As Scott Walker’s support for ‘right-to-work’ bill is seen as another blow to blue-collar workers, labor movement and activists ask ‘what happens now’?

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“The solidarity sing-a-long has maintained free speech rights at the capitol,” Nicole Desautels said, as she stood behind singers who were belting out progressive favorites.

Desautels and others from the Wisconsin Citizen Media Cooperative have been monitoring police harassment and arrests of the singers since they began they their daily noontime chorus at the state capitol in the heat of Governor Scott Walker’s famous battle with organised labor, four years ago. While so much singing had ensured that protesters against the governor’s policies could enter the building with their signs on Saturday, in order to chant and dissent, it seemed one small victory in a dismal line of losses for progressive politics in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin’s latest “right-to-work” legislation is expected to pass next week, further weakening unions in the state governed by Republican 2016 hopeful Scott Walker, in this case in the private sector. The state’s proposed budget, before the Republican-controlled state legislature, will decimate public education and citizen oversight of agencies such as the department of natural resources.

Faced with such defeats, many Wisconsin progressives are asking themselves: “What happens now?”

While much of the traditional labor movement is struggling to adopt new organizing and outreach strategies, grassroots activists have their eyes firmly on the prize. What both groups agree on is that change can only come from organizing large numbers of people.

Jennifer Epps-Addison, who leads Wisconsin Jobs Now (WJN), has no illusions about what it is going to take for progressives to win back ground in Wisconsin. Her organisation, which fights for income equality, was born out of the crucible of the 2011 uprising against Walker, when 100,000 people occupied the capitol for three weeks.

“We need to go back to and return to the progressive tradition of building out urban and rural alliances, alliances of poor and working-class families that are really invested in building out the infrastructure of our state and building out an economy that works for everyone,” she said.

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WJN is based in Milwaukee, the state’s largest city, which holds almost one sixth of the state’s population. In a state that is 88% white, 27% of Milwaukee’s residents are African-American. Once a city built on manufacturing jobs, few factories still operate in the area – Master Lock and Harley Davidson are notable exceptions. Milwaukee is now one of the poorest and most segregated cities in the country.

It is in this terrain that Epps-Addison and her colleagues are working to build power. In September, 40 WJN members were arrested along with US representative Gwen Moore during civil disobedience aimed at improving working conditions for fast-food workers. In December, WJN brought white and black people together to shut down of one of the city’s main freeways as part of the #BlackLivesMatter protests that swept the nation. Such urban actions move in tandem with efforts to find common ground with surrounding rural communities.



In a state with the highest incarceration rate of African-American men in the country, Epps-Addision compares this work of connecting black and white communities to what Martin Luther King Jr referred to as “the lie being told to the white worker” – that people of color are the enemy.

“We really believe that if we’re going to take back the state, if we’re going to rebuild progressive power, we can’t give people a Republican-light agenda that simply looks to make them less poor,” Epps-Addison explains, describing how she thinks progressives need to claim their turf. For her, this trajectory is not tied to an electoral cycle. Rather, it’s a long-term vision that focuses on building local power and includes both an economic and a racial analysis.

“There’s such an incredible amount of power, even in Wisconsin where Republicans certainly have attacked local control, but there are still a number of avenues – city councils and the county boards – [that] can take to increase opportunity and fairness in their communities.” Such steps, she says, build up to statewide and national impacts.

In the meantime, while many Walker policies are clearly detrimental to working families, blows are also falling on traditionally more conservative constituencies. John Matthews, president of the city’s teachers’ union, told the Guardian that 20 home goods stores in the area had closed since the 2011 state budget passed. He speculated that cuts to public employees had trickled down – many no longer had enough disposable income to keep such businesses afloat.

Such concerns drive Lori Compas, who runs the Wisconsin Business Alliance (WBA). The WBA is a non-partisan, statewide organization that Campas says advocates for things that “are non-controversial” such as broadband access and public education. When the new “right-to-work bill” was announced last week, she started to investigate its implications by reading academic studies.

Compas also called business leaders in Republican districts.

“I could not find a single chamber of commerce that supported ‘right-to-work’,” she said.

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC) positions itself as the state’s business voice, but Compas questions the group’s legitimacy. She found that reduced wages resulting from “right-to-work” legislation would have a negative impact on many consumer-driven businesses belonging to local chambers of commerce. In spite of this, the WMC has endorsed the bill.

“The interesting thing to me has been they really don’t represent small businesses around Wisconsin like they claim to,” Campas said. “It’s kind of like the emperor has no clothes.”

Compas’s observations reach beyond the immediate business interests of local communities, suggesting that the impact of “right-to-work” on small businesses will have political ramifications too.

“I think that there are a lot of business leaders in communities around Wisconsin who just feel politically homeless right now,” she said. “They don’t feel like the Republicans are really representing their best interests.”

This sense of homelessness could offer fertile ground for anyone offering an agenda that fits better with the interdependent needs of small towns.

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Economic power has always been critical to organizing efforts. Rebecca Kemble, a 15-year worker-owner in Madison’s Union Cab co-op and president of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, takes the issue very seriously.

“If you’re going to fight these global flows of capital, you have to have an independent economic base of production,” she told the Guardian.

Kemble is also running for a seat on Madison’s Common Council. As she enters the political arena, she has her eyes on the challenges facing progressives in the state. Such groups, she says, should “stop trying to compete with the predatory forces on the same playing field, which is completely dominated by big money”.

Like Epps-Addison and many others, however, Kemble believes that the key lies in people: “What we could have, if we stop focusing so much on fundraising, is mass mobilizations of human beings whose lives are really seriously impacted by all these policies that have been ushered in by the Walker administration in the last four years.”

The City of Madison recently announced plans to launch a $5m worker-cooperative fund, with the goal of creating jobs that will stay local. The fund is one of Kemble’s main motivations for stepping into politics. “I really want to make sure that that gets done properly and right and that the people who need those kinds of jobs get [them],” she said.

Kemble, like other activists around the state, however, claims that the gerrymandering of state districts has rendered change at the state level challenging for now. But she still senses the power that came from the 2011 uprising, even if it failed in its immediate goals.

“We had this mass uprising, three weeks of people coming from all over the state and occupying the state capitol building,” she said. “So progressive people connected. Native rights movements, the criminal justice movement, environmentalists, labor, we all know each other now. We all can reach out to each other.

“So the scaffolding is there to build something different, something built on sheer people power.”