In a stairwell in Van Hise Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jon Shelton displays messages from UW system employees urging UW’s Board of Regents to authorize campuses to hold discussions with employees and their unions about salaries and working conditions. AFT’s Autumn Pickett records Shelton as he discusses the campaign. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
Universities of Wisconsin employees affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers are calling on the UW Board of Regents to formally authorize chancellors in the system to meet with employees and the union to discuss pay and working conditions.
On Friday, about two dozen AFT members and supporters gathered outside Van Hise hall on the UW-Madison campus, where they attempted to deliver a letter to Board of Regents President Amy Bogost. The letter urges Bogust to put on an upcoming regents meeting agenda employees’ request for a formal discussion process with university chancellors to address wages and working conditions.
The group was unable to get access to the floors where the Board of Regents offices are located in order to deliver the letter in person. They left copies of their letters with campus police officers, WORT radio reported.
The UW system’s communications director did not respond Friday to a request for comment.
UW employees lost all union rights under Act 10, the 2011 law that stripped most collective bargaining rights for public employees except for some law enforcement officers and firefighters.
Most public employee groups retained the right to formal union representation with an annual certification process. But except for graduate student teaching assistants, for UW employees even the right to certify a union representative was wiped out, said Jon Shelton, incoming president of AFT-Wisconsin and a UW-Green Bay faculty member.
“We have no avenue to talk about salaries and working conditions,” Shelton said.
AFT members are not seeking a formal collective bargaining relationship — something outlawed under Act 10 — but in its place, a formal structure of meetings where employees can air their concerns about their jobs, Shelton said. The AFT’s request includes a detailed proposal on what that structure would look like.
For other public employee groups, the 2011 law limits collective bargaining to the subject of wages, and limits wage increases to the rate of inflation. To cover a wider range of workplace issues, some Wisconsin public employers and unions have engaged in “meet and confer” relationships through which they discuss pay and working conditions more broadly.
Act 10 permits meet and confer relationships so long as they are not collective bargaining, Shelton said. “Many tech college unions have it,” he said. “Many K-12 [school] unions have it.”
Where meet and confer relationships are in place, “it improves everything,” Shelton said. “It improves outcomes for students. It improves the feelings of morale for workers, it improves workplace conditions and improves retention.” While not the same as collective bargaining it’s “like a conduit … for people, faculty and staff, to channel their voices.”
Shelton said chancellors at nine UW campuses have either ignored or rejected AFT groups’ requests to discuss meet and confer arrangements.
The campaign to bring meet and confer relationships to some campuses has its roots in reductions in academic staff at UW Oshkosh and on other campuses a couple of years ago.
“No one in our union is saying that nothing can ever be cut. We understand the reality of the situation,” Shelton said. “But chancellors are just sort of unilaterally making these decisions.”
Without “a seat at the decision-making table, then our [campus] administrations are going to make decisions that are going to disadvantage our students,” he added.
“There’s really a feeling across the UW system that faculty, academic staff and university staff are all overworked, under-compensated and really need to have a voice,” Shelton said.
“Positions are not being filled very intentionally,” said Neil Kraus, a UW-River Falls professor and president of the AFT union on that campus, “and the UW system is basically implementing the Republicans’ higher ed agenda, which is to narrow the curricular offerings … massively increase online education and buy as much tech as possible. Those things are contrary to the interests of our students and our communities.”
The return to the White House of President Donald Trump after the November 2024 election has also posed “pretty existential threats to public higher education,” Shelton said — such cuts to longstanding research grants that could slash university resources.
“If that happens, we all need to be working together to make sure that we’re preserving student learning outcomes and preserving our publicly important research,” Shelton said. “At a time like this, it’s never been more important that administration and faculty and staff, representing their unions, are on the same page and defending the public education system and making sure things are good for every worker.”
Nearly 200 AFT members from UW campuses across the state have written to individual regents, asking them to address their call for a meet-and-confer relationship, according to the union.
“The regents, up to this point, some of them haven’t been as willing to have conversations about this as we would like,” Shelton said.
The refusal by chancellors to engage the proposal has led him to believe there may be a broader policy directive “telling chancellors not to do this,” Shelton aid. Regents are ultimately responsible for running the UW system, he added, “and so we can most definitely ask them to pass a policy to basically obligate our chancellors to do it.”
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.