YOU DID IT, LOCAL
212!!!
Tuesday’s elections were a huge
victory for MATC, our students, faculty and staff. The many
victories we won are a tribute to Local 212 members -- your
activism, hard work and contributions to COPE.
We want to thank all who worked on these
elections. Your efforts will help our students for years
to come. Please purchase tickets to our Solidarity
Party on Thursday, November 30
to celebrate these victories with your colleagues.
Let’s look at what we accomplished.
We helped re-elect Governor Jim
Doyle who has repeatedly used his veto pen to protect
MATC’s funding and our collective bargaining rights.
Local 212’s own Barbara Toles was
re-elected to the Assembly in the 17th District with 91%
of the vote. Former AFT political Director Cory
Mason won a very closely contested race to represent
the 62nd assembly district in Racine.
In State Senate races, four Republicans
who had repeatedly attempted to cut technical college funding
were defeated by Democrats who are expected to support the
Governor’s proposals to increase tech college funding
and financial aid for our students.
Significantly, Jim Sullivan,
an alderman from Wauwatosa, won the 5th State Senate district
from an anti-union, anti-MATC incumbent. The Sullivan race
was one which Local 212 targeted, and many of our members
spent weeks working on. Sullivan won by less than 700 votes,
and our efforts were critical to his success.
As a result of all this, we have friends
in Madison who care about MATC.
The change in the Senate also means that
joint legislative committees like the “all powerful”
Joint Committee on Finance and the Legislative Audit Committee
(LAC) will now be co-chaired by a Democrat from the Senate
along with a Republican from the Assembly.
Equally important, these committees will
now have equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. As
a result, Republicans will no longer be able to use the
LAC to unjustly attack MATC and the faculty as they have
over the past four years. This means Dr. Cole’s favorite
politicians, Senator Alberta Darling and Representative
Sue Jeskewitz, will no longer have their bully pulpit from
which to attack Local 212.
Funding to support our students and MATC,
which the Republicans have routinely stripped from the Governor’s
budget proposals in Joint Finance, will no longer be the
victim of narrow Republican partisanship.
Real friends of technical education will
assume leadership roles in the Legislature. Judy
Robson, a nurse and strong WTCS advocate, will
become the Senate Majority Leader, and Russ Decker,
a skilled tradesman and WTCS graduate, will become Co-Chair
of Joint Finance.
There is good news for our students at
the federal level as well. With the Democrats winning almost
30 Congressional seats, the House will be controlled by
those like Milwaukee’s own Gwen Moore
who actually support increasing Pell Grants, the main source
of financial aid for many of our students.
The same is true for Carl Perkins and
Adult Basic Education funding that support many of MATC’s
student services. For the last four years, we have had to
fight simply to prevent these programs from being eliminated.
Now that the House and the Senate are controlled by Democrats
who support technical education, we need to work to increase
this funding.
John Gard, who had been the one of the
most powerful politicians in Madison and used his leadership
position in the Assembly to attack public education and
technical education, is now out of a job, losing a race
for Congress to Dr. Steve Kagen, whom Local
212 supported.
The election also means changes in Congressional
committee chairs. Most significantly, Wisconsin’s
own Congressman David Obey, whom we have
supported, will become the Chairman of the Appropriations
Committee. This creates the opportunity to increase the
amount of federal money flowing into Wisconsin.
None of the opportunities mentioned above
are guaranteed. Just as the election victories we helped
to secure were the direct result of your hard work, activism
and contributions, we will need to hold these politicians’
feet to the fire.
That means we need to stay involved and
politically active, appearing at hearings when they affect
our college and students, contributing to COPE and meeting
with our representatives so they know what MATC needs. Thanks
for your hard work. It paid off.
Now let’s use that same energy to
get a new contract.
Michael Rosen & Charlie Dee
|
