Scott Walker and the Fate of the Union

On his first day of work in three months, Randy Bryce asked his foreman for the next day off. He wanted to go to the Capitol in Madison, Wis., and testify against a proposed law. Bryce, a member of Milwaukee Ironworkers Local 8, was unloading truckloads of steel beams to build a warehouse near Kenosha, and he needed the job. He has an 8-year-old son, his debts were piling up and a 10-hour shift paid more than $300. But the legislation, which Republicans were rushing through the State Senate, angered him enough to sacrifice the hours. Supporters called it a “right to work” bill, because it prohibited unions from requiring employees to pay dues. But to Bryce, that appealing name hid the true purpose of the bill, which was to destroy unions.

The next morning, Bryce, who is 50 and has close-­cropped black hair and a horseshoe mustache, woke up at 5:30, got dressed in his usual jeans, hoodie and Local 8 varsity jacket with an I-beam and an American flag stitched on the back and drove 90 miles to Madison in his gray Mustang. Despite the February chill, crowds had begun to gather in the square outside the Capitol. The scene was reminiscent of a similar one that played out four years earlier, in 2011, when thousands of people occupied the Capitol’s rotunda for more than two weeks to protest Act 10, a law that demolished collective-­bargaining rights for nearly all public employees. The protests in Madison were the first significant resistance to the ascendant Tea Party and helped set the stage for Occupy Wall Street. For Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, it was the moment that started his conservative ascent. “The Republican Party has a demonstrated, genuine hero and potential star in its ranks, and he is the governor of Wisconsin,” Rush Limbaugh said last year. The unions, Democrats and other perceived enemies, he continued, had “thrown everything they’ve got at Scott Walker, and he has beat them back without one syllable of complaint, without one ounce of whining. All he has done is win.” Walker is expected to announce in the next few weeks that he is entering the 2016 presidential race.

It is particularly bitter for Walker’s opponents that his rise has taken place in Wisconsin, a blue state with a long history of labor activism; it was the first state in the nation to grant collective-­bargaining rights to public employees, in 1959. Walker, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has won three races for governor, one a recall effort, and each time he took more than a third of the votes from union households. He was able to do this by making “labor” seem like someone else — even to union members — and pitting one faction against another. Four years ago, in a private exchange captured by a documentary filmmaker, he revealed his successful strategy to a billionaire supporter who asked him if Wisconsin would ever become a right-to-work state. Walker responded enthusiastically, explaining that Act 10 was just the beginning of a larger effort. “The first step is, we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public-­employee unions,” he said, “because you use divide-­and-­conquer.”

At the Capitol, dozens of state troopers (who kept their bargaining rights) and Capitol police officers (who lost theirs) were now patrolling the rotunda to prevent it from being occupied again. The Senate hearing room was already packed, so Bryce watched the hearing on monitors outside while he waited for his turn to speak. First came the expert witnesses. James Sherk, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said that unions operate as cartels: “They try to control the supply of labor in an industry so as to drive up its price, namely wages. But like all cartels, these gains come at the cost of greater losses to the rest of society.” Greg Mourad, a spokesman for a lobbying organization called the National Right to Work Committee, which has received significant funding from the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, compared the experience of being made to pay union dues to being kidnapped and extorted. Gordon Lafer, a political scientist at the University of Oregon, noted on the other hand that while right-to-work laws in other states had generated no identifiable economic gains, they did drive down wages for union and nonunion workers alike.

Ordinary citizens got their chance to speak in the afternoon. Nearly all of them opposed the bill. A crane operator cited statistics showing that workers in right-to-work states are killed on the job more frequently. “Are you prepared to be accountable for the deaths that being a right-to-work state can create?” he asked. Anthony Anastasi, the president of Ironworkers Local 383, broke down in tears as he pleaded to the legislators, “Please think about the families that will be impacted by this.”

