American Family Children's Hospital, part of the UW Health complex on Madison's west side. Nurses in the UW Health system have been seeking to restore union representation since 2019. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

This report has been updated with reactions from UW Health and SEIU.

Five and a half years after nurses launched a campaign to restore union representation at UW Health, the state’s highest court ruled Friday that the Madison-based hospital system has no obligation to collectively bargain with employees.

Act 10, the 2011 state law that stripped most union rights from public employees, also removed legal guarantees of union representation for University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics Authority’s employees, Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote for a unanimous Court.

“When we examine the statutory language along with the statutory history, it is clear that Act 10 ended the collective bargaining requirements formerly placed on the Authority,” Hagedorn wrote.

The Court rejected the argument from Service Employees International Union (SEIU) that with the Act 10 changes, the hospital authority as a corporation fit the definition of “employer” under the Wisconsin Employment Peace Act.

The Peace Act defines an employee as anyone working for hire other than an independent contractor and an employer as a person — including partnerships, corporations and some other legal entities — that engages the services of an employee.

The hospital authority doesn’t automatically meet that definition, however, Hagedorn wrote.

Hospital, nurses union respond

The hospital system affirmed the Court’s ruling “that the Wisconsin Peace Act does not apply to UW Health” in a statement Friday, adding, “UW Health appreciates the court’s deliberate, diligent and final review.”

In a statement, SEIU and the UW Health nurses said they would continue to seek union recognition.

“While we are disappointed by the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision, which found that UW Health nurses are not covered under the Wisconsin Employment Peace Act, we are not deterred,” SEIU and the UW Health nurses seeking union recognition said in a statement.

“Our fight to restore collective bargaining rights doesn’t end in the courtroom,” the union statement added. “We will continue to explore all possible pathways to restoring our full collective bargaining rights, including seeking voluntary recognition and passing legislation, to ensure that all of us, no matter who we are or where we work, have a seat at the table and a voice in our workplace.”

A 2022 agreement between the hospital and the union to discuss issues of concern is continuing, according to the nurses’ union statement.

Over the last three years, “hundreds of nurses have become official union members and have been meeting with top administrators to address critical issues around retention, safe staffing, and quality patient care,” the statement said. “Earlier this year, UW nurses and management mutually agreed to extend this agreement through 2027. All the while, we continue to leverage our collective voice to elect pro-worker leaders at every level of government.”

UW Health has in the past made statements declaring that Act 10 prevented the hospital system from engaging with the union.

“Based upon legal advice received from both internal and external counsel, UW Health is concerned about the lawfulness of engaging in collective bargaining, which is not authorized under any statute,” the hospital system’s press secretary, Emily Greendonner, told the Wisconsin Examiner in an email message Friday.

“While today’s decision provided final clarity that we are not required to collectively bargain, the question of whether we are legally allowed to do so has not been decided by the courts,” Greendonner said.

Ruling relates Act 10, hospital system history

The hospital system was spun off from the University of Wisconsin in 1996 into a new “public body corporate and politic,” the UW Hospital and Clinics Authority. The hospital system’s employees were state employees represented by unions and with collective bargaining rights under Wisconsin’s state employment relations law.

The hospital authority “is not defined as a corporation,” Hagadorn wrote, “it is a ‘public body corporate and politic.’” He cited the Peace Act’s definition of “employer” that states the term does not include “the state or any political subdivision thereof.”

The 1996 law creating the new hospital authority removed its employees from the state employment relations law and added language specifying that the hospital authority was an employer under the Peace Act.

Act 10 changed that, Hagedorn wrote — repealing the hospital authority’s collective bargaining duty that was in the 1996 law as well as all other references to collective bargaining.

“In sum, Act 10 purged references to the Peace Act from the Authority Statute,” Hagedorn wrote.

“When it created the Authority, the legislature added the Authority as an employer under the Peace Act and imposed numerous other collective bargaining provisions. In Act 10, the legislature eliminated the Authority as a covered employer along with other collective bargaining requirements. We therefore hold that the Authority is no longer covered by the Peace Act and is not required to collectively bargain under the Peace Act.”

Friday’s ruling was the final stop for a case that started in September 2022. In an agreement brokered to avert a planned three-day strike by nurses demanding union recognition at UW Health, the hospital system and SEIU agreed to a joint petition to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC).

