The Protest Begins!

Day 1 (Monday): I Heart UW

Governor Walker had been prudent to send out his bad news on a Friday, when many state workers were gone or focused on the weekend. But it still hadn’t gone unnoticed by alert folks, like our friend Dave, or like another friend of ours, Kevin, the current TAA president.

Monday would be Valentine’s Day. Kevin is a creative, funny, energetic guy, and he helped organize a few thousand students to gather at the student union and make a giant pile of Valentine’s Day cards to be delivered to Walker’s office at noon. The cards’ and protest signs’ message was: “I Heart UW; Walker, Don’t Break My Heart.”

The students have reason to fear losing the TAA. Without the union, teaching assistants’ salaries and benefits could fall so low as to make school unaffordable for many UW grad students. Unable to provide competitive funding, grad programs may not be able to attract quality students and the quality of UW education could go down.

The students marched up State Street to the Capitol, chanting and shouting along the way. They led raucous chants in the Capitol rotunda before delivering their cards. The following video is a little choppy, but it captures the energy of the day:

(If the video doesn’t work in your browser, click this link to view it.)

From our cubicles a block away, Ron and I caught wind of this and felt proud of our friend and the other students. We were beginning to realize Dave had been onto something when he’d been glaring up at Walker’s office window Friday night.

Day 1 (Monday, Continued): A Not-So-Public Hearing

That day was another rapid lesson in politics for me. Among other things, I learned that to pass a bill in Wisconsin, a public hearing is required before the vote takes place. The Budget Repair Bill’s hearing had not been well-publicized, but the very fact that it wasn’t actually wound up generating a lot of publicity for it.

According to an announcement from the WI Democracy Campaign that afternoon:

The Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee will be holding a public hearing tomorrow at 10 a.m. in room 412 East in the State Capitol on the proposed budget-repair legislation that takes away worker rights in the name of balancing the state’s books. Trouble is, as of 1:45 this afternoon there still was no mention of the hearing on the schedule of committee activities on the Legislature’s public web site. The Democracy Campaign has learned that paper copies of the hearing notice were posted inside the Capitol building earlier today, and legislative leaders claim that satisfies the public notice requirement.

This announcement flew around Facebook and email. Thanks to it and to the attention the students’ protest had received, angry Wisconsinites would show up in droves to testify against the bill.

Day 2 (Tuesday): The Protest Grows

The public hearing was to be heard by the Senate Joint Committee on Finance, which is composed of 12 Republican senators and 4 Democratic senators. According to procedure, once the committee hears the public speak, they adjourn and vote on the bill. If they approve it, it then goes to the senate for a vote.

But word was going out that maybe, if the public hearing drew enough attention, legislators would reconsider passing the bill. Tuesday morning by ten o’clock, the line for the hearing was several hours long.

While the hearing was taking place, Tuesday saw another, larger crowd of at least 10,000 people at the Capitol at noon. By now, Ron and I and our colleagues were riveted to what was happening. So was everyone around us. In our cubicles, we tried to concentrate on our watershed study, but we were periodically interrupted by friends popping in to give us the latest: The public-hearing line was still hours long. The protest was on the news. Thousands of people were rallying.

At noon, we walked there ourselves to check it out and join the protest. We could hear it almost immediately as we exited our building. Despite the cold, as we approached the Capitol, the crowd was lively and the energy was contagious.

The Capitol sits at the intersection of eight roads, and around it, the Capitol Square is circumnavigated by a one-way road, like a giant roundabout. We found the broad lawns packed with thousands of people holding signs, singing, yelling, and listening to speakers with megaphones. The crowd spilled into the streets, so that circling cars had to drive slowly.

This was a side of Wisconsin and Madison I hadn’t seen before. I’d been to rallies for Hillary and Obama in 2008, but never to a Wisconsin protest. This town is easygoing and likes to have a good time. University students and adults love to drink beer; people eat cheese and brats and go to fish fries on Friday nights. Everyone loves the Packers, and since there’s only one state university, they all love the Badgers too. People are friendly, cheerful, and sturdy, used to dealing with cold and snow.

Today people were smiling, but there was a firmness and fierceness to them. Seeing all the union and workers’ rights signs opened my eyes in a new way. I’d never felt like part of the workers’ rights movement before. I wasn’t even sure whether I’d ever been part of a union. But now, many signs had words like “Solidarity,” “Workers,” and “Labor,” and with a touch of awe, I realized this protest was linked to the history of a nationwide and worldwide movement that was still alive today. Workers’ rights was something I hadn’t thought about much except in vague terms. But now, it was impossible not to become passionate about it.

We cheered and sang with the crowd. It felt great to express our anger over the bill in such a positive, focused, communal way. Cars constantly passed and honked their horns; the yellow Union Cabs honked most vigorously, often doing multiple laps and tapping out a “This-is-what-democracy-looks-like” rhythm. That drew big cheers.

We went back again that evening. The hearing was still going strong, even though it had initially only been scheduled for a few hours. Inside, the Capitol was warm and full of people and signs. The hallway where the hearing was being held was packed with a long line that snaked up and down the corridor.

The building couldn’t be closed to the public as long as the hearing continued, and the line showed no signs of diminishing. The crowd was giddy with excitement.

Day 3 (Wednesday): No Pizza For You!

In the morning, Ron and I greeted the kitties then quickly turned on our laptops, eager for the latest news. To our amazement and delight, hundreds of protesters had decided to sleep over in the Capitol, bringing in blankets and sleeping bags and packing all the available floor space in the rotunda.

Later, we learned that some of our friends had been there. One told us her story: she knew someone at Glass Nickel Pizza, which is located near the Capitol, and when she and other protesters got hungry, she called up her friend and Glass Nickel donated several pizzas at 1 or 2 am.