At 6 p.m., Bryce’s name finally appeared on the list of coming speakers. He paced the hallway outside the hearing room in anticipation. But 20 minutes later, Stephen Nass, the Republican senator who is the chairman of the Labor and Government Reform Committee, announced that there was a “credible threat of disruption” and that the hearing would be adjourned so the committee could vote to move the bill forward (it passed). A labor organizer, it turned out, had told The Milwaukee Journal ­Sentinel that some people planned to stand up in protest at 7 p.m., when testimony was to be cut off. (“I went through Act 10 — it was ugly,” Nass said earlier in the hearing, referring to the difficulty some senators experienced reaching various parts of the Capitol after the rotunda was occupied. “We had to go through a tunnel like rats. We don’t want to go through that again.”) About a hundred people were still in line to testify. A chant of “Let us speak” erupted. But Nass quickly took the committee members’ votes and was then escorted out, with his two Republican colleagues, by a phalanx of state troopers.

Bryce still wanted to speak. He had lost a day’s wages, and the committee’s two Democratic senators had remained to hear more testimony. State troopers were now blocking the door to the hearing room, though, so he decided to address a group of protesters in the hallway outside instead.

“My name is Randy Bryce,” he began in a loud voice. “I’ve been a member of Ironworkers Local 8 since 1997. I’ve had the privilege in that time to work on many of Wisconsin’s landmarks, private businesses and numerous other parts of our infrastructure.” As he spoke, the protesters began to quiet. Bryce described how he had wandered from job to job after he left the Army, how Local 8’s apprenticeship program had given him direction, a real career. Finally, he presented the case against what he called “a blatant political attack” on his union. “All of our representatives are elected,” he said. “All of the decisions that we make are voted on. The general membership is given monthly reports on how every dime is spent. Every dime spent is voted on. Unlike what is taking place this week, Ironworkers Local 8 is pure democracy. I am disappointed beyond words at not just what this bill contains, but how it is being passed.”

Two days later, just after the full Senate approved the bill that would make Wisconsin the 25th right-to-work state, Scott Walker was in Maryland, attending the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual showcase for conservative activists and Republican presidential hopefuls. At a question-­and-­answer session, one attendee asked Walker how he, as president, would confront the threat from radical Islamist groups like ISIS. Walker’s answer was simple, and may in the end define his candidacy. “If I can take on 100,000 protesters,” he said, “I can do the same across the world.”

At the foot of a hill in Bay View, a quiet Milwaukee neighborhood near Lake Michigan, stand seven pear trees. In front of them is a small wooden plaque that recounts the events of May 5, 1886, when some 1,500 workers, most of them Polish immigrants, marched on the Rolling Mills iron plant. The Milwaukee Iron Company built the plant and the neighborhood where its employees lived, and it demanded in return that they work as many as 16 hours a day, six days a week. A citywide strike for an eight-hour day and better working conditions had shut down every large factory in Milwaukee except Rolling Mills, and as the marchers began climbing the hill toward this last holdout, members of the Wisconsin National Guard fired down on them. They killed seven people, including a 13-year-old boy. Jeremiah Rusk, the governor of Wisconsin, had given the order. “I seen my duty, and I done it,” he later said. At the time he thought he might become president, but in the end he never ran. Until 1986, when the Wisconsin Labor History Society began holding an annual commemoration, the Bay View Massacre was largely forgotten. In 1996, the society planted the pear trees, one for each person killed.

Many of the great labor battles that followed the Bay View Massacre — Pittsburgh’s Homestead Strike of 1892; Colorado’s Ludlow Massacre of 1914 — also ended in violent defeat for the workers. Yet the defeats, in their very brutality, also forged a sense of solidarity that eventually produced great labor victories, including the eight-hour workday, enshrined into federal law during the Depression, and the passage of the 1935 Wagner Act, which guaranteed the right to strike and remains labor’s greatest means of leverage. The following year, the American Federation of Labor fully chartered A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a black union. From 1935 to 1947, union membership in the United States quadrupled, from 3.5 million workers to nearly 15 million workers, fueled by the pro-­union policies of the New Deal and a labor shortage during World War II. By the mid-’50s, more than a third of American workers belonged to a union.