In the petition, the union argued that the hospital should be considered an employer under the Peace Act, while UW Health argued that Act 10 eliminated collective bargaining at the hospital system. WERC sided with UW Health, and Dane County Circuit Judge Jacob Frost subsequently affirmed the employment commission’s conclusion.

Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin's East Side Madison clinic. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

A union organizing campaign has turned into a contentious conflict at a Madison-based health care nonprofit.

The organizing drive at Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin has gotten mired in a mountain of litigation before the National Labor Relations Board.

There have been disputes over who should be included in a union representation vote as well as dozens of unfair labor practice charges that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has filed against Group Health management.

Most recently, the NLRB’s regional director has issued an order blocking the election after the union argued that the charges against the co-op would taint the outcome. Group Health is denying the charges, and co-op executives say they want a vote to take place as soon as possible.

The Group Health co-op was founded nearly 50 years ago as a health maintenance organization. Members, who include its employees, say the nonprofit’s focus on primary care and wellness has been central to its appeal. Those who support the union contend that the co-op’s response to the union drive is betraying its progressive roots.

“Everyone involved are gut-wrenched by the animosity that has developed,” said Susan McMurray, a former public employee union lobbyist and Group Health member for nearly 20 years. McMurray spoke at  a union rally outside Group Health’s clinic on Madison’s far East Side on June 20.

“There’s a multitude of reasons many of us chose a cooperative model over a for-profit shareholder model for our health care and insurance over the past almost 50 years,” said retired state employee Ruth Brill, a Group Health member, at a May 13 rally for the union.

“Some of our fellow GHC members have chosen to form a union. A union is like a cooperative in almost every way,” Brill said. “I’m calling on GHC to uphold the cooperative principles that it was founded on.”

In an interview, Marty Anderson, Group Health’s chief strategy and business development officer, rejected the accusation that the co-op has engaged in union-busting.

“GHC is not opposed to a union here at the cooperative,” Anderson said. “I think our position all along has been that we want our employees to have a voice — all of our employees, to have a voice in that choice.”

But Group Health co-op members who support the union see the management’s response — challenging the union’s proposal for who would vote as well as distributing messages to workers criticizing the union — more critically.

Paul Terranova, a community organizer, said he got involved in trying to persuade the co-op’s board to take a different approach earlier this year after a conversation with his Group Health doctor.

Terranova put together a group of members and asked for a board meeting in March.

“They gave us 20 minutes on the agenda to speak,” he told the Wisconsin Examiner. “It was just us making a presentation to them and them saying ‘thank you.’”

Terranova said his group asked the board and the management to “stop the anti-union messaging [and] anti-union activity” and to “get a second opinion” from other nonprofits that work cooperatively with union-represented employees.

“They refused to engage and they denied that there was any anti-union activity or messaging going on,” he said.

Terranova is also part of a member campaign that has endorsed, with the union, four candidates for the Group Health board in elections that concluded this week.

Update: All four were elected to the board. Election results were announced at the co-op’s annual meeting Thursday evening. 

Staffing struggles

The pro-union employees and SEIU filed a petition in December 2024 for a union representing Group Health clinic doctors, physician assistants, nurse practitioners and nursing staff in three departments: primary care, urgent care and dermatology. They also included physical therapists, occupational therapists and health educators.

According to union supporters, nearly 70% of the workers in those jobs and departments had signed cards asking for union representation.

Union supporters say that in those departments, issues including employee turnover and increased workloads prompted the campaign.

“We’re calling for equitable wages, safe provider-to-nurse ratios, meaningful ways to ease the crushing workloads we face and real strategies to improve retention,” said Dr. Ira Segal at the June 20 rally.

“There’s been a lot more turnover in our staffing, and that has increased over the years, which negatively impacts our ability to provide excellent care,” said Dr. Nisha Rajagopalan, a family physician. “The increasing turnover in our staff is unsustainable.”

Staffing crunches in health care have been widespread in the last five years, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There just aren’t enough care providers and folks that assist those care providers within the [health care] system in total,” said Anderson, the Group Health executive. “We’ve had to flex with the changing health care environment.”

Julie Vander Werff, a physician assistant and union supporter, said she understands the health care workforce challenge. Despite that, she said, she’s experienced a shift in the co-op’s culture that is contributing to the problem.

