A statement from the Abolitionist Working Group of Madison Area Democratic Socialists of America
On March 19, Madison365 reported that Dane County deputies used unreasonable force on Jimmie Lee Joshua, an inmate at the Dane County Jail, resulting in a broken hip and permanent nerve damage. This happened on December 23, 2020 and only came to light more recently. Instead of receiving medical care immediately, Joshua was put into a suicide watch cell for 15 hours, and only recieved necessary care due to his fiancée calling the jail repeatedly. Similarly heinous behavior was on display on Monday, March 22 following the Madison Police Department’s response to a call at a shelter for unhoused men on the East Side. An MPD officer fired their weapon in the shelter in response to alleged violence having already occured. MPD’s response to violence was to escalate with more violence, and then force the residents of the shelter to wait outside without coats or access to medications.
The Abolitionist Working Group of the Madison Area Democratic Socialists of America (MADSA AWG) denounces all forms of law enforcement violence. These two recent, local instances are just drops in an ocean of unrelenting, state-sanctioned violence that disproportionately impacts the BIPOC and poor people in our community. “Law enforcement” as it is currently conceived in our society does not keep people safe. In fact, policing and prisons make us less safe and make already vulnerable people more vulnerable to abuse. Dane County Sheriff’s Deputies broke a man’s hip and then dumped him in a cell alone for 15 hours before he received medical attention. Madison Police officers cavalierly displaced dozens of unhoused people and prevented medics from providing care for a man who was experiencing an asthma attack. These actions only do harm, furthering the dehumanizing conditions that the most vulnerable members of our community are facing.
MADSA AWG calls upon the governments of Madison and Dane County to hold these officers responsible, divest from our police forces, and reinvest that money into our community through housing programs and public service. This should take place under the direction of the community members themselves, particularly those who are directly affected by incarceration and/or houselessness.
The UW Madison BIPOC Coalition is requesting donations to support the displaced residents of the shelter. Donations related to finding shelter for these folks can be made via PayPal at https://www.paypal.me/GMRCMADISON or via CashApp at $GMRCMADISON; donations related to food and medical supplies can be made via Venmo to @UWMadisonBIPOC-Coalition.
Madison Area DSA’s Abolitionist Working Group formed out of the work to Derail the Jail and the Doyle Resolution campaigns to stop the jail expansion and decarcerate Dane County. This group is the home in Madison Area DSA for all abolition-related work. The Abolitionist Working Group believes that abolition is a key tenet of socialism as prisons and policing are some of the most direct and personal means of state-driven oppression in our current society.The Abolitionist Working Group meets every other Wednesday, with their next meeting scheduled for 7 pm on Wednesday, April 14. You can find information about their meetings and all Madison Area DSA events here.
A solidarity statement from the Socialist Feminist Working Group of the Madison Area Democratic Socialists of America
The Socialist Feminist Working Group of the Madison Area Democratic Socialists of America stands in solidarity against Anti-Asian violence in America and across the globe. We condemn the hate crime that murdered six Asian women in Atlanta, GA on March 16th, 2021, and the lethal anti-Asian racism that encouraged it.
On March 16th, 2021, a white man attacked two Atlanta spas, killing six Asian women and two white people. Four of the victims were of Korean descent and two others were of Chinese descent. Seven of the victims were women. Just hours before the shooting, the gunman bought his murder weapon at a local store. According to a report from Chosun Ilbo, a national Korean newspaper, an employee who escaped the shooting at the second location heard the gunman say, “I’m going to kill all Asians.” Three and a half hours later, the gunman was arrested en-route to Florida.
The racially-motivated murders happened amidst an aggressive rise in anti-Asian violence in America. This rash of hate includes murders, beatings, harrassment, deportations, discrimination, and other harm to Asian-Americans of all ethnicities and ages. Yet, national media outlets, alongside the Cherokee County Sheriff, try to hide the racism of the hate crime as fueled by “sexual addiction” or the gunman having a “bad day”. This narrative is no accident: cloaking a racist hate crime as anything else is an act of white supremacy.
The Trump administration constantly stamped COVID-19 as the “Chinese-virus” or “kung-flu”. In fact, Trump insisted that the 2019 novel coronavirus was deliberately engineered by a Chinese laboratory, which is patently false. These racist lies scapegoated Asian countries and people for the failures of the Trump administration to control the pandemic, and inflamed anti-Asian racism.
Furthermore, the long history of fetishization of Asian women in American most certainly contributed to the gunman’s choice to target these spas, which were owned and/or staffed primarily by Asian women. Asian-American women are hypersexualized and fetishized by U.S. and European imperialism. As a result, white supremacists assert that Asian women are subhuman and subservient, which causes violence against against Asian women. Though there is inconclusive evidence as to whether the victims in Atlanta were sex workers, the media quickly painted them as such to devalue their lives and explain the murderer.
Let us be clear: whether or not the victims were sex-workers, they deserved to live and work free from fear, harm, criminalization, or violence of any kind.
We acknowledge the violent and oppressive role of police in discriminating against Asians and BIPOC of all backgrounds and ethnicities. Police exist to defend private property and the ideology of white supremacy, which devalues the lives of BIPOC and gaslights communities of color. Police rebrand hate crimes to serve their own agenda for increased policing, funding, and militarization of police forces.
We continue to call for defunding the police, for community control, and for complete abolition.
We send a deep and heartfelt gratitude to local organizations standing in solidarity with Asian lives, including Freedom Inc, the UW-Madison BIPOC Coalition, and the Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean-American, Chinese-American, Hmong-American, Filipinx-American, and Indian Student Associations. We urge all members of our communities, both locally and nationally, to continue standing in solidarity with Asian peoples by donating to support families of the victims, as well as organizations engaged in this work.
We stand in solidarity with the victims, their families, members of the Asian-American community, and all those whose lives are impacted by white supremacy.
Solidarity, The Socialist Feminist Working Group of the Madison Area Democratic Socialists of America
[1] The data comes from police data of reported hate crimes. We acknowledge that anti-Asian violence is likely far greater than these under-reported numbers, and that police disproportionately harm Asian communities. We use their data because of the lack of available statistics.
The Socialist Feminist Working Group of Madison Area DSA is organizing for a world without gender injustice, racial oppression, sexual persecution, or capitalism. To connect with the SocFem working group, find contact information and links to social media here. Their next scheduled meeting is Wednesday, April 7 at 7:00 PM. You can find meeting details as well as information about all Madison Area DSA events here.
This story was produced in partnership with Tone Madison.
Nurses at Unity Point Health-Meriter Hospital won a significant victory earlier this month with the ratification of a new labor contract. The nurses and their union, SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin, succeeded through a combination of an energized and organized membership, competent leadership, and clear objectives. The Madison community supported the nurses’ demands for time off for rest and healing so they could better care for their patients and themselves. Nurses pointed out again and again that they were here for the community during the COVID-19 pandemic over the past year, and they asked the community to be there for them.
