Wisconsin
Unanimous Wisconsin Supreme Court blocks UW Health nurses’ unionization, backing Act 10
Scott Walker signs Act 10 in 2011
March 11, 2011: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signs a bill that ends collective bargaining for most public union employees during a ceremony Thursday at the Capitol in Madison.
The Post-Crescent
MADISON – UW Health is not legally required to recognize its nurses’ union or engage in collective bargaining, a unanimous state Supreme Court ruled.
“When we examine the statutory language along with the statutory history, we conclude that Act 10 ended the collective bargaining requirements formerly placed on the (University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics) Authority,” wrote Justice Brian Hagedorn in an opinion released June 27.
The court’s ruling upholds previous decisions by the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission and a Dane County Circuit Court judge.
It also brings to the fore the lasting impact of Act 10, the 2011 state law engineered by Republican former Gov. Scott Walker that effectively ended collective bargaining for public employees in Wisconsin. Hagedorn, the author of the court’s unanimous opinion, provided legal counsel in the creation and defense of the law, and Jacob Frost, the Dane County judge who previously ruled in UW Health’s favor, appeared to have signed a petition to recall Walker over the law
The Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission ruled in November 2022 that UW Health is not required by law to recognize UW Health nurses’ union or to engage in collective bargaining. The union had been formed a few months prior to the commisssion’s ruling, with help from SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin.
UW Health nurses’ last union contract expired in 2014. At the time, UW Health said Act 10 — a 2011 state law that eliminated most collective bargaining rights for public employee unions — barred it from negotiating a new contract. Nurses countered that hospital management — acting as an independent body — could choose to recognize the union and bargain with it.
Fueled in part by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses’ efforts to unionize also followed cost-cutting measures that raised concerns about staffing and patient care. While UW Health administrators agreed problems existed, they said Act 10 prevented unionization as part of the solution.
UW Health and SEIU petitioned the state’s employment relations commission in 2022 as part of an agreement brokered by Gov. Tony Evers, asking the commission to determine whether the Wisconsin Employment Peace Act applies to the hospital. If the Peace Act — a chapter of state law governing collective bargaining — were determined to apply, UW Health would have to bargain with the union.
Both the commission and a Dane County Circuit Court judge ruled UW Health was not covered under the Peace Act and, as such, not required to work with the nurses’ union.
Attorneys for the nurses argued to the Supreme Court in February that the hospital functions like a private employer, and therefore should be governed by the Peace Act. UW Health attorneys countered that the legislative intent of Act 10 was clearly understood to dismantle unions and, despite the fact UW Hospitals and Clinics Authority was created in the mid-1990s as a quasi-government entity, lawmakers in passing Act 10 made clear it was included and considered a public entity.
“Taken together, the effect of the legislature’s changes in Act 10 are no mystery. When it created the Authority, the legislature added the Authority as an employer under the Peace Act and imposed numerous other collective bargaining provisions,” Hagedorn wrote. “In Act 10, the legislature eliminated the Authority as a covered employer along with other collective bargaining requirements. We therefore hold that the Authority is no longer covered by the Peace Act and is not required to collectively bargain under the Peace Act.”
Jessica Van Egeren of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel contributed.
Jessie Opoien can be reached at jessie.opoien@jrn.com.
(This story has been updated to add new information.)
(WLUK) — Wisconsin State Patrol troopers are teaming up with truckers to better spot dangerous driving behaviors.
The annual Trooper in a Truck initiative kicks off next week in Wisconsin.
Troopers will ride along with with semitruck and bus drivers to use the higher vantage point to spot dangerous driving behaviors, especially near commercial motor vehicles.
Troopers will be looking for risky driving behaviors, including distracted driving, speeding, following too closely and seatbelt violations. When an officer identifies a violation from the truck or bus, they will radio to patrol cars in the area for appropriate enforcement action.
Drivers can expect to see Trooper in a Truck enforcement in the following areas:
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- Monday, July 13: Eau Claire
- Tuesday, July 14: Waukesha
- Wednesday, July 15: Madison
- Thursday, July 16: Green Bay
- Friday, July 17: Wausau
New Wisconsin athletic director Shawn Eichorst, who spent the last eight years at Texas, believes his new and old schools have much in common.
Both are well-regarded research universities in state capitals that belong to major conferences and have relatively similar enrollments.
He also pointed out one difference.
