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Wisconsin’s Top Court Reinstates Law That Sharply Limits Faculty-Union Rights

June 14, 2011, 10:23 pm

The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday reinstated legislation that carries out Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to all but end collective bargaining for tens of thousands of public workers, including faculty and staff members at public universities, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. A lower-court judge had blocked the law from taking effect, but the Supreme Court rejected her reasoning. The Legislature “did not violate the Wisconsin Constitution by the process it used,” the majority opinion says. The law and the controversial manner in which it was enacted had drawn huge crowds of protesters to the State Capitol in February.

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  • jffoster

    One note about your headline:   The Wisconsin Law did / does not limit Faculty Union “Rightss” at all.  While there is a right to join or form a union as a corollary to right of free association, there is no inherent inalienable right to bargain collectively with a sovereign government or an agency thereof.  What the Wisconsin law largely eliminates is a PRIVILEGE granted by Wisconsin Law. A privilege granted can be revoked.

  • 11209892

    With consequences sir, with consequences.  

  • unseenhand

    This new law may surprise university faculty by saving them from themselves.  Seemingly in a low-level panic, many are rushing to join one union or another. They will regret it once they learn the real nature of the primary unions with their overwhelming membership of pre-K-12 teachers who naurally care little about research support, university course loads, university promotion/tenure policies, et al.

    Wisconsin statutes written to implement the merger of its two university systems in the early 1970′s include sweeping authority and required involvement in shared governance for faculty.  On too many of the state’s campuses those faculty have allowed their chancellors and others to push aside that statutory authority for faculty. Those statues would empower the faculty in ways and to degrees that are beyond anything that can be provided by traditional unions, which always have worked to maintain the lowest common denominator elements of their memberships and a seniorty system of “last in, first out” regardless of curricular or student program needs..

    The Wisconsin faculties should re-examine their statutory rights to shared governance and revive their abilities to implement them for everybody’s good.  By the way, there is no requirement in those state statutes that the faculty pay a membership fee or dues to get the benefits of shared governance.  They need invest only their personal abilities, time, and efforts to play their rightful roles.

  • johnfarley

    jffoster – I fundamentally disagree.  I believe that the right to collectively bargain with one’s employer is a fundamental human right.  That is exactly why authoritarian governments routinely make that one of the first rights they attack.  In my view, it doesn’t matter whether the employer is public or private.  Just because employees work for the public sector does not mean that they should be expected to give up their rights.

  • jffoster

    Your disagreement is noted. I think you are wrong.  So evidently does American legal tradition.

  • akprof

    At least Wisconsin legal tradition – or perhaps Wisconsin is attempting to establish new tradition. The outcomes of the recall elections will be interesting.

  • jffoster

    All Americn legal tradition, Akprof. To my knowledge, no court, (maybe some local jackleg judge somewhere but no higher state nor Federal court) has held that State or the Federal gpverm,emt and their agencise MUST engage in collective bargaining with their employees as a constitutional right of those employees.   In some States it is legislatively provileged to public employees and therefore statutorily mandated to government, but not as an inalienable right.    Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt and George Meany did not believe in collective bargaining for public employees.

  • mbelvadi

    I think the two of you are using different definitions of the word “right”. Johnfarley is talking about “fundamental human rights”, but you’re talking about legal rights in the US. The US’s failure to ratify the UN Declaration of Human Rights puts that difference in sharp focus.

  • jffoster

    You’re appear to be correct, mbelvadi.  The internationalis fundamental rightsists tend to discover a new “fundamental right” something on the order of every four months. How one can construe collective bargaining with a sovereign state’s government as a “fundamental right” other than by wishful thinking is beyond me.  I for one am glad the United States have (yes, “have”, not *has’) not ratified the United (Damn)Nations Assertion, er, Declaration of Human Rights.

  • old nassau’67

    Plagiarism, Libel, Invasion of Privacy: I’d like to know what criteria determine these. For example, would (Fox’s) Tom Sullivan’s comparison of speeches by Hitler and by Obama be libelous? Would David Irving’s arguments denying the Holocaust be excised? When does offensive become dangerous?