The settlement has implications that go far beyond Meriter, and could signal a broader change in the labor climate for healthcare workers around Madison.
Nurses pointed out again and again that they were here for the community during the COVID-19 pandemic over the past year, and they asked the community to be there for them.
Initially the nurses had five demands. On March 5, the bargaining committee outlined the remaining issues with management, noting that the union had been in negotiations for some weeks.
Wages were one issue. The union sought a raise in base pay above the inflation rate. Another issue was the length of the contract. While many unions try to negotiate two- and three-year agreements, SEIU argued for a one year contract so that the nurses’ contract and the SEIU’s Service and Support contract with Meriter would expire the same year. The Service and Support contract covers many of the blue collar-workers at Meriter, such as food service providers and janitorial staff. Having a joint expiration date of both the blue collar workers’ and nurses’ bargaining units would strengthen both.
The nurses’ union also sought relief for its members in terms of earned time off. The system at Meriter combines sick time and vacation time in the same pot. However, due to the pandemic, many nurses had used up their allotted sick and vacation time. Some actually owed time to the hospital. The nurses sought a significant increase in the earned time allotment so that nurses would have time off available as the year progressed.
According to the union, Meriter hospital was the only area hospital to challenge COVID-19-related workers’ compensation claims. The union provided figures indicating that hospital management fought the vast majority of claims on the grounds that the claimants could not prove that they contracted COVID while at work or from a particular patient.
Nurses also emphasized the need to be a part of the decision-making when it comes to dealing with both the current pandemic and any future, similar emergencies. The union asked repeatedly at the start of the pandemic for routine screening tests (the same tests used to screen every patient admitted to the hospital), a request the hospital denied.
Finally, the nurses sought an increase in the shift incentive. Working extra shifts is voluntary, but when nurses are asked to work extra shifts, they are paid an incentive. The payment is called incentive pay and nurses sought time-and-a-half for all hours worked if the hospital deems the shift a critical short shift. Currently nurses who volunteer to work an extra shift are not paid time and half for all hours worked.
According to the union, the hospital projects 31,000 hours of extra shifts in 2021. About 15 full-time nurses would need to be hired to fill this gap and end the excessive use of extra shift work.
On March 14, SEIU issued a 10-day strike notice, even as negotiations proceeded with the help of a mediator.
On Friday. March 19, unions from both the public sector and private sector, as well as those representing the building trades, came together to support the nurses. Especially important was a commitment by the leaders of Teamsters Local 344 to ask their members not to cross the nurse’s picket line should a strike be called. Local 344 represents approximately 5,000 package and delivery workers across Wisconsin. In a little more than one day, 2,000 community members signed a petition supporting the nurses. Several Madison-based state legislators also came out in support of the nurses in a press conference earlier in the month.
As Saturday, March 20 drew to a close, word went out that the nurses had reached a tentative agreement with Meriter. Almost all of the issues the nurses had raised were addressed in the contract.
The nurses won additional incentive pay to work extra shifts. They won the replenishment of their paid time off plan. Moving forward, no nurses will owe time to the hospital, and nurses could receive up to 60 hours of earned time in 2021. The actual amount of time will vary based on whether the nurses are full- or part-time.
Base wages will also go up 2.6 percent in 2021 and 2.6 percent in 2022.
The hospital agreed that it will rationalize scheduling and establish and announce a deadline for schedule posting that management will follow. This should diminish the likelihood of management calling in a nurse without any prior notice.
The hospital agreed to meet, confer, and bargain regarding the impact of government-declared health emergencies.
Finally, nurses will receive increased money to cover the costs of nursing certification and recertification, including exams, books and fees.
In other words, almost all the issues raised by the union were addressed in some positive manner by the settlement. Absent from the list was the common contract expiration demand. The union indicated that it did push strongly for this clause but the hospital simply would not budge. SEIU said it would continue to advocate on this issue.
According to Unity Point Health-Meriter, the contract increases wages “above market rate and on top of what is already one of the highest paid nurse workforces in Wisconsin.”
“The past few weeks have been extremely stressful for everyone at Meriter and many in the community,” Chief Nursing Executive Sherry Casali said in a statement. “We are committed to moving forward under the contract, as one strong Meriter team, to do what we do best: provide high-quality, compassionate care to our patients and community.”
As part of the ratification of the contract, the nurses’ union has agreed to withdraw the workforce allegations it submitted to the National Labor Relations Board.
The mobilization for a decent contract changed the union in many ways. As Victoria Gutierrez, a critical care nurse at Meriter, told me, “engagement is through the roof.” This engagement can be measured by the percentage of nurses who are actually members of the union. Meriter nurses do not have to join the union, and prior to the contract mobilization, many had not. This has now changed. According to union leadership, membership was around 70 percent before the contract negotiation and it is now around 90 percent.
The victory of the nurses may change the balance of forces for workers at SSM Health St Mary’s Hospital, who currently don’t have a union.
The contract agreement was also widely supported by the membership. SEIU reported large participation in the electronic vote to ratify the contract, with 98.2 percent of the voters approving the contract.
The importance of community and labor support was clearly a factor in the overall success of the contract campaign. The South Central Federation of Labor demonstrated that it could bring together the labor community. Progressive state legislators acted collectively to support the nurses. This vigorous and widespread support indicated that should a strike occur, the hospital would be politically isolated, making it more difficult for Unity Point Health-Meriter to resist legislative initiatives regarding staffing and other issues.
The victory of the nurses may change the balance of forces for workers at SSM Health St Mary’s Hospital, who currently don’t have a union. As one nurse told me, nurses at Meriter are “110 percent excited about the union.” This enthusiasm will influence any attempt by SEIU to expand the unit at Meriter through the organization of the so far non-union, Meriter-associated clinics. It will certainly encourage nurses at St. Mary’s and UW Health, who will see that being in a union means progress for the nurses. The community will also benefit to the extent the staffing needs of the nurses are met, leading to better health care for the community.
The workers at Colectivo Coffee, a Milwaukee based coffee shop are in the middle of a unionizing drive. Their struggle to unionize was featured on a recent episode of the Bad Faith podcast with Briahna Joy Gray and Virgil Texas. The podcast featured Colectivo worker Zoe Muellner, who was laid off due to her organizing efforts.
Worker organizing at Colectivo has been ongoing since 2018. If successful, the union will join the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). Right now there are about 375 employees in the shops in Wisconsin and Illinois. Organizers chose IBEW because all employees – from baristas, to trainers, to warehouse workers – can be represented by the same union.
The vote to unionize the workplace started March 9 and will end March 30. If successful, the union will be the largest for café workers in the country.