“They used to be a very respectful employer, and they’ve really gotten off track in terms of how respectful they have been,” Vander Werff said in an interview. “And they’re being really punitive, and we’re losing staff as a result with high, high turnover rates.”

Who’s in, who’s out

The bargaining unit called for in the union’s original petition did not include other Group Health departments: optometry, behavioral health, radiology and pharmacy. It also did not include physical therapist techs, lab techs and interpreters, social workers, receptionists and maintenance staff.

Addressing the June 20 rally, Vander Werff explained that “other departments who are not under primary care leadership are happy with their jobs” and not interested in unionizing. “But primary care is not.”

From the start, Group Health challenged the bargaining unit described in the petition, according to a letter that employees leading the union drive sent to the Group Health board of directors on Feb. 10.

“Federal labor law says that to form a union, workers need petition only for ‘an’ appropriate bargaining unit — not ‘the’ most appropriate bargaining unit (however that would be determined), and certainly not the unit their employers would most prefer,” the employees wrote. “Rather than accepting a unit of GHC workers’ rightful choice, however, administration and counsel have chosen to contest our bargaining unit.”

Still at an impasse after two days of hearings before an NLRB hearing officer, the union amended its election petition to focus on a single Group Health facility, the Capitol Clinic on Madison’s near West Side. The employees wrote in the Feb. 10 letter that the change was made at the NLRB official’s suggestion.

Group Health challenged that, too. After an additional hearing, the Minneapolis-based NLRB regional director rejected the union’s petition for a single-clinic vote. The decision directed an election covering all clinical departments at Group Health — the bargaining unit that the co-op management sought.

Group Health’s position is that the bargaining unit the employees sought “didn’t include classes or employees that do go between our clinics,” Anderson said. “And because we are an integrated care delivery system, we need to make sure that all the appropriate employees are in the bargaining class.”  

While some Group Health members see the response to the union drive as a turn from the co-op’s roots, Anderson defended it. 

“We were formed by a vote of our members, our board is elected by our members, and I think this goes right along with our ethos as a cooperative to allow our employees the opportunity to vote,” he said.

Pro-democracy, or diluting support?

Employees involved in the union campaign and their allies among the co-op’s members argue that the management claim is disingenuous, however.

“While the administration claims they’re fighting us in order to give everyone a voice, this is a union-busting tactic to prevent workers from winning in a fast and fair election of our choosing,” the Group Health workers wrote. “Anti-union organizations do this to flood the unit with people that they hope will vote against our union.”

According to an NLRB report on union representation elections in 2023, 89% of employers didn’t challenge the workers’ proposed bargaining unit. 

Group Health member Paul Terranova rejected the idea that expanding the vote to include people in jobs and departments who weren’t interested in the union was “just trying to be democratic.”

 “If folks in Madison decided we wanted to put something on a referendum, and the state Legislature said ‘No, everyone in the state has to vote on it,’ everyone would know right away what they were doing,” Terranova said. “People would call BS. It’s the same thing here, right?”

“The right of workers to unionize and to decide what our union looks like . . .  doesn’t belong to administration,” Sarah Spolum, a physician assistant, said at the May union rally. “It doesn’t belong to lawyers. It belongs to us, the workers.”

Anderson said Group Health stands by its position. “We have no idea how our employees are going to vote,” he said. “That’s why we want to get to a vote — because we want that certainty and we want to know what our employees are feeling.”

Unfair labor practice charges

Throughout the campaign, the union has filed charges with the NLRB accusing Group Health management of numerous unfair labor practices. The allegations include changes in pay practices due to union organizing, surveillance of employees for union activity, prohibiting employees from displaying union-related materials, firing union supporters and a variety of other actions.

Group Health has denied all the charges.

After the co-op management’s bargaining unit petition was granted, however, the union petitioned the NLRB to block an election. The agency’s regional director granted the petition, ordering the election to be suspended until all the unfair labor practice charges are resolved.

The union, wrote regional director Jennifer Hadsall, “provided sufficient offers of proof which describe evidence that, if proven, would interfere with employee free choice in the election.”

Group Health, through its lawyer, has demanded a hearing on the allegations in the blocking charge, contending that it’s a smokescreen for diminished support.

At the union’s June 20 rally, Susan McMurray read from a letter she sent to Group Health’s CEO.

