The Labor State, From the Eight-Hour Day to Act Ten

On May fifth, eighteen eighty-six, a crowd of between five thousand and seven thousand workers gathered at the Bay View Rolling Mill on the south shore of Milwaukee, part of a nationwide strike movement demanding an eight-hour workday. The Wisconsin National Guard had been deployed. Without warning, guardsmen fired into the crowd. Seven people were killed, including a thirteen-year-old boy named Frank Kunkel.

The Bay View Massacre did not end the labor movement in Wisconsin. It became part of its founding mythology.

Wisconsin developed one of the strongest traditions of organized labor in the United States over the following century. Milwaukee elected three Socialist mayors in the twentieth century, men who ran clean government, built public parks, and kept the city's finances solvent while privately-run American cities were going bankrupt around them. The state passed the nation's first unemployment compensation law in nineteen thirty-two, in the depths of the Depression, a reform designed by University of Wisconsin economist John Commons.

That tradition lasted through the twentieth century and hit a wall on February fourteenth, two thousand eleven, when Governor Scott Walker introduced Act Ten, a budget repair bill that effectively eliminated collective bargaining rights for most public employees. The protests that followed, one hundred thousand people occupying and surrounding the State Capitol in Madison for weeks, were the largest sustained labor demonstrations in American memory. Democratic state senators fled to Illinois to deny the Republican majority a quorum. It did not work. Act Ten passed. Walker survived a recall election the following year.

The story does not have a clean ending. Wisconsin's labor movement is smaller than it was before two thousand eleven. The eight-hour day Bay View workers died for is the standard workday everywhere in the country now. The argument over what workers owe the state and what the state owes workers is unresolved, in Wisconsin as everywhere, and probably always will be.