The company, which has rapidly grown from its Milwaukee base to shops in Madison and Chicago, has taken the usual union busting tactics. They hired the Labor Relations Institute, an infamous union busting firm, at $375 an hour to try to stop the workers from forming a union. The Institute engages in a number of pressure tactics, including emails, smearing organizers of the union, gaslighting, retaliation, arbitrary dismissals and misinformation campaigns to intimidate workers. You can read more about their disgusting union-busting tactics in Madison Area DSA member Alice Herman’s new article for In These Times, Colectivo Could Soon Become the Largest Unionized Coffee Chain in the U.S.
Workers have asked customers using the Colectivo app to add Union Yes to their names in the app to show that they support the organizing effort. If ordering coffee in person, order it “IBEW strong” to show support.
It is very important for socialists to support workplace organizing efforts. Large sections of the service sector remain unorganized and are staffed by workers who are exploited through low wages, bad working conditions, and a lack of decent benefits. By supporting service workers as they organize and by organizing our own workplaces, we can begin to turn the tide on predatory capitalism and build a better future for all.
To learn more about Colectivo worker organizing, check out:
This story was produced in partnership with Tone Madison.
At the end of last summer, I wrote about the concerning relationship between Public Health Madison & Dane County (PHMDC) and the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce (GMCC). I argued that the interests of a public health department during a pandemic and the interests of the business community were contradictory, and that concessions to business interests might stimulate the economy, but would make all of us less safe. Madison365 reported on this in greater detail in August. Wanting to understand the relationship better, I also submitted a public records request for all communications between PHMDC and GMCC since April. I received those records several weeks ago. You can view them here.
Emails between the two organizations give us insight into instances when GMCC was able to influence final public health orders and instances where it was not. I learned more by talking to people whose experience with PHMDC at the start of the pandemic was different from what communications between PHMDC and GMCC show.
An extensive review of email communications shows that representatives from the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce had greater access to information and opportunities to weigh in on local COVID-19 policy than elected representatives on the Madison Common Council and the Dane County Board of Supervisors and, by extension, the public. These communications also show a gulf between PHMDC’s cooperation with the business lobby and its interactions with individual workers and labor advocates. There’s a case to be made that as a result, PHMDC’s reopening plan was weaker than it might have been if it had been informed by a greater array of perspectives. This case is strengthened by the improvements that resulted from later collaborations with a different, labor-oriented organization.
A year out from the start of the pandemic, there are perhaps more questions we should be asking, though. There are greater issues underlying the problematic nature of business lobbyists being given more information and access to public health decision making than the public itself. From which decisions actually constitute a public health emergency to the strength of our representative bodies relative to other players in city politics, the difficulty of the last year has demonstrated that there’s room for improvement on at least a few fronts.
An extensive back-and-forth with the Chamber
On Friday, May 15, PHMDC’s Business Liaison, Bonnie Koenig, invited Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce President Zach Brandon to meet so she could share an advance overview of Forward Dane, PHMDC’s plan for a phased reopening. Though Koenig did not share an actual draft of Forward Dane at the meeting, which was attended by Brandon and Adam Barr, GMCC’s former Public Policy Manager, they discussed the plan in enough detail to allow GMCC reps to provide feedback, which Koenig summarized in an email the next morning, writing, “The ideas you shared will be presented today as PHMDC continues to work towards finalizing this plan. I appreciate the willingness to partner now and into the future for getting the public health guidance to our business community. And I am grateful for all of your commitment for a safe, phased-in reopening, and agree that this needs to be balanced with supporting our economy and community confidence.”
The suggestions Koenig reiterated include “No more ‘essential and non-essential”—as in, not delineating between essential and non-essential workers/businesses—and “Leave room for business innovation.” Brandon replied with a few additional notes of his own which, as Koenig put it, “arrived at the perfect time this morning during our discussions and was shared to all present. And, as you will see, many of these great insights have been incorporated to the extent possible.”
Not all of the Chamber’s suggestions actually made it into PHMDC policy. For example, Brandon’s suggestion that closed-to-the-public office occupancy limits be determined by workers’ ability to maintain social distancing rather than a percent of building capacity did not make it into the final order. In other cases, the feedback was accepted. The word “essential” did not appear in another order after Order #2, which was followed by Phase 1 of Forward Dane, effectively flattening out the perception that some businesses or activities should be prioritized above others. Koenig summarized exactly what was incorporated in another email on Sunday, May 17, when she also shared a draft of the order. The emails leave no room for doubt that the Chamber’s suggestions directly and quickly influenced PHMDC’s decision making: “I am excited to share the almost final draft of the Dane Forward Plan, where you will be able to see how your insights have been incorporated in these specific ways,” Koenig wrote in her May 17 message. (Italics are Koenig’s.) One of the ensuing bullet points noted that “The language was changed to be less regulatory and showing more positive progression through phases.”
Koenig and GMCC representatives had a standing weekly meeting. Koenig continued to share information about forthcoming orders with GMCC throughout the summer. For example, when new COVID-19 cases began to spike just a few weeks after Dane County entered the first phase of Forward Dane, Koenig sent GMCC representatives an email to share that PHMDC would be introducing a new, more restrictive order and later shared some insights into what the new order would include. She also shared that while she had passed along GMCC’s concerns about broad, county-wide restrictions, PHMDC would not make the new restrictions more targeted.
GMCC shared frequently asked questions from worried business owners, which Koenig answered. Some of the questions reveal the conflicting interests of bosses and their workers. For example, it appears that a common concern for business owners was that their employees might lie to them about testing positive for or being exposed to COVID-19 and wanted to know what rights they had in terms of accessing this information through PHMDC. On another occasion, a business owner fretted that the required quarantine period for someone who has been exposed to COVID-19 would be too long for their workers to go without pay. Nikki Javurek, GMCC’s Director of Business Development, explained that the question was coming from a business whose employees live paycheck to paycheck, as if workers’ financial struggles aren’t directly related to what the business owner chooses to pay them. Koenig regretfully explained that a negative COVID-19 test did not eliminate the need to quarantine.
Most of these questions were generalized and the businesses involved were not specifically named. However, Koenig did request that GMCC President Zach Brandon be included in a weekly PHMDC email report on compliance data, on the grounds that, “Zach is partnering with PHMDC to help us educate this businesses (sic).” In another email about complaints received about businesses, a PHMDC staff person refers to a business that had received a complaint shortly before PHMDC determined that there was an outbreak at the business. The name of the business is redacted in the records released to Tone Madison, which is in alignment with PHMDC’s policy of not publicly naming businesses where there are outbreaks, but public-health staff did share the unredacted name of the business with Brandon.