“Nothing good will come of this decision,” she said of the co-op’s stance during the union campaign. “It will in my view ruin GHC’s reputation in our community, cause irreparable harm to staff, as well as jeopardize patient care.

“And it didn’t and it doesn’t have to be like this,” she added. “In the past few weeks, I have communicated to management repeatedly that we could find a way through the strife and give everyone a graceful way out, a path going forward and something positive to announce at the annual meeting.”

This report was updated Friday, 6/27/2025, with the outcome of board elections at Group Health that were announced Thursday evening.

Children watch popcorn pop at their child care program operated by the Dodge County YMCA. (Photo courtesy of the Dodge County YMCA)

For months child care providers and their allies campaigning for direct financial support from Wisconsin lawmakers have highlighted employers and the economy as central to their pitch.

Child care providers are “the workforce behind the workforce” in one of the rallying slogans of the provider-parent coalition Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN).

Employers and business owners themselves, however, have largely stayed in the background — from time to time offering testimonials about their employees’ need for child care, but rarely weighing in on policy alternatives.

Last week more than 75 business leaders broke that pattern, sending a letter to members of the Wisconsin Legislature.

“Wisconsin’s lingering child care crisis … cannot go unaddressed any longer by state legislators, because Wisconsin remains at a workforce crossroads that presents significant, pressing challenges for businesses and the economic vitality of the state,” the group wrote.

“We therefore ask you to advance a significant long-term state investment in child care in the 2025-27 state budget because inaction will further shutter child care programs and continue to hamper efforts to stabilize and grow Wisconsin’s workforce.”

The letter was distributed with the help of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association (WECA), which provides advocacy and professional services for child care providers and also conducts policy research.

Campaign continues for direct subsidy

The letter embraces what Gov. Tony Evers, child care providers and their allies have been seeking in the 2025-27 Wisconsin budget this year: A direct state subsidy for child care providers. Evers and providers have warned that without that kind of support there’s likely to be a drastic shutdown of child care centers across the state in the coming months.

“Child care programs operate on razor-thin margins with budgets balanced on parent fees, which, despite being costly for families, do not cover the full cost of programs providing high-quality care,” the letter states.

“As employers, we have explored and implemented different local initiatives to help grow access to care,” it adds. Nevertheless, “those solutions are limited and must be complemented with a long-term, significant investment of state revenue.”

Tracy Propst, the executive director of the Beaver Dam Chamber of Commerce, helped organize support for and signed the business letter.

“I really do believe child care is part of an economic strategy,” Propst told the Wisconsin Examiner. “If you don’t have access to abundant and economical child care, you are going to lose workforce.”

Mary Vogl-Rauscher, a human resources consultant in Beaver Dam, joined the letter along with businesses she works with.

Prospective fee hikes are “enough of an increase, if we don’t get the subsidies, to take people out of the workforce,” Vogl-Rauscher said. “From an employer perspective and a business perspective, if [the cost of care] goes up and we don’t continue with the state subsidies, it’s going to make an even bigger economic impact.”

Vogl-Rauscher is active in the local and state chapters of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and organized a community discussion of the issue this spring. 

Propst and Vogl-Rauscher both say they’ve sought to persuade their local Assembly member, state Rep. Mark Born (R-Beaver Dam), the Joint Finance Committee’s co-chair, that the lawmakers should add the subsidy program into the budget. 

“I’ve had conversations with Mark,” Propst said, adding that he told her that the committee was “doing something,” although not what she had asked for. “He will listen to his constituents,” she said. 

Middle-class squeeze

Both Propst and Vogl-Rauscher said their conversations with Dirk Langfoss, CEO of the Dodge County YMCA and a board member at the Beaver Dam chamber, were instrumental in clarifying the problem.

The Dodge County Y has the largest child care program in the county. Langfoss told the Wisconsin Examiner that competition for employees with other businesses has produced “upward pressures” on wages. The average weekly rate for infant and 1-year-old care is $253 — which adds up to $13,000 for all 52 weeks in the year. Rates are lower for older age groups.

“The middle-income families are the ones that are getting squeezed,” he said, with some telling him now that “they are strapped.”

If subsidies end entirely and the Y has to raise its rates, “those families are going to have to make some very hard decisions,” Langfoss added.