In 1941, when the movement was still ascending, William Ruggles, a 40-year-old editorial writer for The Dallas Morning News, coined the slogan “right to work.” Ruggles was alarmed by the growing strength of the labor movement, which in his view was intent on forcing all workers into unions. He proposed a constitutional amendment that would prohibit workers from having to pay dues to a union in order to hold a job in a “union shop.” “If the country does not want it, let us say so,” he wrote. “If we do want it, adopt it and maintain forever the right to work of every American.”

The day after the editorial was printed, a Houston political activist named Vance Muse called Ruggles to ask permission for his organization, the Christian American Association, to pursue the proposal. Ruggles agreed and suggested to Muse that he call it a “Right to Work Amendment.” Muse, an avowed racist — he told a United States Senate committee in 1936, “I am a Southerner and for white supremacy” — held a special animus toward unions, which he believed fostered race-­mixing. In “Southern Exposure,” a 1946 book about racism in the South, the muckraking journalist Stetson Kennedy quoted Muse’s pitch on the need for right-to-work, in which he said: “White women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes, whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.”

But Muse was also an effective fund-­raiser — he received support from General Motors and the du Pont family, among others — and lobbyist. In 1944, the Christian American Association sponsored the amendment that made Arkansas one of the country’s first right-to-work states. By 1947, 10 more states, most of them in the South, had become right-to-work, embodying the growing national backlash against labor brought on by the Red Scare. That same year, over President Harry Truman’s veto, Congress passed the Taft-­Hartley Act, which undercut the Wagner Act by placing numerous restrictions on unions, among them a clause granting states the power to become right-to-work. Muse died in 1950, but his campaign had already been taken over by more mainstream proponents. In 1955, Fred Hartley, the former congressman from New Jersey who helped draft Taft-­Hartley, founded the National Right to Work Committee. Three years later, Kansas legislators, with the enthusiastic support of the oil magnate Fred Koch, David and Charles Koch’s father, adopted a right-to-work amendment. By 1963, 19 states were right-to-work. Since then, six more have adopted the measure, including, in the past three years, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin.

As state legislatures chipped away at unions, other forces were also at work. Some union bosses turned corrupt. Manufacturers began pursuing cheaper labor overseas. Automated systems replaced skilled workers in industry after industry. And some politicians saw a chance to show that they were not beholden to “special interests.”

In the fall of 1980, Ronald Reagan, then a Republican presidential candidate, sent a letter to Robert Poli, the president of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, seeking the endorsement of the union, many of whose members were military veterans and socially conservative. “You can rest assured,” Reagan wrote, “that if I am elected president, I will take whatever steps are necessary to provide our air traffic controllers with the most modern equipment available and to adjust staff levels and workdays so that they are commensurate with achieving a maximum degree of public safety.” The union gave Reagan its endorsement.

Eight months later, after contract negotiations with the Federal Aviation Administration failed, the members of the union voted to strike, violating an oath signed by federal employees. Reagan was unsympathetic. After 48 hours, he invoked a provision of Taft-­Hartley and not only fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers, but also had them permanently replaced. The union’s strike fund was frozen, many of its local leaders were imprisoned and, until 1993, the former strikers were banned from the Civil Service. Since Reagan broke that union, the number of large-scale strikes begun in a given year in the United States has fallen to 11 (last year) from 145 (in 1981). In 2014, only 11 percent of all American workers and 7 percent of private-­sector workers belonged to a union.

The night before Walker announced his plans for Act 10 to the public, he gathered his cabinet in the governor’s mansion for a private dinner and a pep talk. During the dinner, Walker stood up and held aloft a picture of Reagan. He singled out the firing of the air traffic controllers as “one of the most defining moments” of Reagan’s political career — a moment, he said, that “was the first crack in the Berlin Wall.”