The connection was not one-sided. GMCC shared resources and its platform with PHMDC, inviting PHMDC staff members to share information with business owners at GMCC events, providing useful editorial suggestions on materials PHMDC developed, and using their website to share answers to frequently asked, business-related questions. Though GMCC representatives declined a short-notice request to sign on to PHMDC’s Mask Up, Madison initiative, following the announcement of the county-wide mask mandate, this was a collaborative relationship.
An uphill battle for labor
PHMDC is clear that it works with representatives from many organizations and not just the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce. In an email response to Tone Madison‘s questions about this, PHMDC staff cited meetings with groups ranging from the Wisconsin Council for the Blind and Visually Impaired to the Tavern League to the Wisconsin Grocers Association.
They also shared, as an example of how they have responded to the needs of worker-focused organizations, a link to a fact sheet that they put together “in direct response to a request from worker groups to the mayor’s office.” The fact sheet lists what employers are required to provide to employees to keep them safe on the job and provides contact information for PHMDC for workers who want to report a compliance issue. The worker group that requested the fact sheet is the Dignity at Work Coalition, a group of organizations representing labor and other social justice causes. The coalition was started by Rabbi Bonnie Margulis, Executive Director of Wisconsin Faith Voices for Justice, in an attempt to help organizations with shared concerns take action together. I spoke with Rabbi Margulis and Rebecca Meier-Rao, Executive Director of Worker Justice Wisconsin, a member organization of the Dignity at Work Coalition.
Last summer, after the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down Governor Tony Evers’ Safer at Home order, the Dignity at Work coalition recognized that they needed to act to protect workers who were being suddenly called back to work. This recognition was spurred, in part, by what Meier-Rao and her colleagues at Worker Justice Wisconsin had been experiencing since the start of the pandemic.
Worker Justice Wisconsin aims to “build collective worker power through training, labor rights education, collective action and community engagement.” A lot of the organization’s day-to-day work revolves around helping workers deal with injustices in the workplace, from wage theft and benefit disputes to health and safety concerns. Many of the workers that turn to Worker Justice Wisconsin for assistance are immigrants, some of them undocumented.
In 2019, a normal year, Worker Justice Wisconsin helped workers recover over $90,000 in stolen wages. In 2020, the organization’s caseload tripled. Meier-Rao explains that at the start of the pandemic especially, workers were panicked. Many workers were laid off immediately and left with no income. This was especially hard for undocumented workers who did not qualify for stimulus relief money. But there were also many calls about abusive and illegal practices.
“There was a lot of cases of workers calling because they were not paid their last paycheck. Because when things shut down, businesses just decided, you know, ‘That’s it. We’re not putting any more money out,’” Meier-Rao says.
Worker Justice Wisconsin also received many calls from workers who were afraid of getting sick on the job. Especially in the beginning, employers were slow to adopt personal protective equipment (PPE) and social distancing measures, a national trend reflected in high, early case counts in food production settings. Meier-Rao recalls one incident with an area housekeeping service that continued to operate in violation of the state’s Safer at Home order, requiring its workers to clean people’s homes at a time when everyone was terrified of getting infected.
“The PPE was pathetic,” Meier-Rao says. “I mean pathetic. The workers were scared to go to work every day.”
Rabbi Margulis explains that when the Dignity at Work Coalition met to discuss the conditions workers were facing throughout the state, the experiences Worker Justice Wisconsin was reporting were not an anomaly. The group decided Dane County was a good place to take action because PHMDC had developed some of the most robust orders in the state.
“So we had a meeting with folks from [Public Health Madison & Dane County], the mayor and other folks in the mayor’s office and someone from [County Executive] Joe Parisi’s office,” Margulis says. “And we talked about what we were seeing and what we thought was needed. That health department orders needed to be beefed up, they needed to have more teeth to them, more of an enforcement piece. And that the workers needed to have a place that they could complain anonymously and feel safe.”
The meeting took place in June. By the end of June, PHMDC had created the fact sheet that the Dignity at Work Coalition had suggested. In PHMDC’s Emergency Order #7, released June 25, there was an additional requirement for businesses that the fact sheet be posted in the business “in a prominent location where all employees may access and view.”
When I asked Rabbi Margulis for her thoughts about the fact that the business community was consulted in the development of the order but that workers and worker organizations were not, she was clear that she wouldn’t ascribe ill intent to anyone at PHMDC.
“I would say that it’s probably a perspective that didn’t occur to them,” Margulis says. “But when we brought it to them and said you need to be putting things out from the workers perspective, the immediate answer was oh, of course yes.”
Meier-Rao, too, is sympathetic to the challenges PHMDC has faced. But she is also unequivocal about the imbalance in the relationship between employers and workers and whether business owners can be trusted to put the health and safety of their workers first.
“Employers have far more power than employees,” Meier-Rao says. “Which is why we stress collective action, because employees have to act together to even stand a minute chance of countering the power that employers have. And then you add to it undocumented workers who, by the way, are paying taxes but reap pretty much none of the benefits, except eking out a meager amount to survive, and maybe sending some of it back to their families. They have even less power. This is not a disputable fact.”
But it was the organization representing employers that PHMDC reached out to to establish a working partnership before Forward Dane was even finalized. The Dignity at Work Coalition initiated contact with PHMDC on their own, after the fact. PHMDC has said that any organization can reach out to them if they’re interested in meeting with a representative from PHMDC and that “While we have hosted and participated in a number of community-based forums throughout the pandemic, we have not been invited to any forums that were solely worker-focused. We’d be happy to attend any meeting to answer questions and concerns from workers.”
The problem with waiting to be contacted by worker organizations is that worker organizations have been systematically weakened over the decades by anti-labor attacks, including Act 10 in Wisconsin. Unlike business owners, who have the money to assemble lobbying organizations like the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce, the Tavern League, and the Wisconsin Grocers Association, workers are often left without any collective voice at all.
Elected Officials Playing Catch-Up
One way that all residents are meant to be granted a hearing is through their Madison Common Council member or Dane County Board Supervisor. These representatives have smaller constituencies than either the Mayor of Madison or the Dane County Executive, which theoretically gives residents a greater chance of being heard if they have a question or concern. But unlike Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, County Executive Joe Parisi, and the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce, Alders and Supervisors were not involved in Forward Dane discussions and planning. Alders received a link to the press release announcing Forward Dane less than 10 minutes before the same release was shared with the public. Four days later, they received word that Dane County would be moving into Phase 1 of Forward Dane, again only shortly before the public announcement.
Grant Foster, who represents District 15 on Madison’s Common Council, says that he was “shocked and surprised.” I asked Foster if his constituents were concerned about Forward Dane and the reopening announcement. He explains that knowing what constituents think is the ongoing challenge of being a representative, but says, “I had high confidence then and I think I still do that there was sort of broad concern. That move [into Phase 1] did not seem to match the level of concern that I understood or imagined from my constituents.”
