Friends,
Every Labor Day, we honor the people who keep this state running. This year, I want to tell you what the day means to me personally.
I’m an educator and a union member. I was in the classroom when Act 10 hit. I watched what it did — not as a headline, but as a colleague. The pay that stopped keeping up. The bargaining table that got smaller and smaller until there was almost nothing left on it. The experienced teachers who loved this work and left it anyway, because the state they served had decided their voice was a problem to be solved.
That was fifteen years ago. We are still living in it. Wages suppressed, workers’ voices weakened, the dignity of work treated as a line item.
And now we are eight weeks from the first real chance to change it.
Eight weeks from an election that could deliver Wisconsin’s first pro-worker legislature since Scott Walker unleashed his anti-labor agenda on this state. The bills are already written. Democrats have proposed raising the shameful $7.25 minimum wage so a full-time job can cover the basics. Restoring collective bargaining, so workers have a real say in their own workplaces again. Repealing the anti-union “Right to Work” law that has eroded protections for working people across Wisconsin.
Fifteen years of damage. Eight weeks to the chance to reverse it. The only thing standing between those bills and the Governor’s desk is who controls the Legislature, and that runs through districts like this one.
I’m not running to commemorate workers one Monday a year. I’m running to be one of them in the room where laws get written, with the memory of exactly what it felt like when that room turned against us.
This Labor Day week, honor the work with action. Sign up for a canvass shift, or chip in $26 to help us reach every working family in this district before November.
Fifteen years is long enough.