Propst views a direct investment now as a step toward something more comprehensive. “It’s really about child care stabilization,” she said, allowing providers to get their footing.

She also considers the immediate situation to be urgent, and fears the urgency hasn’t gotten through to many people.

“I just think this has snuck up on the businesses,” Propst said. “Like they weren’t aware this is happening, and here we are. And they don’t realize the ramifications of what’s going to happen — and that’s child care closures, child care price increases, and we’re not going to have enough providers.”

Direct investment divisions persist

While child care advocates have been arguing for a direct investment for years, the argument hasn’t fully caught on with the broader public or in the business community.

Among business leaders and the public, “there is a general recognition that child care is essential for workers, especially those that are taking care of young children,” said David Celata, vice president of policy and research for the Greater Milwaukee Foundation. But the true cost of care and why most working families can’t afford it is “an incredibly complex issue,” Celata told the Wisconsin Examiner.

“The numbers really don’t add up until we recognize that there is a social and economic good related to child care that we are failing collectively to truly maximize,” he said. “That then requires some sort of a public investment to strengthen the infrastructure of our child care sector.”

In Wisconsin the campaign for a state child care subsidy has been underway since the 2023-25 budget after monthly grants from federal COVID-19 pandemic relief funds helped child care providers raise wages without having to increase the fees families paid.

The Legislature’s Republican majority turned aside attempts to continue the subsidy program, Child Care Counts, with state money in the 2023-25 budget. Evers subsequently redirected other federal funds to extend the program at reduced rates through the middle of 2025.

The last of those funds will run out by early July. A survey that the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty released in April found that as many as one in four child care providers said they might shut down without the continued support. Anywhere from half to two-thirds of programs forecast fee increases.

Evers put a $480 million proposal for a state-funded Child Care Counts program in his 2025-27 budget. Republicans on the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee removed it from the budget along with more than 600 other proposals Evers included before beginning work on their own version of the document.

After visiting a child care center in Waukesha County on Monday to highlight his subsidy proposal, Evers told reporters that he would not sign a budget this year without direct child care support. Evers said the provision was part of his ongoing budget negotiations with the Legislature’s GOP leaders.

Direct funding is still a sticking point, however.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) told reporters Tuesday that Republicans are open to working with Evers on child care but remain firmly opposed to “writing checks out to providers.”

Kristen Crowell, executive director of Fair Share America, speaks Saturday in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., the first stop for Fair Share America's bus campaign to oppose the Republican budget reconciliation bill currently in the U.S. Senate. (Photo courtesy of Fair Share America)

Over the next three weeks, a band of advocates in a bright green bus is traveling across the U.S. with a message aimed at members of Congress — and at the voters who live in their districts.

To the voters, the message is that they will be hurt by the Republican mega-bill taking shape in Washington — a bill that would extend tax cuts enacted in 2017 that primarily benefit the wealthy and pay for them by slashing Medicaid and other federal programs that critics of the measure argue broadly benefit the public.

To U.S. senators and representatives, the message is: Vote against the measure, or face the wrath of voters in 2026.

The bus trip was launched by  Fair Share America, a coalition of groups focused on  beating back attempts to extend the 2017 tax cuts, one of the signature pieces of legislation from President Donald Trump’s first term. The organization is made up of unions, organizations favoring progressive taxation, and progressive social justice and policy groups.

Fair Share America’s executive director is Kristen Crowell, who lives in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. In 2022 she helped lead a campaign in Massachusetts when voters approved a constitutional amendment that created a 4% surtax on earned income over $1 million.

“That increase is now generating $3 billion annually that is dedicated for education and transportation,” Crowell told the Wisconsin Examiner.

The Boston Globe reported that the campaign to pass the Massachusetts “millionaires’ tax” raised $27 million, nearly twice as much as the $14 million raised by business-backed opponents of the measure. Crowell said the campaign succeeded by appealing to voters on the issue of fairness.

“We know that when we ask the wealthy to pay a little bit more, to pay their fair share, we can fund the investments that our neighbors and families and communities deserve — and really importantly, right now in this moment, they need in order to to get ahead,” Crowell said in an interview.

Opposition group launched in 2024

The 2017 tax cuts expire at the end of this year. With that date on the calendar, Fair Share America launched in September 2024 to oppose renewing them.

“We started organizing before we knew the outcome of the election and were handed a different reality than we might have hoped for,” Crowell said.