Elena Haasl, who represents District 5 on the Dane County Board of Supervisors, also describes being surprised. “The pandemic has held—and still holds—so much uncertainty. I was kind of shocked that PHMDC announced the Forward Dane plan without consulting with any elected officials, but also without a lot of input in the community,” Haasl says.
The four-day window between PHMDC’s announcement of Forward Dane and its announcement that the county would enter the first phase of reopening meant that Alders and Dane County Board Supervisors had very little time to collect input from their constituents and, if they were concerned, to make sure that their thoughts and questions were shared with decision-makers like PHMDC, the mayor, and the county executive.
Still, Foster and Haasl joined seven other Alders and four other Dane County Board Supervisors signing on to an open letter to PHMDC Director Janel Heinrich, the mayor, and the county executive with a list of questions about Forward Dane, ranging from how PHMDC had settled on its metrics for Forward Dane, which were less rigorous than metrics put forward by plans like COVID Local, to what was needed to get contact tracing capacity up to recommended standards. They also noted that while Forward Dane outlined the metrics Dane County needed to reach to move forward into new, less restrictive phases, the plan did not specify what metrics would trigger a return to more restrictive phases if COVID-19 started spreading fast. They reiterated all of these concerns in another open letter sent June 29, in which they also requested that PHMDC issue a mask mandate.
In retrospect, the questions and concerns these elected officials raised look like the right ones. It was good to wonder how PHMDC would determine that we needed to tighten restrictions, something officials were forced to do after we hit the peak of our summer spike just over a month after entering Phase 1 of Forward Dane. PHMDC also issued a mask mandate one week after receiving the second open letter. Concerns about the number of contact tracers were also validated. An insufficient contact tracing capacity, reflected by a statewide deficit, led PHMDC to adopt a “crisis model” of contact tracing on October 21 when the seven-day average for new COVID-19 cases was over 200 cases per day.
Given the legitimacy of these concerns, as well as the fact that our democratically elected representatives are one of the public’s best and only avenues for sharing feedback about city and county policy, it would seem to make sense to include this group in conversations about public health policy before the orders are finalized and announced. That didn’t happen. Throughout the summer, these elected officials continued to learn about new public health orders only shortly before the finalized orders were made public, even as PHMDC’s business liaison continued to share information about new orders with the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce, attend weekly meetings with GMCC reps, and pass along GMCC’s feedback about impending orders with decision makers at PHMDC.
Lessons for after the pandemic
As more and more people get vaccinated, with the promise of a semi-normal summer on the horizon, it’s tempting to try and forget about what happened over the last year or to question whether it even matters.The end of this nightmare is in sight. Who cares?
Over the course of the pandemic, a lot of people cared. There have been numerous instances of workers and groups of community members coming together in an attempt to shape public health decision-making and protect one another. In addition to Alders and Supervisors and the Dignity at Work Coalition, we saw workers at Epic Systems risk retribution to sound the alarm about the health-tech giant’s back-to-work plan, a revolt that quickly turned into an embarrassing national news story for Dane County’s largest private employer. Faculty, staff, and students put up a valiant fight to prevent UW-Madison from rolling out its Smart Restart, a plan of questionable intelligence that led to a huge spike of new COVID-19 cases on campus that trickled out into the community. Malia Jones, a parent and public health expert, spearheaded an effort to get non-essential businesses and gatherings closed last summer in the hopes that students might be able to return to classrooms in the fall. Late last year and this year, teachers all over Dane County objected to being made to return to in-person teaching without vaccines.
These actions reflect a substantial number of people who felt unsafe, out of control of the decisions that impacted their lives, or both over the course of the pandemic.
Alder Foster suggests that it might be time to take a look at the state statutes and local ordinances around public health emergency response. “They’re really meant to provide the ability to quickly put in restrictions to try and stop the spread of a pandemic disease,” Foster says. “The need to put in restrictions is a public health question. And I’m totally comfortable with that being a public health decision.”
But he argues that subsequent decisions about what’s essential and what’s not, what should be open and what shouldn’t, and trying to balance the impacts of those decisions on the economy, education, and other interests, isn’t necessarily an emergency or a public health decision. It’s political.
“That did not need to happen without public input and without decision-making happening from our elected public officials beyond the mayor. And that’s probably my primary frustration, is that it could and should have,” Foster says.
If all of us, as a community, had a hand in determining what activities were most important for us to resume, armed with information from PHMDC about what was actually safe, would we have chosen to open bars and restaurants for in-person, indoor service in May? Would we have wanted to keep them open in the fall, when students returned and it became too cold to eat outside? Who benefits from the fact that there was no formal avenue for the public to weigh in on these decisions? Whose priorities and preferences really did get a hearing? While business owners might like to believe that there is no such thing as essential or non-essential among them, the rest of us would probably have determined otherwise.
It’s worth repeating a point that Rabbi Margulis made about how Dignity at Work chose to reach out to officials in Dane County about worker safety because PHMDC had the most robust orders in the state. PHMDC has worked incredibly hard over the last year to protect our community. One of the reasons it is easy to pick at the decisions of our local public-health officials is because they actually made decisions, unlike Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled State Legislature, which left us all for dead, or our clusterfuck federal government, led by a president whose greatest pandemic achievement was convincing millions of people that the virus was a hoax. PHMDC has an excellent blog, where staff members have written about their decision-making process and where they clearly try to address common questions and concerns. Staff members are similarly responsive to questions over social media. PHMDC did all of this critical work while facing lawsuits, backlash, and harassment from an anti-science right wing.
At the same time, public health officials’ ability to execute robust orders and the positive outcome of those restrictions comes from the residents of Dane County, too—our willingness to cooperate to keep each other safe, and the quality of the people we elect to public office. There are anti-masker fools in Dane County, of course. But the biggest political outbursts around COVID-19 in our community came from people who wanted to be more safe, not less. We deserve more than to feel like our public health department is negotiating our safety in closed-door meetings with the bosses. We deserve to have a say.
Correction added:This article initially stated that four Dane County Supervisors signed the open letter to PHMDC. The correct number was five, not four. The article has been updated.
Community for Responsible Government (CRG) is posting billboards around town, supporting Common Council incumbents like Syed Abbas and Sheri Carter. CRG is likely the same group (with backing from non-Madison-resident but rich-landed-gentry Eric Hovde) that sponsored the last round of silly City Council billboards claiming to “Save Madison.” Hovde’s work of political genius was covered here back in December. While coverage of Hovde and his apparent front groups unveiled some of the mystery of these billboards, the political strategy behind the campaign remains impenetrable – or perhaps just haphazard. For example, the website from the original run of billboards is no longer online.
