Politics
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December 4, 2024
In a major win for labor, the judge determined that Walker’s assault on worker rights was wildly unconstitutional.
Former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker arrives to speak during a campaign rally for former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at Dane Manufacturing in Waunakee, Wisconsin, October 1, 2024.
(Kamil Krzaczynski / AFP via Getty Images)
Former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s assault on labor rights was always wrong, morally and practically.
Walker, a right-wing Republican ideologue who used his position to do the bidding of out-of-state billionaires and corporate-funded “think tanks,” knew that strong unions would make it harder to implement his agenda after his election as Wisconsin’s governor in 2010. So he moved immediately to erect barriers to public-sector organizing and collective bargaining.
As part of a sweeping assault on the underpinnings of civil society, and democracy, Walker unveiled his anti-union Act 10 within days of taking office in 2011. The proposal sparked mass protests by teachers, nurses, librarians, sanitation workers, and other public employees. But Walker pressed ahead with Act 10, which gave special preferences to a handful of public-safety employees while denying them to the vast majority of state, county, and municipal employees. After it was approved by the legislature, the measure was rubberstamped by a state Supreme Court where the conservative majority served as Walker’s amen corner.
Even when Walker’s political career crashed and burned—with the jarring failure of his 2016 bid for the Republican presidential nomination, and the defeat of his 2018 campaign for a third term—Act 10 remained on the books. But a hearty band of union activists and public-interest lawyers keep crying foul. Finally, on Monday, they won their clearest victory yet in the drive to overturn the former governor’s anti-union legacy—which became the template for right-wing assaults on worker rights in other states and nationally.
In a ruling that sent joyous shock waves through labor circles in Wisconsin and across the country, Dane County Judge Jacob Frost restored collective bargaining rights for public employees. Frost’s sweeping decision struck down key sections of Act 10, with an explanation that they violated the Wisconsin Constitution’s equal protection clause. Specifically, Judge Frost determined that Walker had unreasonably and unconstitutionally created a preference for unions representing police and firefighters, which in some cases had supported his campaigns, while effectively eliminating those rights for unions representing teachers and other public employees.
The judge determined that Act 10 was ”irrational and violates the right to equal protection of the laws.” In so doing, Judge Frost —who, in an initial ruling in July, had raised constitutional concerns about Walker’s law—rejected a demand from Walker’s Republican legislative allies for a narrow ruling that would respond to only some aspects of the measure’s obvious lawlessness.
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“I cannot solve Act 10’s constitutional problems by striking the definition of ‘public safety employee,’ leaving the term undefined and leaving the remainder of the law in place,” wrote Judge Frost in Monday’s ruling.