Randy Bryce wasn’t always a labor activist. He grew up in Milwaukee’s “policeman’s ghetto,” a working-­class neighborhood on the city’s southwestern edge. His father was a beat cop, his mother a doctor’s secretary. In 1983, Bryce enlisted in the Army so he could pay for college and was stationed for a year at Soto Cano air base in Honduras, then a launching point for American covert operations in Nicaragua and El Salvador. “My dad was conservative,” Bryce said. “When I was in the Army, I was, too. I was into Reagan, but it was more America first, U.S.A., U.S.A.”

After his discharge, Bryce briefly attended the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, but was found to have testicular cancer and dropped out to receive treatment. He lucked into an experimental trial at a medical college that cured him and eventually landed a job assisting homeless veterans. “I remember talking to a vet,” he said. “He was an atomic warrior in the Cold War, and he showed me his back. It looked like someone poured acid on it.” The government wouldn’t help the man, Bryce said, because he was unable to prove that the injury was caused by exposure to an atomic test. “It couldn’t have been made more clear to me that vets were disposable resources,” he said. Bryce heard about Local 8’s apprenticeship program from a patient in his mother’s office. After completing his four-year ironworker’s apprenticeship, he became more involved in the union. Since Act 10 passed in 2011, he has run unsuccessfully for State Senate and State Assembly and now serves as Local 8’s political coordinator. After protesting the passage of right-to-work laws in Indiana and Michigan, Bryce began a grass-roots organizing campaign against the bill in Wisconsin.

In southeastern Wisconsin, union ironworkers earn $55 an hour and receive $33 of that in pretax income. (The difference goes to funding their pensions, health care and training.) The pretax pay for a unionized ironworker in Iowa, a right-to-work state since 1947, tops out at $26 an hour. In Texas, also a right-to-work state since 1947, the ironworkers’ locals offer pretax wages ranging from $21 an hour to close to $30 an hour. Nonunion workers in the state doing the same job make about $8 an hour. “A mile of U.S. highway in Texas costs close to the same as it does in Wisconsin, certainly not less than half,” Colin Millard, an organizer for the Iron Workers International Union, told me. “So it is only a question of who makes the money — the workers or the owners.”

Ironwork is a dangerous job. It has the sixth-highest fatality rate in the country, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. A 2011 University of Michigan study concluded that the fatality rate in construction trades was 40 percent higher in right-to-work states. Local 8 offers a four-year training program that requires more than 7,000 hours of combined classroom and on-the-job study. Even many right-to-work proponents single out the building trades’ training programs, like Local 8’s, as exemplary.

That is one reason many Wisconsin business owners, who might be expected to cheer the demise of unions and welcome cheaper labor costs, have not done so. Contractors rely on the unions to certify and drug-test workers and keep their workers current on new technologies and job skills. Collectively, Wisconsin’s trade unions contributed more than $30 million last year to training programs.

Bill Kennedy, the president of Rock Road Companies, a family-­owned asphalt-­paving operation with headquarters in Janesville, Wis., flew back early from a Florida business trip to testify against the right-to-work bill at the same Senate hearing where Bryce tried to speak. Kennedy also helps run the Wisconsin Contractors Coalition, an organization of business owners whose positions on labor issues counter those of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the most powerful statewide business lobby, which has pushed hard for right-to-work. Within a few months of its founding in 2014, Kennedy’s coalition attracted nearly 450 like-minded businesses that collectively employ some 120,000 people. Like many of the group’s members, Kennedy voted for Walker and contributed to each of his campaigns.

“There’s this misguided myth that unions and management don’t get along,” Kennedy told me the day after the hearing. Rock Road was founded in 1913 by Kennedy’s grandfather. It was a hauling business until the Depression, when it began bidding on government-­funded projects like railroad beds and town roads. At its summertime peak, Kennedy’s company employs about 150 workers. His opposition to right-to-work is rooted in pragmatism. “It’s a business bottom-­line issue,” he said. “Right-to-work is going to compromise my quality, my competitiveness. The unions are my partner. They’re almost like a screening agency.” Kennedy’s greatest fear is that right-to-work will undermine the unions’ contribution, and eventually the quality and skills of his employees. “This is a working system,” he said. “I have never understood this right-to-work agenda.”

