation
movements can inadvertently accept limita-
tions upon their capacity to mount a struc-
tural critique. If austerity is the context
within which the determination of fair out-
comes is to be made, movements might well
find themselves embroiled in the discussion
of individual choice and personal sacrifice,
alongside a set of moral presumptions and
judgments that can undermine solidarity.
The strength of the Wisconsin protests then
was the ability of those involved to re-frame
it as an ‘uprising’. As Lane Hall, an activist
with the Overpass Light Brigade puts it:
‘using the word uprising is a way that the
grassroots have of reclaiming the energy of
that moment, that space, it wasn’t the great
recall campaign’ (interviewed 16 April 2015).

Uprisings are not the raison d’etre of
trade unions, nor of political parties, but as
the prevailing political opportunity structure,
fashioned by neoliberalism, reduces the trad-
itional repertoires of trade union pressure,
then the evolution of social movement
unionism seems inevitable. In the UK we
have already seen the Unite union recom-
mending to members that the words ‘‘so
far as may be lawful’’ are removed from
the rules governing the union’s actions,
given the proposal of the government to
raise the bar for strike actions above a
simple majority of those voting. In
Wisconsin whilst union membership has
dropped in the public sector, there is

evidence of strategic innovation including
teaching unions funding the ‘release’ of
democratically elected teachers from class-
room duties in order to conduct union activ-
ities, and with it the rise of a significantly
more grassroots and engaged cadre of
union activists. As one released member,
Joe Brusky, put it to me: ‘before the uprising
we might get thirty to forty members at an
action, now we get three or four hundred
who consistently come out.’ As in much ana-
lysis of social movements, the time frame in
which that analysis takes place is often a
decisive factor in determining judgments
about its success or failure. In this instance,
it would appear many have accepted that
‘fairness’ is unlikely to be a guiding factor
in interactions between civil society and the
state government, and as such a turn
towards long-term resistance has taken
hold, as Joe Brusky asserts:

Political wins are one thing, but this year
we’re beginning to see the fruits of those

early movements, Black Lives Matter com-
bining with the Fight for 15, and immigra-
tion rights people holding firm to that

movement as well, we’re seeing a lot of
these movements converging. There’s no
way you can have such a mass movement

and not see things coming from it. We’ve
just been looking at too short a timetable
before now. . . (Joe Brusky, union official
for the Milwaukee Chapter of the

Wisconsin Education Association Council
(WEAC), interviewed 16 April 2015)

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of

interest with respect to the research, authorship,

and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for

the research, authorship, and/or publication of

this article.

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www.thenation.com/article/first-amendment-remedies-how-wisconsin-workers-grabbed-constitution-back-right-wing-roya/
www.thenation.com/article/first-amendment-remedies-how-wisconsin-workers-grabbed-constitution-back-right-wing-roya/
www.thenation.com/article/first-amendment-remedies-how-wisconsin-workers-grabbed-constitution-back-right-wing-roya/
www.tuc.org.uk/about-bill
www.tuc.org.uk/about-bill
http://lec.sagepub.com/