MADISON, Wis. — With public employee bargaining rights back on the table after a Dane County judge struck down parts of Act 10 this week, the mood is a bit mixed.
For some, who had a front-row seat to the controversial change more than a decade ago, the feeling is best summed up as bittersweet.
Many of the key players during Act 10 have come and gone, but there are still some familiar faces around the Capitol, including State Sen. Chris Larson, a Democrat from Milwaukee, who had just started his first term 13 years ago.
“We were trying to sound the alarm bell from the beginning, but there were two big problems, and the big one was, one: the Packers were doing really well, so they went to the Super Bowl and won that year, so that was most of the news,” Larson explained. “Then the other half of the news was the abysmal weather we had. So, we had a ton of snowstorms and that was just it.”
Then and now, most Republicans say the legislation is all about taxpayer savings. However, more than a decade later, Larson sees it as extremely costly.
“It’s a little bit bittersweet for some of those folks because there were teachers who exited the profession immediately. We’ve seen a huge challenge in just about every school district of the state where they are trying to recruit quality teachers but because they don’t have that guarantee of being able to have a seat at the negotiating table, wages have been suppressed, benefits have been suppressed,” Larson said.
One of those teachers who left the profession sooner than he wanted to is Anthony Schnell, who now runs a bakery in Windsor, just outside of Madison.
“Hopefully, this attracts more people back into teaching,” Schnell said. “It’s certainly not going to bring people like me that retired out of it, I mean, we’re done.”
Schnell said he is still holding his breath until the appeals process plays out.
“Until that gets resolved, it’s not like anything has gotten solved,” Schnell added. “It’s just gotten a little better, maybe. To me, the thing that was more surprising is that the tax rate in Wisconsin has dropped. Lower taxes are great until you change the idea of taxes are investments, and we’re not investing.”
For those who had a front-row seat to Act 10, the legislation has become a lesson.
“As people pay attention, people engage and lock arms and work together, you can overcome that,” Larson said. “We can overcome it, so we overcame it in Wisconsin, and I think we’ll overcome it nationally too.”