We’re back, baby! We’re kicking off Season 5 of Working People with a multi-part series on teachers and public sector unions in the state of Wisconsin. As part of a special collaboration between The Real News Network and In These Times magazine for “The Wisconsin Idea,” Max, Cameron Granadino (TRNN), and Hannah Faris (In These Times) traveled to Wisconsin in the summer of 2021 to investigate two intertwining stories that have played a crucial role in the right-wing shift and the decades-long attack on workers and unions in a state that used to be a bellwether of the labor movement and progressive politics in America.

One of those stories has to do with the passing of Act 10 in 2011 under Republican governor Scott Walker, which was a hammer blow to public sector unions around the state that stripped them of their collective bargaining rights and put a chokehold on unions’ ability to function—a chokehold that was tightened in 2015 when Wisconsin became the 25th “right to work” state. The other story is the story of a historic teachers’ strike that took place in 1974 in the small, rural town of Hortonville. With a population of just around 1,500 people at the time, Hortonville became the site of one of the most contentious and consequential teachers’ strikes in Wisconsin’s history. And, in many ways, the sort of cultural hostilities, clashing economic pressures, and vicious union-busting that played out in Hortonville set the stage for a statewide showdown over Act 10 nearly 40 years later. The Hortonville strike itself ripped the community in two—over 80 striking educational staff members in the district were fired by an intransigent school board, and the legacy of the broken strike left a deep scar on the town and the school district for many years.

Over the course of this series, we’ll be talking to teachers and organizers in Wisconsin to see how, nearly 50 years after the Hortonville strike and a decade after Act 10 and the historic protests against it at the state capitol, they are still fighting to recover and build worker power. In this interview, Max talks with Amanda and Jeff Frenkel, two K-12 teachers in Hortonville and union organizers with the American Federation of Teachers, about the challenges they and their coworkers are facing today, and about the ways they are working to rebuild the union and serve their community.

Pre-Production: Maximillian Alvarez, Hannah Faris, Alice Herman, Cameron Granadino, Eleni Schirmer (research consultant), John Fleissner (research consultant), John Yaggi (research consultant), Harvey J. Kaye (research consultant), Jon Shelton (research consultant), Adam Mertz (research consultant)
Studio: Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino, Stephen Frank, Kayla Rivara, Jules Taylor

Additional links/info below…

Permanent links below…

Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive at freemusicarchive.org):

  • Jules Taylor, “Working People Theme Song”

The Wisconsin Idea is an independent reporting project of People’s Action Institute, Citizen Action of Wisconsin and In These Times.

Transcript

The transcript of this interview will be made available as soon as possible.

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Maximillian Alvarez is an Izzy-Award-winning journalist and the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Executive Director of The Real News Network. He is the founder and host of Working People, "a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today," which he started after his family lost their home and life savings during the Financial Crash of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession. Alvarez is the author of The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke, a collection of interviews with US workers recorded during Year One of of the Covid-19 pandemic. His forthcoming book—tentatively titled “American Sacrifice: Working People Fight for The Lives (and Our Future) in America’s ‘Sacrifice Zones’”—is under contract with Haymarket Books. From April 2022 to March 2024, Alvarez hosted and produced The Art of Class War series on Breaking Points. From September 2016 to January 2019, he was a regular contributor and then a columnist for The Baffler magazine. Prior to joining TRNN, Alvarez was an Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Prior to that, he was a graduate student-worker and rank-and-file member of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (AFT Local 3550) at the University of Michigan, where he earned a dual-PhD in History and Comparative Literature, taught undergraduates, and published academic articles in Media Theory and La Deleuziana: An Online Journal of Philosophy. Prior to that, he worked a litany of low-wage jobs in different restaurants, warehouses, factories, retail stores, etc. Alvarez’s writing has been featured in outlets like The Nation, Poynter, In These Times, Boston Review, The Baffler, Current Affairs, Dissent, Protean Magazine, The New Republic, Truthout, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. As an analyst and commentator, he has appeared on programs like PBS NewsHour, Breaking Points, Democracy Now!, The Laura Flanders Show, NPR’s 1A, The Hill’s Rising, This Is Hell!, Krystal Kyle & Friends, The Michael Brooks Show, The Jacobin Show, CounterPunch Radio, Citations Needed, Bad Faith with Briahna Joy Gray, Know Your Enemy, Srsly Wrong, Left Anchor, Revolutionary Left Radio, The End of Sport Podcast, Pod Damn America, The David Pakman Show, The Megyn Kelly Show, The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent, The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow, The David Feldman Show, and The Marianne Williamson Podcast.