The previous Community for Responsible Government billboard, posted at the corner of East Washington and Ingersoll a few months ago, sported a big Uncle Sam and encouraged “common sense” people to run for office. The billboard in support of Alder Abbas thanks him for “trying” to keep the city safe, a tone that is bizarrely sarcastic for an advertisement clearly encouraging support of Abbas. Abbas has since distanced himself from the billboards – albeit half-heartedly – with his campaign Facebook page saying “We continue to be appreciative of community members for their support. We are committed to racial justice and community oversight and reform of police.”
That goes against Abbas’s voting record, and the implied pro-police messaging is just the tip of the iceberg of vexing concerns raised by these billboards. To start with, the website on the billboard has been broken for days. CRG’s website is visible in the Wayback Machine in a snapshot from last November. Looking past the truly incredible barrage of stock photography, you can see that CRG claims to be a 501(c)4 organization. The IRS doesn’t seem to know about them yet, though.
Photo by Karl Locher
One thing that is clear is that Hovde and CRG absolutely love stock photos. Do you think those houses on the Abbas billboard are in District 12? Nope, that’s a stock photo. We can spot that exact shot rotating through headers on varioushome inspection and realty sites around the country. If CRG is committed to saving Madison, they might do well to start by visiting first. Nikki Conklin, who MADSA endorsed, had fun with this on Facebook.. While CRG’s campaign raises suspicion, spending thousands of dollars on billboards with broken URLs is hard to explain as anything other than incompetence. Indeed, even just a few billboards are likely to cost more than running an actual campaign for Common Council. Is this a visionary political strategy, the purpose for which is beyond the grasp of leftist commentators? Most likely it’s just landlord laziness.
There’s nothing in the city ordinances (MGO Sec. 3.35 on ethics) that appears to prevent an independent entity from spending dark money on a candidate for city office. The fact that Abbas, the incumbent in the race, is getting this sort of implied pro-property-and-policing support while being challenged on the left by democratic socialist candidate Tessa Echeverria raises some questions. Abbas isn’t alone; more billboards are going up supporting other incumbents around town, with similarly boring stock footage and the same broken URL.
Photo by Zach S.
While CRG itself seems to offer little insight into its political strategy, the actions of more reputable organizations might be illuminating. Recently, the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce and Building Trades Council announced a series of joint endorsements for City Council. The Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce is a powerhouse of conservatism hiding in plain sight. With policy positions ranging from enthusiastic support for U.S. imperialism and PFAS contamination, to eliminating any vestige of city control over property development, the Chamber of Commerce hides a lot of harmful work underneath a website that is light years ahead of CRG’s. Even Citizen Dave, with his profoundly warped sense of political reality, acknowledges the Chamber of Commerce as a conservative force.
Importantly, the Chamber of Commerce is getting to be a skillful organization at the sort of soft-touch corporate exploitation that Madison is built on. The collaboration of the Chamber of Commerce and Public Health Madison & Dane County to encourage businesses to reopen as the pandemic was just beginning to inflict its lethal toll displayed a shocking disregard for public health. But it didn’t appear outwardly surprising as it happened — it was just a public-private partnership for public health, which sounds pretty normal for Madison.
In context of the efforts of other conservative groups, the efforts of the CRG to support Syed Abbas appear to be a page from a well-worn playbook, if poorly executed. Just as the Chamber of Commerce hides an anti-worker agenda under the cover of “innovation” and “partnership,” these billboards are simply an effort to associate a candidate with a loosely-defined word over which few people will argue. Syed Abbas is trying to keep our city “safe”, and who could argue? Unless, of course, you realize that “safety” is coming at the expense of Madisonians of color, specifically Black Madisonians, who are more likely to be brutalized by a police force that Alder Abbas has refused to hold to account.
2020 was a year of glaring, often painful, contradictions. For an ever-increasing number of people, the harsh realities of American life became visceral, cruel, and so atrocious as to elude novel and emphatic efforts to maintain a blissful ignorance. In many cases, these contradictions were a matter of personal tragedy – unforeseen unemployment, life-shattering eviction, illness, and death. In other cases, the contradictions were absurd and distant, like a perverse comedy playing out on a national stage. The post-election narcissistic breakdown of Donald Trump comes to mind. Here in Dane County, we bore witness to our own catastrophe in the making throughout 2020: the relentless effort of elected officials to silence opposition to a new Dane County Jail.
The existing Dane County Jail, and the building of a new jail, are clearly the site of political contradictions for our community. Massive numbers of people in Dane County have spoken against the jail, indicating clear support for its abolition. Indeed, given the broadcommunity oppositionto Immigration and Customs Enforcement, one can surmise that much of our community objects to the violent racism and white supremacy of the prison industrial complex. Yet, Dane County is among the most segregated counties in America, largely as a result of the nauseatingly high number of Black people in the Dane County Jail.
Despite community resistance to the jail, the actions of the Dane County Board of Supervisors – and the people who continue to vote them into office – demonstrated their lack of compunction about heavily investing in the prison industrial complex with an expensive new jail. The push for a new jail has been largely led by Sheriff Dave Mahoney, who has been hounding the Dane County Board of Supervisors to build it for years – and given that our last jail was just built in 1993, one wonders if the Office of Sheriff does anything else. In 2017, after much deliberation and the original “derail the jail” protests, the Board signed off on the $135 million ($76 million plus interest) project; then they did it again in 2019 after the cost of the project exploded to $220 million. What happened next revealed the depth of Dane County’s commitment to upholding the systems of white supremacy, which should force opponents of the jail to rethink their strategy.
The Doyle Resolution is met by a new County Board
2020 started off with a series of shake-ups in the political landscape of Dane County government: Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Sharon Corrigan retired, about one third of the Board of Supervisor seats turned over in an election, and the new Board was left with the task of cleaning up the endless over-runs of the jail consolidation project. Nonetheless, the jail seemed to be a settled issue as the project lurched forward.
One can only speculate about the motivations of individual supervisors, but as a group, it is clear that the Dane County Board of Supervisors has no real interest in taking action to stop the single most powerful engine of racial oppression in Dane County.
In a last-ditch effort, Supervisor Teran Peterson moved to pull Resolution 145 out of committee and place it on the agenda of the full County Board for discussion and vote. This motion failed, 28 to 9. Although this was an improvement over the 26 to 4 vote to pass the budget authorization for the jail in 2017, it was nonetheless a failure for justice.
Take that vote in for a minute. Three quarters of the Dane County Board of Supervisors voted against the idea of even entertaining a discussion and vote about the Doyle Resolution, much less actually passing it. An overwhelming majority of the Dane County Board of Supervisors blithely ignored hundreds of people who spoke in favor of Resolution 145 over the summer and fall. One can only speculate about the motivations of individual supervisors, but as a group, it is clear that the Dane County Board of Supervisors has no real interest in taking action to stop the single most powerful engine of racial oppression in Dane County. Thus, Resolution 145 died in committee, with no further discussion on the matter.
