Christmas Came Early for Wisconsin's Public Employees

An Essay by Professor Jon Shelton for Detox Tuesday

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas for those that celebrate.

Before the Minocqua Brewing Company takes a brief holiday pause from our new mission to combat right-wing misinformation through daily articles written by smart, progressive activists/ journalists, I wanted to present a wonderful article in the spirit of Christmas from my friend, Professor Jon Shelton, from the University of Wisconsin Green Bay.

Along with being Christmas Eve, today is also "Detox Tuesday," where the weekly theme is to debunk (detox) a lie that is being spread by conservative media. Detox Tuesdays are sponsored by "NOPE Not My President" Sparkling Water--the most "clear-eyed" beverage we make.

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Christmas Came Early for Wisconsin's Public Employees

Greetings! Today, of course, is Detox Tuesday, but it’s a special one today because it’s also Christmas Eve. And this holiday season, public employees in Wisconsin are celebrating the beginning of the demise of Act 10, Wisconsin’s notorious law that stripped most meaningful collective bargaining rights from us in 2011. Just three weeks ago, Judge Jacob Frost ruled, from the Dane County Circuit Court, that virtually all of the labor provisions of Act 10 unconstitutional. The ruling has already been appealed by the Republican legislature, and the case will almost certainly end up being decided by the state supreme court, which hangs in the balance this April.

So we still have a ways to go, but for anyone who cares about workers’ rights or public education in Wisconsin, this ruling was monumental. As I’ve been explaining it, the decision thus far is like the foundation for a house: a good foundation doesn’t guarantee a house, but you can’t build a house without a foundation.

Every Christmas has to have a Grinch, however, and this Christmas Season, Wisconsin’s least popular former governor, Scott Walker, has things to say about the court case, writing an op-ed in the singular newspaper of the nation’s mustache-twisting capitalists, The Wall Street Journal. In that piece, Walker accused Judge Frost’s decision of “political” motives: to wit, that his decision was solely designed to “restore power” to “big government union bosses.”

For your detox Tuesday, I thought I’d unpack just what Walker means when he refers to “union bosses,” since my union (American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin) is one of five unions challenging the law in the courts, and I’ll also explain, as is usually the case, how the claims of Republicans in Wisconsin like Walker are actually projections of their own bad-faith motivations.

OK, so first, let’s talk about a “big government union boss.” For starters, that’s me. I’m president of the faculty and staff union at UW-Green Bay, and I’m also Vice President of Higher Education for AFT-Wisconsin. For a time last spring, I even served as interim President. Our current president is not running again at our convention this October, and I plan to run for AFT-Wisconsin President then. Do you know what I’ve been doing over the past month? It wasn’t leading a conservative organization in DC as Walker
does. I was teaching and grading papers, and grading lots of them, as my students finished their classes. I was speaking out against a new intellectual property policy proposed by UW system that could lead to our students being shortchanged by artificial intelligence, and I was going to union meetings in other parts of the state, as I did in Menasha, for instance, on my own time at the end of a day of teaching.

You want to know who else is a union boss? Maddie Topf, a grad worker, who is the Co-President of the Teaching Assistants Association, one of the plaintiffs in the Act 10 lawsuit. Maddie has spent the past year successfully organizing her co-workers to get paid parental leave for UW employees (before the TAA’s successful campaign, horses got more parental leave than workers in the UW System). Grad workers earn such a low stipend that when Maddie spoke at the state capitol in support of paid leave she picked out her blazer from Goodwill.

Another union boss? Barret Elward, President of United Faculty and Academic Staff in Madison. Barret is an engineer who spent his week helping UW Madison grad students do research on nuclear fusion to help lead us to a sustainable energy future.

Yet another? Angie Bazan, President of the McFarland Federation of Teachers. In addition to her full-time teaching position, Angie spent the fall rallying her community to vote for referendum in her school district so they wouldn’t have to lay off teachers and raise class sizes for teachers. She spent this past week organizing a bake sale with her class to buy Christmas gifts for kids who can’t afford them.

All of these “union bosses” that I’m proud to call my friends have been elected to lead their unions, and we all do this work on top of our jobs. We do this work because we live the spirit of this Christmas season every day: giving to others and our community to make everyone’s lives better.

But one thing I can assure you: we won’t see former Governor Walker’s heart grow three sizes tomorrow, because, for him, Act 10 was never about serving the people of Wisconsin. It was always about serving the small group of millionaires and billionaires who funded his campaigns. If that’s not a political motivation, then I don’t know what is.

If I can mix Christmas stories for just a moment, however, if Walker is visited by the ghost of Christmas future tonight, I can tell you what he’s going to see: a labor movement in Wisconsin that is even stronger on December 25, 2025. In spite of what Walker and other reactionaries tried to do in 2011, unions have never gone away in Wisconsin. We’ve kept fighting, and we’re going to continue to do so. We are going to fight to ensure we continue to have an impartial state supreme court this April that won’t just side with corporate interests, and we’re going to keep fighting for our co-workers, our students, and the people of Wisconsin. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!


Jon Shelton is a professor and chair of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He is the author of The Education Myth and Teacher Strike!, which won the International Standing Conference of the History of Education’s First Book Award. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Dissent, Jacobin, and more. Shelton has served as Vice-Chair of Green Bay’s Equal Rights Commission and sits on the boards of the Labor and Working-Class History Association and the Wisconsin Labor History Society. He is also Vice-President for Higher Education of AFT-Wisconsin.