  • kosboot

    old nassau’67, you sound fairly unfamiliar with Wikipedia, so investigating it yourself might be more beneficial than asking others to do it for you in order to find satisfactory answers to your question. Wikipedia has an enormous of documentation as to its editorial policies. You might want to start here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents/Policies_and_guidelines

    As far as David Irving and his ilk, it’s all there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial

  • sand6432

    This story does not distinguish between plagiarism, as the stealing of ideas without credit to the source, and copyright infringement, which is verbatim reproduction of the original expression. the latter is illegal; the former, while morally wrong, is not illegal.

  • http://twitter.com/GillianP GillianP

    Notwithstanding plagiarists often commit copyright infringements by quoting without attribution….

  • chriskox

    Sand6432 is trying to remind us to distinguish an offense to manners, plagiarism, from something actionable in court, copyright violation. As to copyright, there is much to fear as wikis may erode the revenue streams of traditional publishers, though apparently without monetary gain. As an educational foundation, how far can fair use be stretched here, and does the foundation have the resources to face a challenge in court?

  • chriskox

    And they take their shame all the way to the bank.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Nicholas-Stix/721916225 Nicholas Stix

    Like everything else that I’ve ever seen on the subject at the Chronicle, this is a thinly veiled press release for Wikipedia (“WP”), or as I call it, The Pretend Encyclopedia. What sort of scholarship or journalism takes an organization’s official story for what it does at face value?

    To understand why Wikipedia entries are censored, read up on the subject of a controversial, contemporary entry, say, for the 2007 Knoxville Horror (“KH”), which was committed against Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, whose known killers and their charged accomplices have all been convicted but are all appealing their verdicts and sentences. (According to DNA semen evidence, two more unidentified rapist-killers are still at large.) Then read the Wikipedia entry.

    Although WP’s censors have repeatedly rationalized their skullduggery via claims of “copyright infringement,” they were always lying, because the material they deleted, police mug shots, is in the public domain. And why do they always delete the killers’ pictures, and come up with other outrageous subterfuges for doing so (“BLP” protections against libeling living persons—as if a convicted murderer could sue for defamation!)? Because the killers are black, and the victims were white. WP’s censors don’t want the public to know about racist black-on-white atrocities.

    At the present WP page, you’ll see a picture of the white victims. But that’s not in the public domain; it’s a blatant copyright violation! So, they delete public domain material, while running copyright violations. WP has a million rules, but since none of them is fairly enforced, they’re just a façade. Since the place mirrors the antiversity, most Chronicle readers will probably feel right at home.

    The talk page will give you a taste of what’s been going on for four years.

    WP does not pay for labor, so although its co-founder and guru, Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales is a libertarian, he doesn’t mind that Marxists have taken over, as long as they do the work, leaving him to live a “rock-star” existence, snagging $75,00-a-pop for speaking engagements.

    See my exposés on WP:

    http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2007/05/the_knoxville_h.php

    http://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2011/10/wikipedia-pearcy-massacre-still-never.html

  • socafish

    Plagiarism in Wikipedia - Do not copy and paste stuff into the place that everyone copies and pastes from.

  • http://twitter.com/Jabsfreelance Jabsfreelance

    I agree that they need to monitor the site in a way to prevent hateful and abusive content. There is a right way and a wrong way to write about people and instances of history. 

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_BTFH33NCY3DXWHCQIALPK56TQ4 BobA

    Wikipedia also deletes and edits anything that fails to support feminist dogma or provides alternative information. 

  • http://www.facebook.com/SafeLibraries Dan Kleinman

    The American Library Association uses Wikipedia anonymously to promote its political issues and pecuniary interests, then ensures evidence about its actions is deleted from Wikipedia.  See http://safelibraries.blogspot.com/2010/12/ala-pushes-net-neutrality-on-wikipedia.html

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