Dave Mahoney’s idea of safety
The failure of Resolution 145 shows that the Dane County Board of Supervisors has completely relinquished control of community justice to an autocratic sheriff. Dave Mahoney – now set to retire in May – has consolidated an outsized amount of power in Dane County, a fortune his Governor-appointed successor will undoubtedly inherit. Mahoney has done so by (1) forcefully controlling the narrative around the jail with a subverted rhetoric of humanism, (2) hoarding money and authority while providing very little in return, and (3) consistently rebuking the County Board’s modest efforts of budgetary authority. This last point has been made numerous times over recent years and the jail itself is clear evidence in support of it. What started as a project that would cost about $135 million with interest is now close to double the price.
On the announcement of Mahoney’s retirement, the County Board chair praised him as a force for innovation, words spoken without a trace of irony in a county that still uses cash bail and sends all manner of ill individuals to jail rather than to healthcare facilities.
That the County Board could be prodded into such a project demonstrates the sway Mahoney and his phalanx of criminal justice consultants holds over the Board’s debates. Dave Mahoney has been successful in building a brand of being a sensible Democrat, a pragmatic professional rather than a shrewd politician. Mahoney’s reputation has surely been aided by the stark contrast drawn by David Clarke’s Trumpian vigilantism in Milwaukee County. Nonetheless, Mahoney frequently positions himself and his office as exemplars of gentle humanism, while doing things like sending deputies to harass water protectors or complaining about Black people exercising their rights. Over time, the message seems to have stuck. On the announcement of Mahoney’s retirement, the County Board chair praised him as a force for innovation, words spoken without a trace of irony in a county that still uses cash bail and sends all manner of ill individuals to jail rather than to healthcare facilities.
While Mahoney’s rhetoric of upholding humanist values was a part of his political strategy, the end result is something more concerning than shamelessly uttered self-deceptions – the Dane County Sheriff’s Office has effectively expanded its statutory mandate. While state law requires that county sheriffs maintain county jails and process lawful orders presented to them, Sheriff Mahoney has positioned his office as responsible for any matter of public safety, and even of public welfare. The County Board and Executive have played into this, ceding the terms of debate about mental health response and treatment, among many other issues of safety, as matters for the Sheriff – and the anti-democratic Criminal Justice Council – to handle.
While the Dane County Sheriff is quick to complain about the burden of mentally ill and addicted persons in the jail, and has over-run his budget and demanded unprecedented levels of funding for a jail to respond to such mental health crises, the county has almost nothing to show for this investment. That our county exists in such poverty of services while building a lavishly expensive jail is a testament to the Sheriff’s ability to hoard resources and power in exchange for such little service to the community. The county’s languishing capacity for care and safety is the inevitable result of turning over such vast authority to the Sheriff. Jails and prisons do not keep people safe, yet county leadership has let themselves be convinced otherwise. As a result, they are flummoxed by the urgent demands of the community to address issues of safety – in the most expansive definition of the word – other than to continue funding a jail project that is already failing.
The limits of advocacy
The failure of the Doyle Resolution – which revealed the depth of the recalcitrance of the Board of Supervisors over the matter – should signal to organizers that it is time to revisit our strategies towards jail abolition. The Board of Supervisors has made it abundantly clear that they cannot be dissuaded from building the jail and that they view community activists to be powerless to coerce them into stopping the project. While the spirit of Resolution 145 would have moved the County Board in the right direction, the weight of the resolution alone would not have stopped the jail expansion project. Once the Board of Supervisors approved the funding for the project, they ceded much of their legislative power to stop the project from moving forward. The Sheriff’s office can build the jail, and further authorization from the Board is only needed for some procedural matters or if the Sheriff goes over budget and needs more money. Therefore, in effect, Resolution 145 would have only produced a strongly worded, but altogether toothless, letter. With vanishingly few legislative opportunities left, other than hoping to organize a majority of Supervisors to vote against any potential forthcoming construction contracts, organizers can no longer afford to be so narrowly focused on the Board of Supervisors.
By comparison, it is instructive to look at the direct action campaign of Freedom, Inc. that ultimately terminated the Educational Resource Office (ERO) program in Madison’s public schools. Among the many projects of that campaign, organizers turned out hundreds of students and community members – predominantly Black and brown youth – to speak out at and disrupt MMSD Board of Education meetings. It was a strategy premised on developing youth power and it wisely invested in a multitude of tactics.
Early in the campaign, when the MMSD Board of Education was leaning towards continuing the ERO program, organizers were hammering away at an institution that had real power to make the change they needed. Beyond trying to persuade the Board, organizers and activists were raising the cost of continuing the ERO program by taking up more and more of the Board’s time. While this was happening, Freedom, Inc. undertook a massive campaign of education and public consciousness-raising throughout the community. They made cops in schools a central issue that politicians had to address. Crucially, Freedom, Inc.’s campaign problematized the institution and practice of policing, not just the actions of individual police officers. As a result, they helped give rise to new electoral campaigns for Board of Education seats, like those of Ananda Mirilli and Ali Muldrow, who opposed the ERO program. It was a strategy that could coherently continue after the Board of Education renewed the ERO contract, as both the MMSD Board of Education – and ultimately the Madison Common Council – still held the power to cancel the contract, which eventually happened last summer.
The jail is different. For one, it is a vastly larger institution and organ of our government. The ERO program was projected to cost MMSD about $380,000 for 2020. Simply building the jail will cost well over $225 million, enough money to have funded the ERO program for nearly six centuries – which doesn’t even begin to include staffing it, maintaining it, and other associated costs. Beyond the financial scope of the project, the jail plays a different role in the prison industrial complex. Maintaining a jail is a constitutionally mandated duty of county sheriffs in Wisconsin and much of their responsibility is now to the federal prison system, for whom they hold persons transferring between prisons. Additionally, it is no longer clear that the County Board can unilaterally end the jail project, since they authorized the funding for the jail and abdicated most of their power of oversight for the project. Now that the most decisive power to stop the jail expansion rests with Dave Mahoney and his successor, organizers opposing the jail must reckon with this reality.
The organizing we need
What will it take to stop the jail? This is a challenging question that demands examination of further questions. What would it take to stop the county from building a new jail when they’ve already committed to doing so? What kind of organizing would we need to stop the new jail from operating once the county does build it? Organizers would do well to appreciate that no one involved in passing the jail ever felt any real pressure to vote otherwise. Indeed, both County Executive Joe Parisi and Sheriff Mahoney have interpreted their most recent electoral victories – Mahoney’s was uncontested – as mandates for the jail.
