The first photo-op of the governor standing next to a freshly nailed OPEN FOR BUSINESS sign will be right in Rock County, at the rest stop along Interstate 90 in Beloit, ten miles south of Janesville. Before that, his day’s schedule begins with a visit to meet with Mary and Diane and other leaders of Rock County 5.0. When he strides through ABC’s sliding glass doors, Diane’s arms are outstretched. Walker leans in for an embrace, then steps back to shake Mary’s hand. Before they take the elevator upstairs, Diane asks, could they talk for two seconds about some concerns that are best not to raise in front of the group?
“Okay, sure,” the governor says.
Diane stands close and looks him straight in the eye. “Any chance we’ll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions and become a right-to-work? What can we do to help you?”
“Oh yeah,” Walker replies. “Well, we’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is, we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer.”
“You’re right on target,” Diane says, as Mary looks on.
By the time they get up to the boardroom, there is no more union talk. The leaders of Rock County 5.0 have decided that widening the Interstate, from the Illinois line to Madison, would be one of the best boosts for the local economy, and they are thrilled when Walker tells them that he supports this idea, hard as it will be to find the money for it in his lean, lean budget.
Invoking his father, a Baptist minister, Walker says that he and Rock County 5.0 are preaching to the choir, because his tax-lowering, regulation-lessening goals are the same strategies that Diane and Mary and the rest of the 5.0 leadership team believe will bring jobs to replace ones that General Motors took away.
“You’ve made our job a whole lot easier,” Mary tells the governor.
From Beloit, Walker goes on today to have his photo taken next to OPEN FOR BUSINESS plaques in Dickeyville and Hudson and Superior, the first of twenty-three towns along Wisconsin’s borders at which such plaques will be nailed onto welcome signs.
Mary types on her BlackBerry a message that she posts on her Facebook page: “Great morning with Gov. Walker. We are so lucky to have him.”
29
The Opposite of a Jailer
Later the same week that Mary Willmer drives to Madison for the glitz of the governor’s inaugural ball, Barb Vaughn drives over to Blackhawk Tech. Barb is out of work and jittery about what will happen, now that she has quit her job at the County Jail. She has not been on Blackhawk’s campus since the endurance test that was the criminal justice academy last fall. Today, she walks into an unfamiliar office along a corridor off the college’s main atrium.
This office belongs to Upper Iowa University, a school based nearly two hundred miles west of here in Fayetteville, Iowa, that specializes in long-distance learning. It is through Upper Iowa that Barb, jittery though she is, is determined to go forth and keep studying until she becomes a person who has a bachelor’s degree. Her friend Kristi has been saying, since their Blackhawk graduation with their honor cords last spring, that she wants to go on for a bachelor’s, too. Something about the way Kristi says it has made Barb begin to think that it might be just talk. Barb can see how much Kristi likes the jail paychecks. Always buying clothes and planning house renovations. So, odd as it seems to think about college without Kristi alongside, Barb figures that she is on her own. The courses leading to a social work degree, she knows, will be tough—partly online and speeded up into eight-week terms, with no breaks in between. But by now, she trusts herself with studying. She is weeks from her fiftieth birthday. Having made a mistake once by choosing criminal justice, she is determined not to aim wrong again.
But she has thrown $16.47 an hour out the window, with Mike still studying human resources at Blackhawk until the spring. And now she’s just taken student loans. Barb has been trying to find something—anything—to tide her over while she is back in school. She has spent hour after hour on the computer, scouring the slim job listings. This week, she notices a new posting by something called Creative Community Living Services, which turns out to be a Wisconsin company that provides intensive help for people with developmental disabilities. “Residential coordinator/community protection” is the name of the job that is advertised. Barb applies.