Even when he was attacking public unions for robbing the taxpayers of Wisconsin, Walker consistently praised private-­sector unions, particularly those in the construction trades, calling them “my partners in economic development.” During his first term, many of those unions, including Local 8, backed Walker’s effort to rewrite the state’s environmental law so that an enormous iron-­ore mine could be built in a pristine section of northern Wisconsin, a few miles from a Chippewa Indian reservation. The mine, which was never built, was fiercely opposed by Native American tribes and conservationists, but the mining company promised to deliver hundreds of union jobs, creating a split in Walker’s broad-­based opposition.

In 2010, Terry McGowan, the president of Local 139, a statewide union of 9,000 heavy-­machinery operators, endorsed Walker, because he had promised to increase highway funding and build more roads. McGowan supported him again last year, but since then, he has come to reconsider. Testifying at a right-to-work State Assembly hearing in March, McGowan’s voice cracked as he described the death, three days earlier, of Ryan Calkins, a 33-year-old union operating engineer who got caught in a drilling rig while working on a highway interchange in Milwaukee. “Remember that name — Ryan Calkins — because he will just be a little blurb in the newspaper,” McGowan told the legislators. Five hours after Calkins was killed, McGowan said, he received a call from a lawyer for Calkins’s employer; it needed someone who knew how to operate the specialized drill to help remove the mutilated body. McGowan sent one of his union members, who had trained at Local 139’s facility in central Wisconsin. “Now we’re talking about possibly taking training and safety away from our industry?” McGowan asked in disbelief.

A few days after McGowan testified, I went to see him at Local 139’s impressive new glass-and-steel union hall in wealthy suburban Waukesha County, a stronghold of support for Walker. McGowan greeted me warmly, but I could see he was still shaken by Calkins’s death. “I gained a lot of respect for the guy that I called, because he made it very obvious he didn’t want to do it,” McGowan said. “But he said he was not going to allow a fellow operating engineer to sit wrapped around that drill bit in that weather and freeze solid. You could hear his family in the background. I’m sure he was looking at his wife and kids while I was talking to him.”

In his testimony, McGowan described his members as “beer-­drinking, gun-­toting, pickup-­driving rednecks” and reminded legislators that many of his workers are politically conservative and usually vote Republican. Local 139’s special relationship to Republican politicians was made clear when Scott Fitzgerald, the State Senate majority leader and the sponsor of the right-to-work bill, floated the idea of exempting McGowan’s union, along with a few others.

“One side of the aisle likes the work we do, but not our organization, while the other side likes our organization, but not what we do,” McGowan told me. He had lobbied heavily on behalf of the iron-ore mine. “I was surprised that the United Steelworkers fought the mine so hard, when the mine would have used their equipment. The mine became political, and a lot of the unions that opposed it; they did it so that Walker couldn’t get a victory out of it. My thinking was: jobs.”

Fidgeting behind his desk, McGowan rubbed his bald scalp and half-­smiled. “I sort of trusted the guy,” he said, recalling his 2010 endorsement of Walker. “I took some bullets at the time from the other unions.” When Walker’s “divide and conquer” video was released in 2012, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked McGowan about the governor’s remarks. McGowan told the paper that the phrase “divide and conquer” troubled him. “It means turning worker against worker,” he said.

Last fall, McGowan met with Walker, who was seeking a contribution and another endorsement for governor, at a small campaign office in Wauwatosa, outside Milwaukee. “I looked across the table at him, and I said, ‘We are both God-­fearing men,’ ” McGowan told me. “ ‘If you can tell me that right-to-work will not come on your desk, then I will take you for your word.’ He looked me in the eyes, and he said, ‘It will not make it to my desk.’ He was looking for a contribution, and I was looking for a commitment. We both got what we came for. He kept his, and I lost mine.”