Looking back to Freedom, Inc.’s campaign to end the ERO program, it is important to remember that the campaign turned EROs into a must-address issue, indeed one that everyone except Dave Blaska viewed as a problem. While many candidates running for school board may have been reluctant to end the ERO program, opting for reform rather than abolition, candidates in 2018 almost universally viewed the program as a problem. The state of discourse around the jail simply isn’t comparable to that of the ERO program. Candidates for County Board rarely speak of the jail and, if anything is to be viewed as a problem, it is the inhumane conditions of the City/County Jail building, not of the jail as an institution and practice. Any campaign to stop the jail must first make it obvious that the jail itself is a problem. Socialists must be clear, the jail is the malignant heart of racism in Dane County. We cannot stop the jail so long as the liberal illusion that jails can be kind and just continues to persist in the minds of so many in our community.
Stopping the jail will take deep organizing. Such a campaign will require a strategy that includes a variety of different sorts of activism and organizing. First and foremost, the entire county needs to understand the violence of the jail. Voters from Mazomanie to Cambridge need to appreciate that the jail does not rehabilitate – indeed, if it does, no one would know, as the Sheriff publishes no data on jail outcomes. People across Dane County must recognize the part that they are playing in a system that fills a jail with 57% Black people from a county in which only 5.5% of the residents are Black. To raise awareness, organizers must look to new forums and opportunities, notably speaking directly to people, as almost no one pays attention to County Board meetings, much less to the testimony that is happening at these meetings. Organizers must start to build a much larger community movement against the jail.
Socialists must be clear, the jail is the malignant heart of racism in Dane County. We cannot stop the jail so long as the liberal illusion that jails can be kind and just continues to persist in the minds of so many in our community.
With greater capacity will come greater opportunities for stopping the jail. Beyond electoralism – such as voting out pro-jail supervisors in favor of abolitionists – organizers must consider ways in which they can directly disrupt the activities of the Sheriff and the county-wide network of law enforcement that throw people in jail. Campaigns to document law enforcement activities, even interrupt them, such as the work of the FreeThe350 bail fund, must grow in scale to the point that the Sheriff’s work is seriously impaired by community activism. Ultimately, the bodies of our community may need to literally throw themselves in front of the construction of the jail in order to get the point across.
The community responsibility for challenging the jail
In a community full of yard signs welcoming immigrants and proclaiming that Black Lives Matter, only a truly delusional observer could ignore the conflict between our community’s conscience and our lived existence. In this case, the idealized version of ourselves, what we believe ourselves to be, is far away from the reality of the life that we lead. As generations of psychotherapists have prescribed, a little – or a lot of – insight could be just the cure for our intolerable symptoms of racial segregation. Dane County must begin to realize that our idealized community is not our realized community and, in doing so, lift ourselves out of a collective apathetic depression that only serves the status quo.
Realizing that one is in an abusive and exploitative relationship is different than dumping the motherfucker, although it often precedes doing so. If our community is to end racial segregation and incarceration, we need become fully aware of how we are participating in it. This will take a campaign of political education far beyond the scope of testimony at County Board meetings. The political leaders of the county are still pushing the narrative that the old jail is bad and a new jail will be less bad, which entirely misses the point. The terms of the debate need to refocus on jailing as a practice and the jail as a public institution, an institution interwoven with the lives of every resident of the county. Organizers must reach directly into the community and have conversations that raise understanding of the Dane County Jail as a system of segregation and oppression, not just as a couple of buildings which might need repair.
Ultimately, this community needs to stop participating in the carceral system. The jail is full of people because someone decided to call the police, more likely than not because there was no safe alternative available to the community. But people in Dane County are clearly calling the police because they are intolerant of people who are homeless, Black, or using drugs. While our community at large must cease cooperation with carceral and punitive systems, it is essential that our mental health and social welfare systems emphatically refuse to participate in such systems. Social workers and therapists call probation officers when they find that a patient has relapsed, just as pedestrians walking down the street call the police about people who are homeless. The problem is that when our systems of welfare and care rely on punishment and segregation, they systematically drive people out of care and into prisons. The county can start funding programs like CAHOOTS and build a non-carceral crisis center, but we also need to grow our capacity as human beings to work with conflict and tolerate difference. Even with a CAHOOTS program available, we still need to stop calling the police on people who are existing while Black.
It will take persistence and compassion to awaken our neighbors to the horror of this jail. Most of all, it will take courage to walk away from the machine we have created and show our friends, our families, our neighbors, our coworkers, and our community that they can do so as well.
One of the lasting lessons of the COVID 19 pandemic should be the importance of public health infrastructure. The disastrous response by the federal government and most state and local governments should result in a demand for robust public health programs on all levels.
Lessons can be drawn from the past. Before the age of digital information, there were examples of quick and aggressive responses to public health crises. Right in our own backyard, Milwaukee’s Socialist government helped mitigate the disaster of Spanish flu and built a public health system which made it one of the healthiest cities in the U.S. by the 1930s. This was done by strong leadership and standing up to corrupt local politicians that put cronyism before concern for the common good. Socialists fought for better health care and laid the foundation with clinics, government hospitals for those unable to pay and services such as visiting nurses for mothers and their children.
My family was the beneficiary with a visiting nurse making free wellness checks when I was a baby. My mom told me about this visit and she considered it both an important and helpful part of her life as a new parent and a matter of the fact thing. Something necessary and what a government should and can do.
Over the years these services have eroded, and we’ve paid the price. Milwaukee County Hospital used to be public and cared for the poor. It was privatized in 1995, as the infrastructure of public health hospitals, clinics and services crumbled under the pressures of austerity and neoliberalism. We’ve lost the ability at rapid response that was shown in New York City in the 1940s. We’ve lost the vision that “sewer socialists” had a century ago when they laid the foundations for a robust public healthcare system that can serve all, regardless of income.
What will socialist heath care look like? It will go beyond being reactive. By taking the profit motive out of the mix, prevention will move to the front as we can prepare for problems – big problems like pandemics and the smaller scale but important tasks of helping all citizens with their needs: from vaccination to nutrition to medical treatment. We can take the lead from other socialist countries, such as Cuba, which has built an excellent public health system and an outstanding medical education system.
We can also learn from Viet Nam, which, despite having almost 100 million people, has had only 35 deaths from COVID – 19 as of the writing of this article. Viet Nam produces its own protective equipment, takes aggressive measures to halt the spread of the virus and supports those in lockdown with boxes of food.
We might even take a page from China, which had a very successful “barefoot doctors” program that trained many young people, mostly women, to go into remote areas and give basic medical care and vaccinations. This had the added benefit of giving people from poorer communities a quality education and making them a vital part of the country’s development.
If we can learn from success stories from our own history and countries around the world, we can rebuild our failing healthcare system. But this will take getting rid of current for-profit system, which enriches the few while endangering and ruining the lives of the many. It’s time to leave behind the barbaric for profit health system which has killed so many. It’s time for Medicare for All and rebuilding our entire system so that public institutions become the cornerstone of a modern, humane country.