To her surprise, she gets the job. It means that she works one-on-one with a client with a history of difficult behaviors. Her criminal justice background will come in handy, after all. The client has been institutionalized until now. Her first mission is to go into the institution where her client has been living and help move him into a group home, his first home in years. From there, she learns to prod and teach and motivate and soothe as she tries to help him become as independent as he can be. She is someone for her client to lean on, to trust. The opposite of being a jailer, it seems to her. It does not take long before her fragile, stubborn client and his struggles for self-sufficiency start to pull on her heartstrings.
None of this is easy. The job is full-time. She is taking her sped-up, eight-week, no-break courses at night. That’s okay. Barb knew she would be working hard. Still she had expected that, once she had her associate’s degree, she’d go back to keeping everything neat at home—the ranch house filled with houseplants and decorated with the Americana that she and Mike have collected. She’s looked forward to dusting and vacuuming as she used to. Well, that idea turns out to be premature.
There is one other catch. Being a residential coordinator/community protection pays $10.30 an hour. Nearly 40 percent less than she was making at the Sheriff’s Department. Less than half her wages at Lear.
30
This Is What Democracy Looks Like
Janesville’s teachers have a day off on Friday, February 25, and Deri Wahlert is excited as she drives up to Madison with her partner, Rob Eastman, a Parker science teacher, and Avery, their three-year-old son. They grab an early lunch at Quaker Steak, a favorite spot. It is midday as they approach Capitol Square, the highest point of the land between two lakes on which downtown Madison is built. Avery is riding atop Rob’s shoulders, his small, blond head high enough that it will be caught by an MSNBC news camera, so that Deri will later glimpse her own son on television once they get back home.
It is Day No. 11 of protests against the new governor, Scott Walker. The next day, a Saturday, will bring out up to 100,000 protesters in a snowstorm, the biggest demonstration in Wisconsin history. But even today, thousands have descended on the square from throughout the state and beyond. As Deri approaches with Rob and Avery, the crowd is thick and the din loud. She thrills to the sights and sounds. One chant, to the staccato beat of a drum, delights her in particular: “This is what democracy looks like!”
Until these protests broke out, Deri had wondered, ever since she was a girl learning about the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War demonstrations, whether anyone in America still had the heart and soul to come together and fight for what they believe. This is the first time in her thirty-two years, Deri is thinking, that she has witnessed people coming together to put their First Amendment rights to use. As she watches, bagpipers and snare drummers lead a solemn brigade of firefighters, who carry aloft red and white signs, “Firefighters for Labor.” Off-duty police officers toting “Cops for Labor” signs are out in big numbers, too. Construction workers and nurses, teachers and college kids, manual laborers and PhDs, they stand in the thin February midday sun and lift their voices, thousands-strong. In solidarity. In chant. “Kill the Bill! Kill the Bill!”
The bill in question is the first big-deal legislation that Walker put forth during his maiden month as governor. He is calling it a Budget Repair Bill. In the past, that has meant a slight fiscal tinkering. Not this time. The governor wants to carve and reshape the state government, saying that his bill is necessary to pull Wisconsin out of its recession-driven deficit. He also, it turns out, wants to shred most collective b
argaining rights of most Wisconsin public sector unions. This was the plan about which he hinted to Diane and Mary the morning he met with Rock County 5.0. He had never mentioned it during his campaign.
The bill would unwind Wisconsin’s own history. At the turn of the twentieth century, the state had become a hub of the Progressive movement, with the election in 1900 of Robert M. La Follette as governor. La Follette was known as “Fighting Bob” for his pursuit of reforms to help citizens in a society that was increasingly urban, industrial, and prone to capture by special interests. As part of this Progressive tradition, Wisconsin became a leader in workers’ rights. In 1911, a dozen years before the Janesville Assembly Plant began turning out Chevrolets, the state created the nation’s first workman’s compensation law for employees injured on the job. In 1932, the year the plant closed during the Great Depression, Wisconsin was the first state to establish a system of unemployment benefits, three years before Congress adopted the federal Social Security Act that spread a similar system nationwide. It was in Madison in 1932, too, that a group of state employees formed a union that would, within a few years, grow into the country’s main labor organization of state and municipal workers. And in 1959, Wisconsin became the first state to pass a law guaranteeing collective bargaining for public employees.