But unfortunately, when a Glass Nickel employee arrived at the Capitol with the pizzas, the police wouldn’t allow the person in the doors. My friend had gone to meet the deliverer and bring the pizzas inside, and she asked the police if she could go out to bring the pizzas in. But the officer guarding the exit said once you go out, even briefly, you can’t come back.

“Since the assembly’s adjourned, the building is technically closed,” he said, unsympathetically.

Apparently, the police weren’t forcibly kicking people out overnight, but they weren’t letting more people in, either, or letting people back in if they left. Sadly, the donated pizzas went to waste.

Day 3 (Wednesday, Continued): An Attempt to be Heard

Although the assembly was adjourned, the hearing had continued until around 3 am. At that point, it was officially adjourned by Republican senators on the committee, but even then, the line to speak was still approximately 4 hours long. Virtually everyone was testifying against the bill’s passage, although a few pro-bill voices had been conveniently squeezed in at the very beginning when media coverage was strong.

Now, you might say that 17 hours is long enough to hear virtually all opinions the public has to offer on a given bill. And you might be right! But although the public may have been repeating itself after 17 hours, it still very much wanted to be heard.

So after the hearing was officially closed, Democratic senators had immediately opened a ”listening session” to allow the public to continue giving testimony. That listening session was still ongoing when Ron and I awoke and checked the news Wednesday morning.

A listening session carries less weight than a public hearing, we would learn. At a bill’s hearing, your testimony—written or spoken—gets attached to the bill’s official public record, so that anyone looking up the bill can find out how the public felt about it when it was passed. But a listening session isn’t attached to a bill and carries no political weight. And only Democratic senators—who were already sympathetic to those giving testimony—were present at the listening session.

Despite these setbacks, the public was continuing to stream into the Capitol to testify, in hopes that this would generate enough attention and solidarity to somehow halt the bill’s passage.

Energized by all this news, I biked to the Capitol before work that morning to give my own testimony. Inside, I found hundreds of people filling a long, marble hallway while clerks in black suit jackets bustled around handing out paper and pens and explaining the “hearing” process.

One clerk talked to me. He was young and had stayed up all night directing the line, which gave me another jolt of awe—I wondered how many others here had also pulled all-nighters. He looked part dapper in his suit, part exhausted with bags under his eyes, and part exhilarated. With a haggard smile, he said he was a political science major on an internship. I knew he must be thrilled to be thrust into the heart of politics in action.

He explained that to give testimony, you filled out a little card with your name, whether you were for or against the bill, and any comments you’d like to enter. You could either choose to speak your comments aloud at a microphone (supposedly in under 2 minutes) or just enter them on the card. If this were a true public hearing, the comments would be attached to the bill, but sadly, our comments would probably be shuffled off into some obscure place.

But we would be captured on WiscEye, the video service that regularly tapes proceedings at the Capitol. And we could actually speak for longer than 2 minutes, since the listening session was less formal.

By the time I got my bearings and learned all this, it was 8:30 am, the line was still 4 hours long, and I needed to go to work. I left, planning to come back later to testify.

Day 3 (Wednesday, Continued): Teachers’ Sick-Out

That day the excitement continued. It was Wednesday, and on Thursday the senate was scheduled to vote on the Budget Repair Bill, the last step before sending it back to Governor Walker to be adopted. Today, teachers around the state staged a sick-out in protest.

If passed, the Budget Repair Bill would affect no group more than teachers. There are 175,000 public-sector employees in Wisconsin, 106,000 of which are teachers. More than any others, it was teachers’ unions this bill had targeted.

A sick-out was yet another political phenomenon I’d never heard of before. It’s like a strike, except that in my opinion, it’s cooler because it’s more grassroots. While a strike is organized by a union, a sick-out requires that at least a third of all teachers in a school district call in sick individually. If that many teachers are “sick,” the school district is forced to cancel school for the day.

I love imagining the coordination that must have taken place for this to happen: the rapid conversations by phone, text, email, and Facebook; the hundreds of determined people deciding to take a risk for what they believed in. The sick-outs so infuriated some citizens and lawmakers that teachers who called in sick without a valid doctor’s note might face reprimands or worse.

Teacher sick-outs would also happen Thursday and Friday in Madison and many other Wisconsin cities, including Milwaukee. As a result, thousands of students would have all those days off from school, forcing parents to scramble to find babysitters and freeing up many children to come to the protests themselves.

In Madison, on Wednesday high schoolers organized themselves to march across town from their respective schools to join the protest. Undoubtedly, they learned more from this democratic participation than they could have learned in class any day of the year.

Day 3 (Wednesday, Continued): Pizza From Around the World

So the protest was even bigger today than Tuesday: around 20,000 protesters, peaking with rallies and chanting at noon and again in the evening.

Ron and I again took our lunch at the Capitol and joined the protests, which we would continue doing in the coming days. Word had gotten out about the thwarted pizza delivery of the previous night, but Glass Nickel and other restaurants were still supporting the protest by donating food.

Out-of-towners also began calling Ian’s Pizza and others and paying for pizzas to be delivered to protesters at the Capitol. It was the latest act that sent an electric charge through the crowd; we gleefully took slices and ate them for lunch, thrilled at the thought of people supporting us from far away.

As the protests continued and grew, pizza would become a constant occurrence. Ian’s would erect a map board with pins showing where people had ordered from, and eventually, pins would mark all of the states and many countries. Word was getting out that what’s happening in Wisconsin could affect all Americans and could even have ripple effects around the world. The stakes are high: unions are on the chopping block.