In 1956, the Republican Party platform declared: “The protection of the right of workers to organize into unions and to bargain collectively is the firm and permanent policy of the Eisenhower administration.” President Richard Nixon enthusiastically courted the white “hard-hat vote,” winning a majority of union households in the 1972 election. During a news conference announcing the replacement of the air traffic controllers, Reagan boasted of his union bona fides as a lifelong member of the A.F.L.-­C.I.O. who led the Screen Actors Guild in its first-­ever strike. Walker’s own consistent praise for private unions appears, with the passage of right-to-work, to have come to an end, and with it any sense that his party must even pretend to support labor.

Many union leaders worry that if Walker is elected president, Congress could pass a national right-to-work bill. In January, Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, introduced such a bill in the House; it now has 98 co-­sponsors. In February, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, sponsored a similar bill, which now has co-­sponsors in Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, and 15 other Republicans.

In this sense, passing Act 10 was a kind of audition for Walker. “If we can do it in Wisconsin, we can do it anywhere — even in our nation’s capital,” he wrote in his 2013 book, “Unintimidated.” The origins of Wisconsin’s right-to-work bill, meanwhile, showed whom he might have been trying to impress. As revealed by the Center for Media and Democracy, a watchdog organization based in Madison, Wisconsin’s law was a virtual copy of a 1995 model bill promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization based in Arlington, Va., that disseminates model legislation for a consortium of corporations and conservative private backers, including the Koch brothers.

A law with language that closely tracks that model bill was enacted in Michigan in 2012. Similarly worded proposals were introduced this year in Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico and West Virginia, but they failed to advance. Missouri’s right-to-work bill, which was also more or less identical to the model bill, passed both houses this year, only to be vetoed by Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, early this month. A few weeks after signing the right-to-work bill, Walker gave a private talk in New York to a group of powerful Republican donors that included David Koch. Koch later told reporters that he believes that Walker will be the eventual Republican presidential nominee. “I thought he had a great message,” Koch said after the meeting to a reporter for The New York Observer. “Scott Walker is a tremendous candidate.”

But if Wisconsin is a model for what Walker might achieve nationally, it is worth examining his results so far. Walker credits Act 10 in part for the decline in Wisconsin’s unemployment rate since he took office in 2011 and has said he considers right-to-work “one more arrow in that quiver” for the creation of jobs. But since 2011, the state has fallen to 40th out of the 50 states in job growth and 42nd in wage growth, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data conducted by The Capital Times of Wisconsin. Act 10, officially called the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, was supposed to fix persistent budget shortfalls by lowering labor costs and eliminating union rules. But Wisconsin’s two-year projected budget deficit has actually increased; in May, the Legislature approved a $250 million cut to the state’s prized university system to help close the gap. Wisconsin is now among the top 10 states people move out of.

Right-to-work bills like Walker’s have also had negative consequences. When Michigan implemented a similar law in 2013, 16.3 percent of its workers belonged to a union; within a year, the percentage dropped to 14.5. That may not seem like a precipitous decline, but the loss erodes the collective-­bargaining power of the unions and will almost certainly be reflected in lower wages across the board, as it has been in other states that have passed similar laws. In a New York Times Op-Ed article, Lawrence Mishel, the president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, called the decline of union bargaining power in the United States “the single largest factor suppressing wage growth for middle-­wage workers over the last few decades.” And a recent study by two economists for the International Monetary Fund connected the decline in union membership in advanced economies to the overall rise of income inequality. It is not just pushing down the wages of the working class, they wrote; it is also increasing the incomes of the wealthiest 10 percent.

Wisconsin legislators are now considering repealing the state’s prevailing-wage law, a Depression-­era law requiring public construction projects to pay the going wage in a given area as determined by a survey of local employers. In places with high union membership, the union wage becomes the standard, which then raises the scale for nonunion workers. Like right-to-work, the prevailing-­wage bill is being promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council in states across the country; measures rolling it back recently passed in West Virginia and Nevada. Walker has said that repealing the prevailing-­wage law is not “a priority” — a phrase he also used about the right-to-work bill — but in May, he promised to sign such a bill if it reached his desk.

