A Message From Local 212 President
Michael Rosen
August 27, 2011
Welcome back to a new semester. Or if you are a new employee welcome. We are excited that YOU are joining the MATC family.
MATC is the Wisconsin’s flagship technical college. We offer 125 Associate Degree and Diploma programs, 25% more than any other tech college. We educate more minority students than all of the colleges and universities in the state combined and are Wisconsin’s second largest graduate school with almost 4500 bachelor degree students pursuing additional education..
MATC began as the Milwaukee Vocation School in 1911. It was established to ensure that child laborers would receive an education. The downtown campus was built two years later in 1913. This is our 100 year anniversary. We are very proud of our roots in the fight against child labor and that for 100 years we have been responsible for training the Milwaukee area’s skilled and technical labor force.
Today we educate welders and auto technicians, nurses and graphic designers, accountants and morticians, air craft maintenance mechanics and animators, fire fighters and IT security specialists, police officers and engineers and virtually any other skilled or technical worker you could imagine. MATC is Milwaukee’s working class college.
From our very beginning MATC welcomed Milwaukee’s immigrants at first from Germany, Poland, Italy and other European countries, and now from Mexico, the Cameroon and Vietnam. We help them master English and become productive citizens in their new country.
During the Great Depression, MATC didn’t cut back on service to the community. Rather we established the Adult High School. And during World WWII we operated 24 hours a day, training the skilled workers needed by industry to wage the war against fascism.
And since 1931 MATC's faculty and staff have been represented by the American Federation of Teachers Local 212. Local 212 was organized in 1930, long before teachers had collective bargaining rights and was the first college or university faculty union in the nation to negotiate a contract.
From its beginning Local 212 fought to ensure that its members are treated and compensated as professionals and that we had a voice in running the college. A 44 day faculty strike in 1969 was the seminal moment in 212’s history where we achieved these goals. Every generation since has had to fight to maintain them.
As our Constitution’s Preamble states: Local 212 was “organized not only for the benefits of teacher-members which come from cooperative effort, but also for the improvement of the teaching profession…” and “to lead …in the construction of an equitable society where no man is a serf and where hunger cannot stalk in the midst of abundance.”
The challenges our founders faced in 1930 are still with us. Hunger and poverty are rampant in Milwaukee, the 4th poorest city in the nation. Our profession is under stack from the Governor’s office on down. Now that Walker has taken our collective bargaining rights away, we find that -- like our founders in 1930 and the strikers of ‘69 --we too have to fight to have a voice in the work place.
Our original charter rings as true today as it was in 1930 when our founders proclaimed that our fight was for “Democracy in Education-Education for Democracy.”
Welcome back. Local 212’s Executive Board looks forward to working with you to ensure that every student receives a quality education, that MATC is adequately funded, and that faculty, counselors and professional staff have a real voice in the workplace and are treated like professionals.
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