With their state Senate debating so-called “Right to Work” legislation this week and their Assembly expected to take it up next week, Wisconsin is poised to become the latest Republican-controlled state to enact the anti-union law. In the weeks and months leading up to Michigan’s passage of right to work legislation, anti-union forces rebranded it as “Freedom to Work”. The term “Freedom to Work” is even used on our state government website.
As it turns out, as in so many other ways, Michigan was the testing ground for new corporatist and conservative efforts. The group Wisconsin Right to Work now has FreedomToWorkWI.com as the URL of its website.
[Note that this has nothing to do with the national LGBT advocacy group Freedom to Work.]
The legislation under consideration in Wisconsin is essentially a word-for-word copy of the legislation developed by the corporatist front group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which puts out pro-Big Business model legislation so that conservative lawmakers don’t have to do the hard work of actually creating their own laws. Their corporate benefactors are more than happy to help them with that.
Notorious corporatist and former ALEC state chairman Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald sponsored the bill and made a surprise announcement last Friday that he was going to move it through the state legislature as quickly as possible so that labor supporters would have little or no time to organize.
If you’d like to help workers in Wisconsin fight this, there is a “Wisconsin Solidarity Toolkit” online HERE which includes memes, graphics, and example tweets.
There was a rally today at noon and there will be another tomorrow. Please retweet this tweet to help spread the word:
Pls retweet—> WISCONSIN: Rally to oppose #RightToWork at the Capitol Tues and Wed #1u @WISAFLCIO pic.twitter.com/CQo04xBo5p
— AFL-CIO (@AFLCIO) February 21, 2015
You can also share the the Facebook event page with your friends in Wisconsin.
[Photo credit: Anne C. Savage, special to Eclectablog]
