What happened in Wisconsin?

If Wisconsin’s recall election had been held a year ago instead of this June 5, Gov. Scott Walker would have been toast. Fifty-eight percent of adults wanted to kick out this unionbuster, according to a St. Norbert College/Wisconsin Public Radio poll conducted in November 2011.

Yet seven months later, Walker kept his job with a 172,000-vote margin over his Democratic opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. What happened?

When Walker announced his anti-union bill on Feb. 11, 2011, thousands of people went to the state Capitol in Madison and occupied it for 17 days until they were locked out.

Walker’s Act 10 prohibits public employee unions from bargaining over anything except their base pay. Any other issue — like health insurance — can’t even be discussed. “Limited-term employees” aren’t allowed health insurance or retirement benefits.

Wages can’t rise above the inflation rate, unless a referendum is held. Workers’ pensions were cut and deductions for health care jacked up. Meanwhile, the state refuses to deduct union dues.

Just to retain these limited bargaining rights, public unions will have to undergo yearly elections to represent workers.

Workers and their supporters were outraged at this power grab in Wisconsin — the first state to establish collective bargaining with public workers in 1959. At least 100,000 union supporters demonstrated at the Capitol on Feb. 19, outnumbering a Tea Party rally more than 50 to 1. Despite a snowstorm, 150,000 protesters came to the Capitol again a week later on Feb. 26.

One of the organizers of these historic protests was Gilbert Johnson, president of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 82 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and also a member of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and the A. Philip Randolph Institute.

Many workers in Wisconsin were inspired by the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. “Fight like an Egyptian” was a popular slogan. Working people around the world were inspired by the Wisconsin fightback.

Dock workers in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union shut down the San Francisco and Oakland ports in solidarity on April 4, the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. “This was Wisconsin on the docks,” said ILWU member Clarence Thomas.

Messages of solidarity to Wisconsin came from Egyptian unions and Bangladesh’s Garment Workers Federation.

How to continue the struggle?

It was only because of this mass outrage that Democratic state senators went into exile and temporarily prevented a vote on Act 10. But Walker rammed it through the state legislature anyway.

Walker signed this bill on March 11, 2011. The next day a crowd estimated by the AFL-CIO at 185,000 went to Madison to demonstrate. Among them were thousands of farmers who drove their tractors around the Capitol. That’s how popular this fightback was.

Walker was forced to cut out a provision that would have allowed a fire sale of 37 state-owned power and heating plants without any competitive bidding. The billionaire Koch brothers, big campaign contributors to Walker, had to say they weren’t buying them.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich pushed through a similar union-busting bill, called SB 5. But Ohio law allows a referendum to overturn laws. Despite millions spent to support SB 5, it was buried at the polls by a 22-point margin of almost 800,000 votes.

There’s no reason to believe that Walker’s Act 10 wouldn’t have been similarly defeated. But Wisconsin only allows statewide referendums on amendments to its constitution.

Union members and community activists discussed how to continue the struggle. The 45,000-member South Central Federation of Labor, based in Madison, unanimously passed a resolution to prepare for a general strike.

A statewide “labor holiday” would have been a powerful answer to Walker and the billionaires.

But this militant workers’ struggle was hijacked by Democratic Party officials and turned into a recall election. Tens of thousands of union members and activists were encouraged by politicians and union officials to put their efforts into collecting a million signatures, often in the snow. More than 1 out of 6 Wisconsinites signed it.

The Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement supported this effort.

With all the hard work that went into it, this recall campaign had severe limitations. The million signatures collected should have been sufficient to evict Walker from the governor’s mansion.

Instead it set up a rematch between Walker and his 2010 opponent, Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett. Most unions had endorsed Kathleen Falk, the former Dane County Executive. But she was defeated in the Democratic primary.

Barrett, who came to City Hall by defeating Marvin Pratt, Milwaukee’s only Black mayor, never focused on Walker’s union busting. For many workers who had been in the streets fighting the governor’s union-busting drive, voting for Barrett didn’t present any real alternative. It just moved the struggle into an arena stacked against the working class and dominated by big money.

The recall was reminiscent of many organizing drives. Despite a union signing up a majority of workers, bosses eke out a victory by delaying a representational election and wearing down the workers.

That’s what Walker did — aided by at least $30 million in contributions from the 1%. The recall election occurred more than a year after people had flooded the streets of Madison.

Elections always lag behind the class struggle. Harry Bridges, who helped found the ILWU, led the magnificent San Francisco general strike in the spring of 1934. A few months later, California Gov. Frank Merriam, who tried to smash the strike, defeated the ex-socialist Upton Sinclair by 259,000 votes.

Yet Merriam’s victory didn’t stop the labor upsurge of the 1930s.

After all the work that went into the recall, many union members probably feel terrible and even betrayed by their neighbors. The worst enemies of working and poor people are claiming the Wisconsin results are a mandate for more attacks.

Yet there were 480,000 fewer votes in the recall than in the 2008 presidential election in Wisconsin. Walker lost Milwaukee County, where he had been the county executive for eight years, by more than 106,000 votes and 26 percentage points.

Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin, was defeated in the race for lieutenant governor. Nevertheless, it was a defeat for racism that Mitchell, who is African-American, got 1.2 million votes in a state that is 90 percent white.

That’s why Wisconsin was chosen by the “banksters” — read financial gangsters — for this anti-union drive.

Walker’s biggest ally was racism. The Census Bureau rated the Milwaukee metropolitan area as the country’s most segregated in 2010. Because of Walker’s cuts, hundreds of teachers have been fired in Milwaukee, where 87 percent of the enrollment is students of color.

Tommy Thompson won four terms as Wisconsin’s governor by beating up on poor people. Instead of the mothers on welfare and their children whom Thompson beat up, it’s public workers who are now being demonized. Mitt Romney, after all, declared the country doesn’t need any more teachers.

White workers under attack in Wausau, Marshfield or Green Bay should know that Black voters in Milwaukee voted 99 to 1 against the union-buster Walker. Menominee County, where the vast majority belong to the Menominee Nation, had the biggest percentage margin against Walker.

The recall election was just one battle in the long war against capitalism’s 1%. Lessons learned from that battle will help the working class further develop the solidarity and unity needed to fight and win the many battles that lie ahead.