Since then, the organization has helped “lead the pushback at the state level to make sure that constituents and the public understand what’s happening behind closed doors in Washington, D.C., and to really bring the fight to key districts and geographies across the country where lawmakers, in particular the GOP members of Congress, have shut out their constituents,” she said.

The bus trip started on Saturday in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., stopped in Philadelphia on Sunday and will hit four more cities across Pennsylvania on Monday. Stops in Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Iowa follow. After that, the bus will double back on its route for three Wisconsin stops, in Racine and Oshkosh on Monday, June 30, and La Crosse on July 1.

The schedule will continue through the middle of July, stopping in Minnesota, Missouri, Colorado, Arizona and Nevada before concluding in Bakersfield, California on July 14.

The tour isn’t the start of the organization’s campaign. Fair Share America and its partners with other advocacy groups have been holding town hall meetings in 33 states across the country, Crowell said — including one in Racine in April that featured former Social Security commissioner Martin O’Malley.

Crowell was at the Racine event, to which the local member of Congress, U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville) was invited but didn’t show up. “Over 200 people came [from] across the political spectrum.” Crowell said.

At that town hall and other such events across the country, she’s seen energetic opposition to the new Trump administration as well as the priorities of the current Congress, she said.

“Fair Share America’s not speaking to one side of the aisle vs. the other,” Crowell said. “This is a populist moment.”

Public opposition to budget bill

A poll on behalf of three of the coalition’s member groups found that even before they were given information about details of the GOP budget reconciliation bill, the American voters surveyed had a negative opinion of it.

According to the pollsters 38% of those surveyed said they support the bill, 46% said they oppose it and 16% said they don’t know enough to have an opinion.

Fewer than one-third of voters surveyed — 30% — have heard a lot about the bill. Another 40% have heard “just some” about it, and the remaining 30% said they’ve heard little or nothing about the measure.

The more people heard, however, the less they liked it, according to the report from the polling firm, Hart Research. Opposition increased among all groups after pollsters told people about various details — its changes to Medicaid and to SNAP federal nutrition aid, for example.

“By being in the rooms and town halls and knocking on doors here in Wisconsin, that is what we are hearing and seeing,” Crowell said.

With its slogan, “Stop the billionaire giveaway,” Fair Share America’s bus tour aims to amplify the bill’s cuts to programs that benefit the public and to center the message that its tax cuts favor the wealthy.

Congressional Republicans “have not engaged with their constituents” in Wisconsin and elsewhere about the reconciliation bill, Crowell said. Fair Share America’s goal is to break down the details in terms that people will understand and respond to.

“When you tell them what’s at stake, what’s coming down, they are furious and they want to know how to get in the fight,” Crowell said. “They want to know how to organize their three or four neighbors. So it is incumbent on all of us to shed light on the horrors of this reconciliation bill and do everything it takes to get the word out.”

Funding values and priorities

In Wisconsin, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson has said he opposes the bill and has threatened to vote against it, criticizing it for not making deeper federal spending cuts. 

While that’s the opposite of Fair Share America’s agenda, “voting ‘No’ is voting ‘No’ at the end of the day,” Crowell said.

She is skeptical that Johnson will follow through on his threat, however.

“When push comes to shove, I don’t think Sen. Johnson is going to cross the White House or cross GOP leadership. I expect him to fall in line,” she said. “But we’re here to push back and say, ‘Absolutely not. We will hold you to that No vote and we do want you to understand what the stakes are for your constituents.’”

While the campaign’s goal is to stop the bill, there’s a second message regardless of the outcome, Crowell said.

“We are building a movement that is strong and durable and it crosses partisan lines,” she said. “If they in fact do go ahead and pass this, there will be hell to pay for those members who abandoned  and threw their constituents and their communities under the bus.”

Crowell said her more than two decades of activism started when, as a working mother, she opposed Milwaukee public school budget cuts. Her daughter, who was in kindergarten then, is now 29.

She went on to organize with “We Are Wisconsin,” the grass-roots coalition that sprang up in reaction to Act 10 — the 2011 law stripping most collective bargaining rights from most public employees, introduced and signed by Scott Walker in his first term as governor.

Act 10 was billed as a “budget repair bill.” Crowell said that working against it she saw clearly the connection between government budgets and policy.