The surprise, labor-weakening aspect of Walker’s Budget Repair Bill is the reason that a considerable, sustained expression of fury has amassed at Capitol Square.
Deri teaches U.S. history to teenagers and grew up in Wisconsin and certainly knows about its labor traditions. She considers herself a middle-of-the-road person—someone who tends to see both sides of a situation. In this case, her self-interest was in line with the protesters and not with the new governor’s plan. The Budget Repair Bill would take away from unions that represent state and municipal workers and public school teachers the right to bargain over working conditions, and it would cap wage increases. She and Rob would lose money if they had to start pitching in toward their retirement pensions and paying more for their health insurance, as the governor wants. Losing money this way, she understands, would mean that the odds that they could afford to have another kid, as she has been thinking about lately, would go downhill.
Still, she has not come to Madison today to protest. She has come as the history teacher she is. The protests are big national news—destined, she can tell, to become an important moment in her state’s history, in U.S. labor history. How could she miss seeing this dramatic chunk of history with her own eyes? With this history-in-the-making wonder, and because her little boy has never before seen the State Capitol, Deri and Rob and Avery, still on his dad’s shoulders, work their way through the crowd and up to the granite-domed building. They open the capitol’s heavy doors and step inside.
From TV news, Deri learned that the interior, its rotunda and halls normally tomb-quiet even when the legislature is in session, as it is now, had become a well-organized, if slightly stinky, twenty-four-hour encampment. But being inside in person is something else. A union of graduate students from the University of Wisconsin campus a mile away are in charge, more or less, of organizing the space. The grad students have designated the rotunda and each of the four wings for purposes vital to around-the-clock occupation: sleeping areas filled with air mattresses and sleeping bags, segregated for families with kids and for smooching college couples; a children’s play area; a first-aid station; a cell phone charging station; a training area for lessons in nonviolent civil disobedience; and, because this was Madison, an area for yoga.
There is a hub, too, for food, which is plentiful and has, for days, included free deliveries of Ian’s Pizza, which is just a block up State Street from the capitol. Ian’s has been deluged with phone calls and online orders from protest sympathizers from all fifty states and two dozen nations, who, in acts of long-distance solidarity, are paying for the pizzas to be delivered to the capitol so that the demonstrators do not go hungry.
The backs of empty pizza boxes have been converted to protest signs, mimicking the larger signs that are lining the capitol’s limestone walls. Despite the designated sleeping areas, the protesters that Deri notices seem pretty sleep-deprived, because of drum circles and strobe-lit dance parties and renditions of “Solidarity Forever” and other old-time labor songs that have gone on into the wee hours of the morning and are going on still as Deri and Rob and Avery make their way through the crowd. No matter what side of the fence you are on, Deri is thinking, it is neat to see so many people fighting for a cause.
Deri and Rob and Avery happen to have arrived on a pivotal day in the protests. While she delights in the spectacle inside the capitol, the mood among the pizza-fueled protesters has become grim. At 1 a.m., the Republicans in the Wisconsin Assembly, the legislature’s lower chamber, abruptly ended sixty nonstop hours of debate on Walker’s budget bill. Without a motion to end the debate, and with fifteen filibustering Democrats in line to speak, the Assembly’s Republican leaders began the vote on the governor’s plan. The vote lasted ten seconds. Before most of the Democrats even realized what was going on, the bill passed. The groggy GOP legislators then filed out of the chamber, separated by capitol police from the Democrats, who wore orange T-shirts, with “fighting for WORKING FAMILIES!” scrawled across the front and who hurled sentiments seldom heard in civilized times among state legislators: “Shame!” “Coward!”
