May 9 Recall Walker unity rally. Photo: Wisconsin AFLCIO

I just had to post about this latest revelation from our colleagues in the US trade union movement. Scott Walker, the Republican Governor of Wisconsin, has started a firestorm by abolishing public sector workers’ collective bargaining rights. It has split the state and unions have run a fantastic campaign to recall him which we have covered before. Governor Walker claimed that he took this step to save the state money, a claim that unions always doubted. Now the truth is out, with a video of Governor Walker telling a billionaire funder that his plan is actually to turn Wisconsin into a ‘right-to-work’ (ie non-union) state.

Yup, he really is just out to get unions. Good luck to the Wisconsin AFLCIO in their efforts to make sure he fails.

Wisconsin AFLCIO campaign poster

A year ago today, Republican Governor of the mid-west US state of Wisconsin rammed through a law stripping public sector workers in Wisconsin of their rights to collective bargaining in an illegal meeting in the dead of the night. Tomorrow, trade unionists, their families and their communities will march in the state capital, Madison, demanding the recall of Governor Walker. Already they have collected twice the half a million signatures required to force a re-election (having removed a number of state legislators last summer through the same process). Now they are campaigning to kick him out of office and re-establish their bargaining rights.

Wisconsin AFLCIO President Phil Neuenfeldt says that

“by recalling Scott Walker we can return to a Wisconsin that is fair, a Wisconsin that honors justice and a Wisconsin that treats its workers with dignity and respect.”

British trade unions have been following events in Wisconsin closely, inspired by the popular struggle that the Wisconsin AFLCIO have waged, and TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber has sent a message of solidarity to the marchers. You can add your voice to the campaign by signing up to the online petition (just select ‘other’ in the box which asks you for your state) or downloading their campaign materials.

We’re also learning the lessons of their campaign for our own activities, with Wisconsin AFLCIO Secretary-Treasurer Stephanie Bloomingdale joining a TUC organisers course last week by skype. The campaigners have managed to connect with the voters of Wisconsin with a message and a campaign that has enthused voters in precisely the way we need to in the UK and Europe. We are Wisconsin!

In a letter to the foreign ministers of the four countries – which are acting together over relations with Fiji – the TUC, ACTU, NZCTU and AFLCIO call for a series of measures including sanctions targeted on the leaders of the regime, reviewing trade preferences, and reconsidering the UN’s use of Fijian armed forces as peace-keepers.

The TUC has asked the UK Foreign Secretary, William Hague, to raise these matters with his opposite numbers in Europe, too.

The message from our Zimbabwean colleagues, to whom we have extended solidarity so many times in their struggle to survive, is particularly welcome because they demonstrate the essential point of solidarity when they write:

“Your concerns as working people of Britain are also our concerns. Solidarity forever!”

But they also show that this is more than just a response to our requests for solidarity – they go on to demonstrate that they ‘get’ what the Bill is about even if the British Government claims otherwise:

“There will be fragmentation of the health service, worsening the care available to patients, and uncertainty for NHS employees, with the quality of training and their terms and conditions of employment likely to suffer. Stop the Bill now!”

The AFLCIO also understand all too well what a privatised health system means: they’ve been campaigning to get the USA to head in the opposite direction! President Rich Trumka said in his message:

“Given the ongoing challenges facing workers in the UK and globally, it is irresponsible to attack a program that is so key to working families.”

The AFLCIO reported that:

“Overall union membership increased by 49,000 from 2010 to 2011, including 15,000 new 16- to 24-year-old members, according to new U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data out this morning. An increase of 110,000 in the private sector was partially offset by a decline of  61,000 in the public sector, making the rate of union membership essentially unchanged at 11.8 percent, with some 14.8 million U.S. workers union members. Public-sector density increased from 36.2 percent to 37 percent though November 2011. Private-sector union membership remains at 6.9 percent. The largest increases in union membership were in construction, health care services, retail trade, primary metals and fabricated metal products, hospitals, transportation and warehousing.”

