Posts tagged Act 10
Wisconsin’s Anti-Union Model Faces Reckoning as Top Court Shifts
December 12, 2023 // “They’ve been trying to overturn it through the legislature and the ballot box and have been wholly unsuccessful,” said Brett Healy, president of the conservative John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy, which estimates Act 10 has saved taxpayers $16.8 billion as of this year. Act 10 also made it easier for school districts to fire low-performing teachers and retain good ones, said Walker, now president of the Young America’s Foundation, a conservative activist organization for youth. The former governor pointed to the state’s standardized test scores and graduation rates, which typically meet or exceed national averages. “We’ve seen tremendous success,” Walker added. “All the attacks they said at the time, how this would devastate schools, proved be just that—attacks. They don’t match reality.”
Government Unions Love Democrats
December 6, 2023 // The four largest government unions are the National Education Association (NEA), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (Afscme). In the 2021-2022 election cycle, they spent more than $708 million combined on politics.
Video: ALEC’s Labor of Love: A History of Championing Worker Freedom
March 10, 2023 // Today, ALEC debuts its first episode, “Worker Freedom,” in our 50th anniversary video series. The episode features ALEC champions Scott Walker (45th Governor of Wisconsin), Matt Hall (Michigan House Minority Leader and ALEC Board of Directors Member), and Vinnie Vernuccio (Senior Fellow, Mackinac Center), discussing ALEC’s pivotal role in securing Worker Freedom policy wins across the states. In some states, private sector workers can be forced to join, leave, or pay fees to a union as job requirement. The Right-to-Work Act, which ALEC task forces approved as a model policy, provides a solution to this issue. It prevents private employers from requiring or banning union membership (or fees) as conditions for employment, giving workers in Right-to-Work states a guaranteed right to support a union or not to support a union without this choice affecting their hiring or job security.
Opinion: Imagine there’s no public employee unions
February 21, 2023 // But try as President Joe Biden has, it just hasn’t been enough. Automation (including not only factory machinery but also the gig economy), trade, high-profile union corruption cases, failing pension funds, and a string of adverse court rulings are among the many factors rendering private sector unions irrelevant to workers in most modern fields. This has led the unions to desperate measures, such as organizing esoteric, low-income professions, including graduate student teachers and video game testers. Yet the story is quite different for unions in the public sector. The unionization rate of public employees remains robust, at more than 33% of all government workers nationwide. Local government workers are the most likely to be unionized, at a rate of nearly 39%, and public sector union members are concentrated in states that mandate collective bargaining. The states with higher rates of unionization seem to correlate with the nation's least functional state governments: California (54.5%), Illinois (48.7%), New York (66.7%), and New Jersey (59.3%) among them. As their private sector cousins starve, public employee unions are fat and happy — a strange development, given that there was no public sector collective bargaining at all 70 years ago, when unions were at their apex.
SEIU intervenes in Wisconsin nurse unionization dispute
December 6, 2022 // Though SEIU cannot officially represent them, the union negotiated on behalf of UW Health nurses during the strike threat. The union gained concessions from UW Health and state lawmakers, ending the strike before it happened and paving the way for future unionization. The contradictions and various legal opinions surrounding this case suggest that WERC’s ruling will be appealed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. A UW Health spokesperson said that the hospital will seek additional legal opinion on the issue, “We believe that an expedited decision on these important legal issues will best allow us to move forward, which is why we are petitioning the Wisconsin Supreme Court for an opinion on these questions.” WERC’s ruling is a temporary legal setback, but all signs point to further legal challenges to state laws on collective bargaining.
UW Health reaches agreement with nurses and union leaders, averting strike
September 14, 2022 // UW Health CEO Dr. Alan Kaplan said he was pleased to reach an agreement. He said that the hospital previously was not able to recognize the union due to Act 10, but now that may change. The hospital did not formally recognize the union under the new agreement, Kaplan said, however, a pathway was been set up for the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission to decide if UW Health is covered under Wisconsin’s Employment Peace Act, which gives employees the right to form and join a union. Attorney General Josh Kaul
UW Health nurses vote to authorize 3-day strike in September as they seek to regain union
August 29, 2022 // Nurses voted Wednesday to strike from 7 a.m. Sept. 13 to 7 a.m. Sept. 16, but said the UW Hospital Board could avoid the strike by recognizing the union. Otherwise, nurses will provide a 10-day notice of the strike so administrators can prepare, as required by labor law. In 2014, when a contract for about 2,000 nurses and therapists represented by SEIU expired, they lost the union. In January, SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin said it gave UW Health CEO Dr. Alan Kaplan more than 1,500 cards signed by nurses supporting a union. SEIU says 2,600 nurses at UW Hospital would be in the bargaining unit. UnityPoint Health-Meriter in Madison, Steve Striffler, director of the Labor Resource Center at the University of Massachusetts-Boston,
Act 10 Savings Tops $15 Billion Since 2011
March 27, 2022 // Before the unions convince you that contributing 12.6% towards health insurance is an unfair and undue burden, think about this. A state employee in Wisconsin pays $2,952 a year for the regular family plan with dental. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average annual worker premium contribution is $6,015 a year. State employees pay roughly half of what the average taxpayer pays for health insurance and the state employee is receiving platinum coverage for that reasonable amount.
Why Pennsylvania Needs Wisconsin-Style Government Union Reform
February 24, 2022 // Government union executives use this power to trap government employees in unions, deny them alternative representation, and lobby against fiscal and educational reforms needed to make Pennsylvania more prosperous.