Looking back a decade later, 10 stories about Act 10

As it became evident that Republicans in the Legislature planned to rush through passage of Act 10, Democratic lawmakers, who held minorities in the Assembly and Senate, knew they had to get creative.

Their radical solution: Flee the state.

Former Republican Gov. Scott Walker, the architect of Act 10, may have been defeated by Democrat Tony Evers in 2018, but his successor hasn’t yet proposed a full repeal of the controversial legislation. That’s a sign, in Walker’s view, that his signature legacy has withstood the test of time.

“I believe it’s a legacy that works, because despite my successor introducing a budget about a year and a half ago that included about everything on the liberal wish list, the one thing that was not included: an outright repeal of Act 10,” Walker said. “I think that’s a reflection that it works, and that repealing it would devastate schools, local governments and state government.”

Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to strip collective bargaining rights from public employees motivated Susan Cohen, a Madison middle school science teacher, to do something she had rarely contemplated — break the rules.

“It’s hard to break the rules when you’re a teacher because we understand rules are made to keep things moving along, keep things safe,” she said. “But we all recognized that taking away the union and our bargaining rights was going to make it very difficult.”

Former Sen. Dale Schultz described the Act 10 saga as a major component of the end of bipartisanship in the state Legislature — a rift that still can be felt a decade later.

Schultz, a Richland Center Republican, was the only Republican in the state Senate to vote against Act 10. He recalled his disbelief when Gov. Scott Walker announced the legislation, which came just weeks after the Legislature passed several bills Walker requested to spark economic growth in the state.

As the longest-serving labor leader in Wisconsin at the time of Act 10, Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews kept a close eye on proposed legislation that had to do with labor and education.

When he learned then-Gov. Scott Walker was going to introduce a “budget repair bill” to plug a hole in the state budget, he knew a fight was coming, potentially as big as the 1976 Madison teachers strike Matthews helped organize.