Workers in education, training, and library occupations had the highest unionization rate, at 36.8 percent, while the lowest rate occurred in sales and related occupations (3.0 percent). Among states, New York continued to have the highest union membership rate (24.1 percent) and North Carolina again had the lowest rate (2.9 percent). In 2011, among full-time wage and salary workers, union members had median usual weekly earnings of $938, while those who were not union members had median weekly earnings of $729.

In 1983, the first year for which comparable union  data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers.

Handing in the million signature petition to recall Gov Walker. Photo: Wisconsin AFL-CIO

Unions in Wisconsin, a year into their titanic battle with Republican Governor Scott Walker over the scrapping of collective bargaining rights for public sector workers, were celebrating today as they handed in over a million signatures on a recall petition demanding a new election for the Governorship. Under Wisconsin law, they only needed 540,000, but the final count showed that over a million Wisconsin voters want Walker out. What’s really incredible about this is that there are only 3.2 million people registered to vote in the state, and at the last gubernatorial election, only just over a million voted for Governor Walker. The summer recall election – in a state that voted Democrat in 2008 but Republican in 2010 – will be a key indicator of how the Presidential election will go. At the same time, recall petitions on three Republican state senators were also handed in.

Indiana State Capitol building. Photo Cindy Seigle.

Following on from last year’s battles in Wisconsin and Ohio,  the latest key battleground state on union rights is Indiana (where a similar battle last spring was ended when state Democrats prevented a vote in the legislature by absenting themselves and denying the Republicans a quorum). State Republicans are seeking to introduce the same ”right to work” laws that exist in 22 other states of the USA (there’s a great explanation of the issue – and a map of which states have such laws - on the Bad for Indiana website) and hinder the trade union movement’s ability to bargain collectively over pay, or ensure decent health and safety laws.

Whilst these moves by Republicans (often backed by the employers who will directly benefit) have all been couched in terms of public sector austerity or competitiveness and job creation (and rebutted by unions and their allies concerned that they will actually lead to greater inequality, lower wages and worse terms and conditions for workers generally), there’s more than a hint of pre-Presidential politicking in the air. These states are key Presidential battleground states, and a key objective of the right is to cripple unions so that they are less able to help Obama and the Democrats win the forthcoming Presidential and Congressional elections in the fall. Even when the right loses, they very often drag the unions into hugely expensive campaigns which drain them of money they would otherwise be able to use in get-out-the-vote campaigns, and persuading members to vote for candidates who share union policies on issues like the economy and workers’ rights.

But it’s a high risk strategy, as the crushing defeat of the move in Ohio showed last fall, and the recall elections which saw Republicans lose out in the Wisconsin legislature last year (and which could also affect the Governor this year) show. In Indiana, where the iconic US football Super Bowl takes place in Indianapolis on 5 February, it has prompted the football players’ union which represents every single player in that competition to protest, as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reports in this fabulous newscast. That could impact seriously on Republican support, whatever happens in the Indiana state legislature.

Unions in Indiana are of course campaigning against this move by state Republicans, and have a great toolkit on the state AFLCIO website.

The flyer for their event makes clear the old union adage – your fight is our fight:

Like their US counterparts, British officials want to slash public worker pensions to cut public deficits — even though, like Social Security in the US, British pension funds are financially sound.

Great news this morning from Ohio, which along with Wisconsin is one of the slew of US states where Republicans (in this case Governor John Kasich) have been trying to remove collective bargaining rights and key working conditions from public sector workers in the name of austerity.

A publicly demanded referendum has dramatically overturned the law Gov Kasich rammed through in the face of protests last March. That they did so in the face of well funded campaigns by right wing outrider organisations, and attempts to restrict access to voting makes the 2/3 majority result all the more impressive.

Owen has more on Kasich’s plans and the union-backed campaign against them over at Touchstone.

The AFL-CIO have this nice 2 minute video documenting the campaign. It’s inspiring viewing and an important illustration of the principle that we need to be doing more in documenting our campaigns as they take place, not just once we’ve (hopefully) won them.

Sharing what went well and how the campaign came together is more valuable for building future campaigns than any amount of victory speeches, and given the scale of the problem activists currently face in the US, there are going to be a lot more of those future campaigns to come.