2011 Wisconsin Act 10
Based on Wikipedia: 2011 Wisconsin Act 10
In February 2011, fourteen Democratic state senators fled Wisconsin and hid in Illinois hotels for three weeks. They weren't running from criminal charges or personal scandal. They were trying to stop a vote.
The legislation they were fleeing would become known as Wisconsin Act 10, and it would fundamentally reshape the relationship between government workers and the state that employed them. More than that, it would become a template—copied, debated, and contested across America—for how states could rein in the power of public employee unions.
The Budget Crisis That Wasn't Entirely About Budgets
When Republican Governor Scott Walker introduced the bill on February 14, 2011—Valentine's Day, of all days—he framed it as fiscal medicine. Wisconsin faced a projected $3.6 billion budget deficit. Something had to give.
But the bill went far beyond asking state employees to pay more for their pensions and health insurance. It also stripped away most collective bargaining rights for public workers. And that's where the fight really began.
Here's the thing about collective bargaining: it's the process where employees band together to negotiate with their employer as a group rather than individually. When you negotiate your salary alone, you have limited leverage. When every teacher in a district negotiates together, that's a different conversation entirely. Collective bargaining is the core power of any union.
Walker's bill didn't just ask workers to contribute more to their retirement. It asked them to give up the right to negotiate about almost everything except basic wages—and even those increases would be capped.
The Great Escape to Illinois
Wisconsin's state legislature has a peculiar rule: you need at least 20 of 33 senators present to vote on any bill involving money. With 19 Republicans and 14 Democrats, the math was simple. If every Democrat left the state, there could be no quorum. No quorum, no vote.
So that's exactly what they did.
On February 17, all fourteen Democratic senators crossed the state line into Illinois, where Wisconsin state troopers had no authority to drag them back. They stayed for three weeks.
The response from Republican leadership was swift and punitive. Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald—yes, that's his real name, straight out of a political novel—cut off the absent senators' staffers from using copy machines. Senators who missed two or more days couldn't receive their paychecks via direct deposit; they'd have to pick them up in person at the Capitol. Which, of course, they couldn't do without returning.
By early March, Republicans voted to fine the absent members $100 per day and authorized the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms to arrest them. The resolution mentioned "contempt and disorderly behavior." But Wisconsin authorities couldn't cross into Illinois, so the standoff continued.
The Protests That Transformed the Capitol
While senators played interstate cat-and-mouse, something remarkable happened in Madison. Tens of thousands of protesters descended on the State Capitol. They weren't just union members—though there were plenty of those. Teachers, firefighters, nurses, students, and ordinary citizens packed the building's marble halls.
For weeks, the Capitol became a 24-hour demonstration site. Protesters slept on the floors. They held signs. They chanted. The building, usually quiet and bureaucratic, hummed with the energy of a political movement.
What made Act 10 particularly contentious was its selectivity. The bill exempted certain public safety unions—police officers, firefighters, and sheriff's deputies—from the collective bargaining restrictions. Critics immediately noticed that these exempted unions had, by and large, supported Walker's campaign for governor. The unions being targeted, particularly teachers' unions, had not.
Walker's defenders argued the exemptions were about public safety. You can't have police officers or firefighters striking during emergencies. But to opponents, it looked like political payback dressed up as policy.
The Money Behind the Movement
To understand Act 10, you need to understand how public employee compensation actually works.
When we talk about teacher or government worker salaries, we're usually talking about take-home pay. But total compensation includes benefits: health insurance, retirement contributions, and other perks. Before Act 10, Wisconsin covered most pension contributions for its employees. State, school district, and municipal workers generally paid little or nothing toward their pensions directly.
This sounds generous, and in some ways it was. But it's also a matter of framing. Total compensation is total compensation, however you slice it. Whether the state gives you $50,000 in salary plus $5,000 in pension contributions, or $55,000 in salary and asks you to contribute $5,000 yourself, the math is similar. The difference is psychological—and political.
