The Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) surprised many when it announced that it wouldn’t push for local affiliates to hold certification votes to maintain their union status. But what WEAC is doing makes perfect sense.
The only thing worse in not holding a vote is holding a vote and losing. The new bargaining law sets a very high, and intentionally unrealistic, bar of an affirmative 51% of the total membership, not just those voting, to continue as a union. In some communities, WEAC is just not going to get that vote from its teachers.
The new bargaining law doesn’t give much reason to have a union because there isn’t much to bargain about. Work rules, health insurance provisions and the like are off the table. Walker and his buddies were hoping that WEAC would waste a lot of time trying to get certification votes instead of applying political pressure on real issues.
My guess is that WEAC is going to take a page out of Southern states’ playbook on how to be an effective organization without being a union.
In 1998, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) considered a historic merger of the two organizations at their national conventions. The two 800 pound gorillas would become one 1600 pound gorilla.
Opposition to the merger at the NEA convention came from two camps. First were Eastern NEA affiliates which fought bloody civil wars with the AFT over which organization would represent the teachers. In some cases, they hated each other more than they did their school boards or state departments of education.
Additional opposition came from Southern delegates who openly stated on the convention floor, “We don’t want to join a union, and NEA is an association, not a union.” All of which came as a total surprise to many of my fellow Northern delegates who always considered their state and local NEA affiliates to BE unions.
In some Southern states, it was, and still is, outright illegal to have a public employee union. Many delegates from these states reflected this Southern anti-union bias. They wanted the NEA to be a professional organization like the American Bar Association or the American Medical Association. The word, “Association” in National Education Association was really important to them.
But that didn’t mean these folks went to their school boards with tin cups in hand asking pretty please for scraps from the table. Oh, no. They had a ground game that those back in Wisconsin only could dream about.
When there was an issue their members cared about, they packed the auditorium and confronted their school board members. When elections came around, they had boots on the ground passing out flyers and knocking on doors for candidates they supported and against those they opposed. Elected officials crossed their “Association” at their peril.
Back in Wisconsin, we still had teachers who didn’t want to become involved in politics, who were against forming political PACs, relying only on collective bargaining.
What we saw recently at the capitol protests and the latest shouting matches at local school board meetings, are likely to become the norm. We are not likely to see wildcat strikes in Wisconsin, but job actions, chiefly through refusal to cooperate with some work rules, are likely to become common.
Instead of an 800 pound gorilla union, we may see more guerilla hit-and-run tactics from teachers in rebellion. Political action is likely to go beyond lobbying and PAC money. Elected officials may quickly long for the days of the civility of collective bargaining.