“There’s swag at Texas, right?” Eichorst said Tuesday during his introductory news conference. “There’s 30 million people in Texas. We’ve got swag, too, but we have a little humility with that deal. We need to get our shoulders up. We need to feel good about what it is that we’re doing.”
Wisconsin could gain more of that Texas swagger if its football program gets back to winning the way it did the last time Eichorst was employed in Madison. Eichorst, who most recently worked as a deputy athletic director at Texas, received a five-year deal worth $1.6 million annually, with provisions for increases and incentives. He was hired 2½ months after Chris McIntosh left to become the Big Ten’s deputy commissioner for strategy.
Eichorst worked at Wisconsin from 2006-11 when Barry Alvarez was AD and Bret Bielema was leading the football program. He followed that up with stints as an athletic director at Miami (2011-12) and Nebraska (2012-17) before Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte hired him in 2018.
He returns to Wisconsin with the Badgers coming off back-to-back losing seasons in football, a notable fall for a program that had 22 straight winning seasons from 2002-23. Wisconsin coach Luke Fickell has gone 17-21 after posting a 53-10 record with one College Football Playoff appearance in his last five years at Cincinnati.
Eichorst hasn’t worked with Fickell before but said he’s encouraged by their initial conversations.
“Obviously he’s won every place he’s been,” Eichorst said. “My expectation is more of me than him, meaning I need to pour into him, learn more about his program, how he has things set up, how his athletes are taken care of, how we’re supporting that endeavor. And then we can figure out, as we move along, what that might look like.”
Football struggles led to Eichorst’s downfall the last time he was an athletic director.
He fired Nebraska coach Bo Pelini in 2014 and hired Mike Riley, who had gone 93-80 in 14 seasons at Oregon State. Eichorst was dismissed shortly after Nebraska suffered an early-season loss to Northern Illinois in 2017. Riley was fired at the end of that season after going 19-19 in three years.
When Eichorst’s hiring was announced last week, he spoke about how much he had grown from that Nebraska stint. Wisconsin interim chancellor Eric Wilcots led the search and has emphasized Eichorst’s accomplishments at Texas, which has won the Learfield Directors’ Cup all-sports standings five times in the last six years.
Texas ranked anywhere from fifth to ninth in the Directors’ Cup standings in the five years before Wilcots’ arrival. Texas’ football team went a combined 23-27 from 2014-17 but has made two College Football Playoff appearances in the last three years.
“Everybody looks at the end result of what we did at Texas,” Eichorst said. “When we got there in 2018, we weren’t very good in a lot of areas. And that didn’t change overnight.”
Eichorst said one thing that has caught his attention about Wisconsin is the overall quality of its head coaches.
“You’re going to be as good as your coaches,” Eichorst said. “That’s it. If you have an elite group of coaches who are working together and uniting and galvanizing and learning from one another and taking it out to their individual programs, I think you can start to build something special. I go back to Texas. We built a room of really elite head coaches and put them at the top of everything we did to help guide us.”
Eichorst said this job is particularly important to him because of his Wisconsin roots. He was born in Lone Rock, about 45 miles northwest of the Madison campus.
He treasured his previous stint at Wisconsin and says he believes this school “represents everything that is great about higher education and college athletics.”
“Nobody will work harder for Wisconsin athletics,” Eichorst said. “I love this state, and I love everything that it represents. The passion is there. You can see it. I don’t have to make it up. I’ve lived it. It’s in my heart.”
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AP college sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports
Wisconsin
South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, officials in standoff with homeowner over year-round skeleton display
The city of South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has ordered a homeowner to take down his year-round giant skeleton display or face fines, but the homeowner is standing firm and refusing, even as the deadline to remove the display has passed.
Now there’s a skeleton standoff.
The city cited ordinance violations in their order for Sean Oster to dismantle the lawn decorations. The notice specifically references “large Halloween decorations being displayed not during the appropriate time of year.”
Oster was also ordered to make other improvements to his property.
But Oster has refused to take down the display, which is re-dressed as the year goes on and is currently sporting a Fourth of July theme. The Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm, has come to his aid, saying the city’s actions violate Oster’s First Amendment rights.
City administrators declined to comment, citing a pending investigation. Neighbors have been divided by the display; some say they’re fine with it, and think it brings fun and positivity to the neighborhood, but some others want to see it removed and say the lawn should be kept up better and more consistently.
Oster said he’s hoping to reach an agreement with the city, and said he’s corrected all other violations outside of the display.
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