Act 10 required Wisconsin Retirement System employees to contribute roughly half of the annual pension payment, estimated at about 5.8% of salary. For someone earning $50,000, that's nearly $3,000 less in take-home pay each year.
Health insurance changed too. State employees had been paying around 6% of their premiums on average. The law bumped that to at least 12.6%—more than doubling their out-of-pocket costs.
These weren't abstract numbers. They meant real cuts to real paychecks.
The Nuclear Option
After three weeks of standoff, Republicans found a way around the quorum requirement.
The 20-senator quorum rule only applied to fiscal bills—legislation involving money. So on March 9, Republicans stripped out the budgetary provisions from Act 10, creating a separate bill focused solely on the collective bargaining restrictions. This new bill required only a simple majority.
It was a procedural maneuver, legal but aggressive. Democrats cried foul, arguing the move violated open meetings laws. But the bill passed the Senate with only Republican votes.
Governor Walker signed it into law on March 11, 2011. The fourteen senators returned from Illinois. The protests eventually dispersed. And Wisconsin became ground zero for a national debate about unions, government workers, and political power.
What Act 10 Actually Changed
The details matter, because this law reached into nearly every corner of public employment in Wisconsin.
First, collective bargaining itself. Public employee unions could now only negotiate over base wages—not benefits, not working conditions, not job security. And even wage increases were capped. If a union wanted raises above the Consumer Price Index, voters would have to approve it in a referendum. Imagine going to the ballot box to decide whether teachers in your district get a 3% raise instead of 2%.
Second, union survival became much harder. Under the new rules, collective bargaining units had to hold annual votes to maintain their certification. Not votes on contracts or leadership—votes on whether the union should exist at all. Every year.
Third, the law prohibited employers from collecting union dues through payroll deduction. Before Act 10, dues came out of paychecks automatically, just like taxes or health insurance premiums. Now, unions had to collect from each member individually. This might seem like a minor administrative change, but it's actually devastating to union finances. Getting people to proactively write checks every month is much harder than automatic deduction.
Fourth, union membership became truly optional. Workers in collective bargaining units were no longer required to pay dues, even if the union negotiated on their behalf. This is called the "free rider" problem in labor economics: if the union wins a raise for everyone, why would anyone pay dues when they get the benefits either way?
The University Exception
Act 10 also carved out the University of Wisconsin-Madison for special treatment—though not in the way you might expect.
The law separated the flagship Madison campus from the rest of the University of Wisconsin System. This was about governance and autonomy, giving Madison more independence from the statewide university bureaucracy. It was a sweetener, perhaps, amid the bitter medicine. Or maybe just an unrelated policy goal attached to a must-pass bill. In politics, these things often happen together.
Meanwhile, UW faculty and academic staff lost their collective bargaining rights entirely. So did employees at the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics.
The Courts Weigh In
Act 10's legal battles lasted more than a decade.
The main challenge, Madison Teachers Inc. v. Walker, raised several constitutional arguments. Did the law violate workers' rights to freedom of association? Did treating police and firefighter unions differently from teachers' unions violate equal protection? Did the law's restrictions on local governments violate Wisconsin's home rule provisions—the principle that cities and counties have some independence from state mandates?
A circuit court judge named Juan B. Colas initially struck down several provisions. But in July 2014, the Wisconsin Supreme Court reversed him in a 5-2 decision, upholding Act 10 completely.
The legal fight didn't end there. As late as 2024, courts were still wrestling with the law's unequal treatment of public safety unions versus everyone else. A circuit court judge named Jacob Frost struck down parts of the law on exactly those grounds—the same argument that had failed a decade earlier was succeeding now, with different judges interpreting the same constitution differently.
Beyond the Headlines
Buried in Act 10 were provisions that received less attention but affected thousands of people.
Limited-term employees—temporary workers—lost eligibility for health insurance and state retirement benefits entirely. Home health care workers under Medicaid lost their ability to collectively bargain. So did family child care workers. These weren't high-profile professions with powerful unions, but they were people who would now face their employers alone.