By the afternoon, the Assembly’s passage of the governor’s bill is not the only reason that the protesters are in a sour mood. The capitol police are now saying that the encampment inside the capitol must move out by 4 p.m. on Sunday, two days away. The protesters want to stay. The sneaky vote by the Assembly Republicans shifted the drama to the legislature’s other chamber, the State Senate, whose Democrats have already executed a sneaky move of their own. Wisconsin’s Democratic state senators have fled the state.
Early on February 17, two days after the protests at Capitol Square began, Tim Cullen received a sad, but not unexpected, phone call at home. An old friend and mentor, a former state senator and State Supreme Court judge, had died the night before. Aware that his friend was terminally ill with cancer, Tim had promised that, whenever his death occurred, he would serve as the family’s spokesman. Now he needed to run up to Madison to hand out obituaries and talk with the press.
It has been three months since Tim, who poured his heart into the losing quest to reopen the assembly plant, won election to his old seat in the State Senate. He is sixty-six and had not been a legislator for twenty-four years. Now, at 8:30 a.m., he was about to leave for Madison when he got another call, this one from Mark Miller, the State Senate’s minority leader. Miller was calling to tell Tim of a decision that the Senate’s Democratic caucus made moments before at a meeting that Tim missed.
With the vote on the governor’s budget repair bill expected that day, the Senate Democrats had decided to flee to Illinois. This disappearing act—dramatic, bizarre, without precedent—was prompted by a small parliamentary fact: In Wisconsin, votes on legislation with fiscal implications require a quorum of twenty senators. The nineteen Republicans held the majority of the Senate’s seats, but they were one short of the quorum, unless at least one Democrat was in the chamber. If all fourteen Democratic senators were out of state, there could be no vote on the governor’s bill.
The timing, Tim told Miller, couldn’t be worse. He had to keep his promise to his friend’s family. So he raced to the capitol, thronged with protesters, to handle the obituary, managing to slip out just before the Senate convened for a voting session. As Tim dashed home to pack, Miller called again to warn him not to take Interstate 90 to Illinois. The governor may have stationed state police at the border to prevent Tim from leaving Wisconsin.
Using back roads, Tim met up with his Democratic colleagues at a Rockford, Illinois, hotel. He had made it out of the state, but he had a dilemma. Tim is a friend of labor. He also is a believer in political compromise. Fleeing across state lines to avoid a vote wa
s distinctly not an act of compromise. And he quickly saw another problem, when he asked his colleagues about the morning’s caucus meeting he had missed. “Did you talk about a strategy to get us back to Wisconsin?” The subject, it turns out, had not come up.
So began three weeks during which Tim moves with his fellow Democrats from hotel to hotel across northern Illinois. True to his nature, he tries during this time to negotiate a compromise to end the political crisis—a compromise that, in the end, neither side wants. They are staying at a La Quinta Inn in Gurnee, Illinois, when Tim and a fellow Democrat slip back into the state. Having received assurances that state troopers would not pick them up and cart them back to the capitol, they drive to a McDonald’s outside Kenosha, a half hour away, for a negotiating session with the Senate’s GOP majority leader. No progress. On the next Sunday, Day No. 13 of the protests and two days after Deri and Rob and Avery are in Madison, he and two Democrats return to the McDonald’s at 9 p.m.—this time to meet with the governor’s chief of staff. Tim senses that some compromise might be possible. On March 6, Day No. 20, after the Senate Republicans held the Democrats in contempt and authorized the sergeant-at-arms to use police force, if necessary, to drag them back, the governor’s chief of staff dips just below the Wisconsin line to meet with Tim and a fellow Democrat in South Beloit, Illinois. This negotiating session ends with a tentative list—not a deal, but a few ideas for softening the bill’s effects on unions. Tim thinks the list does not go far enough but might give the Democrats a graceful way to return to Madison. The rest of the caucus isn’t interested.
Janesville Page 15
