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| As soon as their shift ended on Tuesday, November 15 these Local 1107 went as a group to sign "Recall Walker" petitions in Necedah, Wisconsin. |
The campaign to remove Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker kicked off on Tuesday November 15, with more than 100 events across the state. Union activists and supporters must collect more than 540,000 valid signatures in the next 60 days to force the unpopular anti-union Republican into a recall election sometime in the spring of 2012.
UE members across Wisconsin have begun gathering signatures on the "recall Walker" petitions, and many of them will be at the state capitol in Madison on Saturday, November 19 starting at 11:00 a.m. for a big campaign kick-off rally. The recall petition drive will be conducted in workplaces, at community events, and door-to-door in cities and towns across Wisconsin in the weeks ahead.
The recall campaign will also target Walker's lieutenant governor and three state senators who voted for Walker's union-busting legislation last February. Elected state officials in Wisconsin are subject to recall by the voters, but only after they have been in office for at least one year. Walker was elected in November 2010 and took office in January 2011, so he has just become eligible to be recalled. In recall elections last summer, voters removed two Republican state senators who had voted for Walker's union-busting bill.
Among those states that have recall procedures, Wisconsin's requirements for getting a recall on the ballot are among the toughest. Petitioners must gather signatures equal to 25 percent of the electorate in the most recent gubernatorial election, and must do so in just two months. (In contrast, the petition drive to get repeal of Ohio SB 5 on the ballot was required to collect signatures of 6 percent of the voters in Ohio's last statewide election, and had 90 days to do so.) But building on Walker's massive unpopularity, as well as momentum from the big pro-union vote in Ohio and the nationwide anti-Wall Street "99 percent" movement, workers' rights supporters in Wisconsin are confident they can reach their goal.
Continued corporate backing for Scott Walker and his anti-worker agenda is evident in the big-money advertising campaign aimed at saving Walker. The Walker campaign spent $300,000 on TV ads in several Wisconsin media markets during the Monday Night Football game between the Green Bay Packers and Minnesota Vikings. So it appears the Recall Walker campaign will be another showdown between corporate political money and grassroots worker activism.
The campaign to recall Walker is being coordinated by United Wisconsin, a statewide coalition, and you can follow its progress on the United Wisconsin website.