The law also gave the governor new powers during declared emergencies. If workers were absent for three days without approval during a state of emergency, or if they participated in work slowdowns, they could be terminated. This provision wasn't hypothetical; it was a warning shot at any future protest.
And in one of the law's stranger provisions, Act 10 authorized the state to sell its heating plants. The proceeds, after paying off any remaining debt, would go into a budget stabilization fund. Why heating plants specifically? Sometimes legislation is less a coherent philosophy than a grab bag of whatever the majority wants at the moment.
The Ripple Effects
Wisconsin Act 10 didn't stay in Wisconsin.
Other Republican-controlled states watched closely and passed similar legislation. The law became a proof of concept: you could take on public employee unions, survive the protests, and win reelection. Scott Walker did exactly that, defeating a recall attempt in 2012 and winning another term in 2014.
For conservatives, Act 10 represented fiscal responsibility and a check on union power. Unions, they argued, had negotiated unsustainable benefits that taxpayers couldn't afford. Public employees shouldn't have advantages that private-sector workers didn't enjoy.
For liberals, the law was an assault on workers' fundamental rights. Collective bargaining wasn't just about money—it was about having a voice in your workplace. Taking that away while exempting politically friendly unions made the whole thing look like power politics, not reform.
Both sides had a point. That's what made the debate so bitter.
What About Teacher Salaries?
Act 10 connects directly to ongoing debates about teacher compensation. When states limit collective bargaining, they limit the primary mechanism teachers have used to negotiate higher pay. The results vary by district: some local governments used their new flexibility to adjust pay structures, while others simply cut costs.
The law also changed what districts could negotiate over. Before Act 10, teachers' unions often bargained for smaller class sizes, planning time, and other working conditions. After Act 10, those issues were off the table. Districts could make unilateral decisions about everything except base wages.
Whether this was good or bad depends on your perspective. Supporters argued it gave school boards and administrators flexibility to manage their budgets and schools. Critics argued it left teachers with little power to shape their own profession.
One thing is certain: Wisconsin became a laboratory for what happens when you dramatically restructure the relationship between government workers and their employer. More than a decade later, we're still analyzing the results.
The Bigger Picture
Act 10 raised questions that go beyond Wisconsin and beyond 2011.
Should government workers have the same rights to organize as private-sector workers? The two situations are different: in the private sector, unions negotiate with company management; in the public sector, they negotiate with elected officials spending taxpayer money. Some argue this gives public unions too much political influence—they can help elect the very people they'll negotiate with.
Others counter that government workers need unions precisely because they're subject to political whims. Without collective bargaining, every election becomes a referendum on their job security and compensation. That's a lot of instability for people we rely on to teach our children, maintain our roads, and run our public institutions.
There's also the question of who benefits from weak unions. When public employee compensation falls, does the money go to taxpayers? To other public services? To tax cuts? The answer varies, and it's often not as straightforward as the rhetoric suggests.
Where Things Stand
Wisconsin Act 10 remains law, though it continues to face legal challenges. The exemptions for police and firefighter unions remain a point of contention—a reminder that even sweeping reforms contain political calculations.
Scott Walker rode the law's success to national prominence, briefly running for president in 2015 before dropping out. He lost the governorship in 2018 to Democrat Tony Evers, though Act 10 survived the transition. Repealing such a comprehensive law would require legislative action, and the Republican-controlled legislature had no interest in undoing its signature achievement.
For the fourteen senators who fled to Illinois, the episode became a defining moment in their careers. Some were hailed as heroes of resistance; others faced criticism for abandoning their posts. Like so much about Act 10, the judgment depends on where you stand.
In the end, the law accomplished what its supporters wanted: it weakened public employee unions in Wisconsin and inspired similar efforts elsewhere. Whether that was a victory for taxpayers, a defeat for workers, or something more complicated—that debate continues, in Wisconsin and across America, wherever teachers negotiate contracts and governments balance budgets and citizens argue about what we owe each other.