My Time As a Member of the Wisconsin State Employees Union

There have been I don’t know how many commentaries about Wisconsin Governor Walker’s plan to take away state employees’ right to collectively bargain. Few of these commentators have spent any real time in Wisconsin and fewer still have actually been a part of the employees union. I have, although it was long, long ago. I’ve been thinking of those days as I’ve read about the protests and the AWOL Democrats in the State Senate.

My title as an employee was Clerk Typist II. I earned $4.63 an hour, which was, if I remember correctly, about double that of minimum wage at the time. For my salary, I sat at a desk near the entrance to the UW-Extension building, directed visitors to the offices they were seeking, typed remittances on carbon paper, and handed out paychecks every other week (people in the building loved me for this and I felt like Santa Claus).

I was basically the receptionist for the building. I’m sure that job doesn’t exist anymore. What buildings, aside for hospitals and Walmarts, still have greeters who tell you where you need to go? Nowadays, you’re supposed to just figure that piece of information out yourself.

It was my second job out of college. I was waiting for my sweetie to graduate in six months. Employment opportunities in college towns for recent graduates are usually very slim. Madison, Wisconsin was no exception. My first job was working for about twenty cents over minimum wage as a temp in the Wisconsin state unemployment office. I started out in the mailroom, but they quickly “promoted” me to client correspondent. My job was to write letters to people who had been given, through error, too much unemployment compensation and to try to claw back the money with threats.

Some people did pay back the money. Most didn’t. I’ll never forget the response one of my clients sent back to me, written in cursive on greasy lined paper:

Dear Mr. Rochecker,

You’ve got about as much chance getting money from me as you do sticking hot axle grease up the ass of a tomcat.

Yours,

X

I hated my job. The pay was crap. Taking back money from the unemployed seemed cruel to me. I was in the basement all day. Fortunately, the part of the unemployment office that got new job announcements was one floor above and I convinced a girl who worked up there to pull the good ones for me the second they hit the job board.

That’s where the Clerk Typist II position showed up. The requirements were good communication skills, a good wardrobe, and an ability to type 35 words per minute. I called the number immediately. I showed up at the UW Extension building one hour later ready for my interview. I lied about being able to type at the minimum required speed, told my future boss I’d do anything to get the job, and bowled him over with my enthusiasm. He hired me on the spot.

I spent the next weekend in our apartment with a “how to type” book from the library and practiced for probably about 15 hours until I had the rudiments of touch-typing down.

How well could I live at $4.63 an hour back then? Not very well, but I didn’t starve. I could pay my share of the rent in a shared apartment, buy food, go out once a week with my sweetie for some cheap Chinese, and go to the movies. I was more than OK with this mind-numbing job, though. My goal at the time was to be a full time novelist. I thought this is what novelists did, took stupid jobs that didn’t tax them too much so they’d have the mental energy to write when they were at home.

I wrote and wrote my first novel on nights and weekends - page after page – a picaresque. I’d go to work dutifully every day, dressed like I thought a male receptionist should dress. The people around me were conscientious and serious, but there was one funny exception.

Every once in a while, I’d walk down to the basement to the copy office to get some paperwork Xeroxed. The door to the copy office was always locked. There was a little slot through which you were supposed to slide your papers. At 3:00 PM your copies would be placed outside the door for pick up.

I was intrigued about this locked door. Why were these people copying in secret? So I’d always try to open the door when I dropped off my paperwork in the hope that I could actually see what was going on inside. One day I succeeded. The door was unlocked and I opened it to find five guys sitting around a table playing a German card game that I knew well, sheep’s head.

What these folks did was play cards all morning and through lunch. Then at 1:00 or so they’d take all the copying jobs for the building and run the papers through the copy machine. They were getting paid eight hours for a two hour work day. So, yes, there was some waste and sloth going on in the building. But it wasn’t widespread.

My wife graduated. That summer, I stopped to critically read my novel (it was about half done). Oh my lord, I thought. This is utter crap. I definitely need to do something else for a living.

We moved to Denver at the end of the summer and I kissed my Clerk Typist II position good-bye, but not before I trained my replacement, a very weepy young woman who had just divorced and talked non-stop about her marriage and how she missed her husband. She was 26. I had just turned 21. I thought she was ancient.

Nowadays a job like I had pays about fifteen dollars an hour. That’s an improvement relative to the cost of living over my salary, but not a dramatic one. You can probably afford to rent your own apartment with that kind of money, and make payments on a decent used car (I didn’t own a car during my stint as a Wisconsin state employee).

The improvement from a barely livable wage to a modest but livable one for clerk typists in the state of Wisconsin over the last 35 years was, no doubt, the result of collective bargaining. Without it, jobs like the one I had would, I’m guessing, be ten dollar an hour things. Can you really live on ten dollars an hour? Sort of, if you’re twenty years old, sharing an apartment with your sweetie, don’t have kids and don’t own a car.

Governor Walker would like to strip collective bargaining from state employees. What would be the long-term outcome? Crappy pay and expensive benefits. Eventually you’d probably have a sea of employees earning Walmart kind of wages. Eventually you’d have a state where a large percentage of employees – both public and private – earned wages that caused them to struggle to just make ends meet every month. This isn’t progress for the state. This isn’t progress for the country.

Governor Walker has noted that Mitch Daniels, who has axed the budget of Indiana as governor, is a hero of his. The data say that Daniels’ dramatic budget cuts have, in the end, made it more difficult for your average Indianan to make ends meet. No one should mistake this as a change for the better.

When someone works an honest job, they deserve not the world, but the ability to be able to feed and raise a family (with some help from their spouse’s income), keep that family healthy, put a modest roof over their heads, and keep their cars running. When a job doesn’t allow for these modest benefits of employment something is wrong in America. This Walmart model for employees essentially is the future the Governor Walker is planning for Wisconsin state workers. Who benefits from such a plan? Only a sliver of the populace, the wealthy. It’s a plan that is undeniably wrong.