Wisconsin Matters

prospect.org — Tomorrow marks the 100th anniversary of the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that trapped and killed 146 workers, most of them young immigrant women, on the upper floors of a New York City sweatshop. It's a time to honor and mourn the Triangle's victims, commemorate the tragedy's importance as a turning point in the history of the American labor movement, and reaffirm the crucial role of unions and regulatory bodies in advancing worker rights. Both are taking a beating in America's 21st-century iteration of the Gilded Age, as industrialists (hello, Koch brothers) paired with the craven politicians who do their bidding (greetings, Gov. Scott Walker, Sen. Scott Brown, et al.) take another pass at ridding our country of all those nasty laws that protect consumers and workers, and cut into their bottom line.

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nytimes.com — NOW that a Wisconsin judge has temporarily blocked a state law that would strip public employee unions of most collective bargaining rights, it’s worth stepping back to place these events in larger historical context. Republicans in Wisconsin are seeking to reverse civic traditions that for more than a century have been among the most celebrated achievements not just of their state, but of their own party as well. Wisconsin was at the forefront of the progressive reform movement in the early 20th century, when the policies of Gov. Robert M. La Follette prompted a fellow Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, to call the state a “laboratory of democracy.” The state pioneered many social reforms: It was the first to introduce workers’ compensation, in 1911; unemployment insurance, in 1932; and public employee bargaining, in 1959.

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guardian.co.uk — The streets of Madison, Wisconsin are teeming— with people, placards, even farmers' tractors — in a moment of democratic uprising unlike anything in recent memory. This spontaneous eruption of massive popular resistance, with hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life demonstrating for weeks on end, was sadly not enough to stop the state from stripping workers of their rights. Yet it has given birth to a newly engaged and radicalize working class in Wisconsin and kindled a broader democracy movement whose impact will be tested both in its immediate response to these attacks and its ability to sustain itself and progress as a popular movement.

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guardian.co.uk — What is happening now in America is that, finally, as the corporate interests make their ultimate claim on the commons, they have created what my old friend Florence Reece described as a "which side are you on?" moment. There is no longer the easy middle ground that compromising and compromised Democratic politicians tried for so long to occupy. Now, the choices are stark: unions or no unions, public services or no public services, plutocracy or democracy? As Americans have taken sides, they have found that the old divisions that so favored the elites — white versus black, gay versus straight, native versus immigrant, urban versus rural — are abstract and meaningless. What is real is the threat of state and a nation so defined by corporate campaign contributions, corporate lobbying and corporate power that they can take away our right to organize unions, to speak in our workplaces and our communities, to petition — as the founders of the American experiment intended — for the redress of grievances.

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thenation.com — It was, paradoxically, at once a significant loss for the protest movement in Wisconsin and a measure of its extraordinary success that Governor Scott Walker and his Republican allies had to resort to legislative legerdemain to pass their unpopular unionbusting measure on March 10. By separating the attack on collective bargaining from the budget bill, they ensured its passage, but they also stripped the veneer off their own agenda: this was never about budgets, and always about class war. As Michael Moore put it in his rousing speech to the crowd of tens of thousands who had assembled a few days before in Madison, “America is not broke…. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and portfolios of the über-rich.” To be frank, this is a war working people have been losing for decades without much of a fight. But the pro-worker movement seems at last to have something resembling a battle plan.

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huffingtonpost.com — Polls show that on the major issues of our time -- the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Wall Street bailouts and health insurance -- the opinion of We the People has been ignored on a national level for quite some time. While the corporate media repeats the myth that the United States of America is a democracy, Americans, especially Wisonsiners and Ohioans, know that this is a joke.

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huffingtonpost.com — Our challenge as a nation -- the vast majority of Americans who built this country and strive to sustain it — is to transform the storyline of who is to blame for this crisis, and how to solve it. And to change, once and for all, our priorities to become a more just society. Nurses in particular know this well. Their voices are heard in every community, their social responsibility profound. Their refrain is "we brought you into the world, now we are going to fight for you, for your quality of life, for your children, for our future." It's time for a Main Street Contract for the American People.

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huffingtonpost.com — The battle in Wisconsin over the rights of public-sector workers holds the potential to reawaken workers across the country to demand their fair share of the economic pie. This could be an important turning point. However, if workers are to make real progress they must move to alter the rules of the game. These rules have been deliberately rigged against them over the last three decades. The most obvious of these rules are those governing the rights to unionize, such as those that Gov. Walker directly attacked in Wisconsin. However, this is just part of the story. Unionization has become almost impossible in the private sector, since companies routinely fire workers engaged in an organizing drive.

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