David Michael Miller
No one is more delighted about the decline of the state teachers union than the right-wing MacIver Institute. The union-bashing group claims the Wisconsin Education Association Council, or WEAC, has suffered a greater loss of members than any teachers union in America.
WEAC was once the top lobbyist in Wisconsin. During the 2009-2010 budget period, it spent $2.49 million on lobbying, about three times more than its top counterpart on the right, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, which spent nearly $856,000.
But then came the election of Scott Walker and a Republican Legislature in 2010, and the passage of Act 10, which decimated collective bargaining rights for nearly all public unions in Wisconsin.
Before Act 10, WEAC had 98,000 dues-paying members; today that’s down to 40,000, as the Wisconsin State Journal has reported. Before Act 10, WEAC was collecting $23.5 million in annual dues from union members, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported; today that’s down to $9.3 million, according to the group’s most recent federal tax form for the 2014-15 year.
At its peak WEAC had at least 140 employees, the Journal Sentinel reported. Since then that number dropped to 98 staff in the 2012-13 year and just 47 in 2014-15, its federal tax forms show.
As for its lobbying, state Ethics Commission records show the group spent just $116,110 in the 2015-16 budget period, while the WMC, which once spent one-third of WEAC’s budget for lobbying, was now spending 11 times more: $1.3 million. In 2017 WEAC spent nothing — zero — on lobbying compared to the WMC’s $408,000.
“Honestly, I never see [WEAC officials] in the Capitol anymore,” GOP Sen. Luther Olsen of Ripon, a key member of the Legislature’s education committees for decades, told the State Journal. “I don’t even know who their lobbyist is.”
WEAC also has lost clout in elections. It spent around $550,000 on TV and radio ads in 2009 to help elect state Superintendent of Public Education Tony Evers, but is unlikely to afford such spending on future elections. Decimating the political power of WEAC and other public employee unions was the real goal of Act 10, union leaders have argued. Certainly it has made it all-but-impossible for Democratic candidates to match the campaign spending of Republicans. Things got so bad for WEAC that, in September 2016, it listed its headquarters on Nob Hill in Madison for sale for $6.9 million.
It’s all because of Act 10. Under the law, unions can’t bargain over benefits and only for salaries up to the rate of inflation, so there’s little they can gain for members’ pocketbooks. Meanwhile, unions must annually win a majority vote of all teachers in the district — not just of those teachers voting — a seemingly impossible hurdle that no politician running for office is required to jump.
As Mother Jones reported, “These annual elections can cost thousands of dollars and force unions to run full-scale phone-banking operations. Last year, 11 WEAC affiliates lost recertification votes. In the small eastern Wisconsin town of New Holstein, all 42 teachers who voted backed recertification, but there were another 42 members who didn’t vote, so the local union disappeared.”
So it’s quite remarkable that WEAC, as of its most recent federal tax form, had still retained about 40 percent of its dues-paying members. Many local affiliates may have disbanded, but of those left, teachers are voting overwhelmingly for their unions. As WEAC’s website notes: “Ninety-six percent of 2017 recertification elections for WEAC locals passed this fall,” according to tabulations by the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission.
The Milwaukee Teachers Education Association has retained 70 percent of its union members, the Journal Sentinel reported. And in the recent election for Madison Teachers Inc., nearly 80 percent of all members voted and 99 percent voted for recertification of the union.
In fact, Madison Teachers Inc. has moved its offices to the WEAC headquarters, as has the Region 6 district of WEAC, according to Christina Brey, spokeswoman for WEAC. As a result, the organization no longer needs to sell the building.
How has WEAC managed to survive? Brey says it’s all about moving the focus to the local level and grassroots organizing.
“We’re learning how to introduce ourselves to a whole new generation of teachers. They’re definitely not as familiar with unions.”
Three key selling points for WEAC, she notes, are that the union can “influence collectively what happens in the local schools” and policies affecting teachers and classrooms; offer professional development and training for teachers; and advocate politically for them. For instance, WEAC opposes the federal tax plan, which Brey says could slash 4,000 teaching jobs in Wisconsin through the elimination of federal tax deductions for state and local taxes paid.
All of which suggests that WEAC is far from dead, and that many teachers still value their unions. Says Brey: “We believe we’ve stabilized after a really tumultuous time.”
Bruce Murphy is the editor of UrbanMilwaukee.
