When our last issue went to press, there was speculation about a compromise in the battle over union rights taking place in the US state of Wisconsin, allowing Republican governor Scott Walker to push through cuts in exchange for abandoning his attack on collective bargaining.
This would have been logical for the ruling class: “remove organised labour from the fight in order to consquer the rest of the working class”, as the US socialist group Solidarity’s Wisconsin blogger put it.
Instead, on 9 March, Republican legislators split the “Budget Repair Bill”, removing the fiscal elements so as to avoid the quorum which Democratic state senators undercut by fleeing to Illinois. The union-busting measures passed on 10 March, leading to a revival of protests.
Almost instantly, thousands of workers and supporters besieged the state Capitol, leading to a brief reoccupation. The firefighters’ union withdrew almost $200,000 from the M&I Bank, a major contributor to Walker’s election campaign, forcing it to close for a day.
School students organised walkouts. And on 13 March 100,000 people protested in Madison. Workers were joined by hundreds of farmers driving in on their tractors.
It is, of course, much harder to repeal a law than to prevent it passing. The anti-union law goes into effect on 25 March; the danger is that the movement will now ebb away.
Many union officials are trying to shift the emphasis onto an electoralist fight to recall Republican legislators and Walker himself from office. This is plausibie, since they are now dramatically unpopular. But it means demobilising the direct action struggle, and relying on the big business-dominated Democrats, who are not certain to repeal all of Walker’s attacks even if they come to office.
At the other end of the spectrum, US socialists report that there is a widespread “buzz” around the idea of a general strike to force the repeal of the anti-union law. Madison’s equivalent of a trades council has voted to prepare for a general strike, and “general strike” is what protesters chanted when they reinvaded the Capitol.
