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.

Ten years after the introduction of Act 10 led to hundreds of thousands of protesters to descend on the state Capitol, protests and civil unrest have once again become a common occurrence in Wisconsin and the nation.

Former Wisconsin Capitol Police Chief Charles Tubbs, who oversaw law enforcement at the Capitol during the Act 10 protests, looks back on that era and said he’s proud the strategy that he and his fellow members of law enforcement used at the time, a strategy that emphasized voluntary compliance, communication and emphasis on peace.

For Ian’s Pizza, a staple of Madison’s food scene that now has locations in Milwaukee, Denver and Seattle, feeding Act 10 protesters helped plant the business firmly on the map.

Ian’s involvement in the Act 10 protests started early on, when an employee at the parlor’s Downtown location gave out about eight leftover pizzas to protesters gathered at the Capitol at 3 a.m. on a cold February night.

Looking back on the passage of Act 10 a decade ago, Sen. Joan Ballweg, R-Markesan, said one of her most vivid memories is the tens of thousands of Wisconsinites who amassed at the Capitol to voice their opposition to the proposal.

But it was when her son, who was living in New Zealand at the time, told the recently elected Assembly Majority Caucus chairwoman that he saw a photo of her in the Capitol circulating on Al Jazeera News that Ballweg realized how many eyes were on Wisconsin that February.

When the news about Act 10 broke, Madison middle school teacher Michele Ritt went to the Capitol, where a few hundred or so people had begun to gather. Over the next few days and weeks, that crowd grew to tens of thousands of protesters as news about the legislation spread.

Ritt’s son, Josef Rademacher, was 10 years old at the time. He joined his family as they marched around Capitol Square for nearly 10 hours a day during the occupation, to the point where the soles of his snow boots were worn through.

As a Capitol reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in early 2011, Jason Stein had a front row seat to the politics and protests surrounding the passage of Act 10.

Stein, who also previously reported for the Wisconsin State Journal and is now the research director for the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum, recalls how when tens of thousands of protesters flooded the Capitol it was second on The New York Times’ website to just one other story — the Arab Spring protests in the Middle East and North Africa.