In early March, I visited Dave Poklinkoski, the president of Local 2304, an electricians’ union, at his office in Madison, where he was drawing up a right-to-work-­compliant union contract. “Divide and conquer, it works,” Poklinkoski said. “It works real well.” He dug out his iPad from under a pile of papers and pulled up an editorial cartoon by Mike Konopacki that showed a bloodied Terry McGowan, the Local 139 president, with a sword in his back, the hilt and handle in the shape of Walker’s head, labeled “R-T-W.”

It didn’t matter if everyone knew that Walker had broken a promise to a union leader, because now it was clear, at least in Wisconsin, that Walker no longer needed labor. “Wisconsin has become a kind of laboratory for oligarchs to implement their political and economic agenda,” Poklinkoski said. “We’re small enough that they can carry it out. Can they carry it out on the national level? We’ll find out.”

Two weeks after Walker signed the right-to-work bill, Local 8 held a monthly meeting in its union hall just outside Milwaukee. On the way there, I drove past Miller Park, the Milwaukee Brewers’ stadium, which Bryce worked on in 2000, during the final phase of its construction. It was the project he was most proud of. From the Interstate, I could see the elaborate arched ironwork crowning the stadium’s top. It reminded me of a photograph I had glimpsed on the wall of Bryce’s home showing him and two other ironworkers decking the top of the stadium. They looked tiny in the far distance, but you could tell how strong the wind was from the way a tarp was blowing.

Bryce’s grandfather, Eugene, had taken the photo. He used to drive by the stadium several times a week, because he loved watching Bryce work. It was difficult to see Bryce and his co-­workers, 350 feet in the air and bracing against the wind, as members of a cartel, as the Heritage Foundation economist had described unions in his Senate testimony. Miller Park had claimed the lives of three Local 8 ironworkers, who fell 300 feet to their deaths when a giant crane collapsed into the stadium on a fiercely windy day.

Bryce arrived at the Local 8 meeting straight from work, wearing mud-­caked overalls. He walked into the office to pay his $53 in monthly dues and then chatted with a few other ironworkers before wandering into the meeting hall. After the men recited the Pledge of Allegiance and the recording secretary read the minutes from the previous month’s meeting, the executive board began a series of briefings: the prospects for building a new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks, the restructuring of the local’s dental plans, what happened at the annual conference of the international union in Las Vegas.

Last on the agenda was Bryce’s political report. He stood up and started talking. He told the union workers about being locked out of the Senate hearing. He told them about the next day, when he went back to protest and was thrown out of the Senate debate for shouting, “This bill is turning Wisconsin into a banana republic.” He talked about his organizing trips in anticipation of right-to-work and the dispiritingly small crowds at the rallies. He implored Local 8’s members to become more active and not to think of themselves as elite tradesmen whose concerns were distinct from those of other workers and other movements. “Unions are not separate from the community,” he said. “We build the community. Yet you’re seen as the enemy, the reason people are broke. We have to stop this union-­versus-­nonunion mentality.”

After the meeting, Bryce headed out to the parking lot. There had been some defeats, he acknowledged, but he still saw the attacks on unions as an opportunity to build solidarity. “At last month’s meeting, I talked about how the only way to fight back is to stage a massive general strike,” he said. “It doesn’t need to be that, but we do need to build ourselves up to a strength where they fear that. Now they’re not afraid of anything, because we haven’t done anything to fight back.”

Bryce blamed the timidity of both union leaders and the rank-­and-­file, as much as the Republicans, for allowing Act 10 and right-to-work to become law. “People think that unions are useless today, that we’re dinosaurs,” he said. “Well, how did that happen? We let it happen. The labor movement has become lazy, because it’s something that’s been handed to us.” He leaned against his Mustang and stared out into the industrial landscape surrounding the parking lot.

“A lot of guys in our local didn’t see Act 10 as being important for ironworkers,” Bryce said, because it targeted public employees. “I would ask them, how can you say there are good unions and bad unions? It’s an idea that they’re trying to kill — it’s not the union itself. This is the strategy they’re using to do it. They’re splitting everything up. They’re going after them first, then it’s going to be somebody else. Then they’re going to get to us too.”