“If progressives want to really win … and fund the things that we care about, we have to compete for what happens in the budget process,” Crowell said. “We have to compete for a fair and just tax code. We have to compete for the revenue that funds all of the issues that we care about, whether that’s health care or climate or education or child care.”

A budget “can be used either to fund our priorities and reflect our values or attack the things that we deeply care about,” Crowell said. With the federal budget reconciliation bill, “we’re watching the GOP members of Congress do exactly that — looking to further harm our communities through advancing this budget.”

Tami Jackson of the Wisconsin Board for People with Developmental Disabilities describes how unpaid family caregivers could be affected by proposed Medicaid cuts in the Republican budget reconciliation package in Washington, D.C. Janet Zander of the Greater Wisconsin Agency on Aging Resources, seated at right, also spoke. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Among the many people whose health care could be in jeopardy from possible Medicaid cuts, one group may be even less visible than the rest.

“Medicaid is the primary thing that supports family caregivers,” said Tami Jackson, policy analyst for the Wisconsin Board for People with Development Disabilities (BPDD), in a presentation to social workers Thursday in Dodgeville. 

The person under the caregiver’s care could be living at home, but will probably still require long-term support of some kind — support covered by Medicaid, Jackson said. Medicare provides coverage only for a limited time, such as when a person has come home after being hospitalized.

Private long-term care insurance plans “are unaffordable and they have not been workable for many years,” she added. “So Medicaid is it — and we happen to have a lot of people who need long-term care.”

Jackson and Janet Zander of the Greater Wisconsin Agency on Aging Resources met with Iowa County social workers in Dodgeville Thursday to explain the likely effect of Medicaid cuts that are part of the budget reconciliation bill that has passed the U.S. House and is now in the Senate.

The GOP majorities of both houses want to pass the legislation so they can extend tax cuts enacted in 2017, when President Donald Trump was in his first term. Those tax cuts have been found to heavily benefit wealthy Americans. Without action they will expire at the end of 2025.

Cutting Medicaid, hiking other costs

Medicaid is the single largest source of federal funds in the state budget — about $9 billion a year.

Under the U.S. House version of the budget reconciliation bill, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) has projected between 71,000 and 111,000 Wisconsinites would lose Medicaid coverage, including more than 3,800 people with disabilities and 2,400 older adults. The state’s federal Medicaid revenues would be cut by $501 million to $663 million.

The Medicaid cuts on the scale of those in current iterations of the bill “are too large to not cause states to have to cut many things in their state budget,” Jackson said.

The bill’s Medicaid cuts as well as changes it would make to the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplace — including ending subsidies that have made marketplace plans more affordable for lower-income people — would increase the number of uninsured Americans by 16 million in the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

“Whether you’re a caregiver, whether you’re on Medicaid, whether you’re working for somebody who’s on Medicaid,” everyone will be affected by 16 million more uninsured people, Zander said.

With more uncompensated care for hospitals and providers, she predicted that the cost for other payers will increase.

“We’re going to see premiums for any kind of [health] insurance skyrocket — the employer’s portion, the employee’s portion,” Zander said.

Reduced Medicaid care, more unpaid care

Family caregivers feel Medicaid’s impact in several ways. For many people who are elderly or have disabilities it enables them to get paid, professional care at home. If that care is cut back, that means more work for the unpaid family member.

“Those paid caregivers — they’re paid for by Medicaid dollars and there aren’t enough of them. There haven’t been enough of them for years,” Jackson said.

 If Medicaid cutbacks reduce the pay for those caregivers, the workforce that is already underpaid is likely to be even harder to find — making access to paid care even more difficult, she added, to the point where “it’s either the unpaid caregiver or nothing.”

Family caregivers who take on more unpaid care responsibilities may have to cut back on their own paid jobs.

“The amount of people who are reducing, limiting [work hours or] leaving the workforce because there isn’t a stable, paid caregiving workforce to provide what they need is huge,” Jackson said.

A BPDD survey found that for unpaid family caregivers in Wisconsin providing or coordinating care or filling in for missing care workers took 80% of their time. Two-thirds said caregiving had a negative impact on their family finances and 50% said they left jobs or reduced hours to provide care because there were no care workers to hire.

Unpaid caregivers who leave the workforce not only lose income but reduce the earnings that contribute to their Social Security retirement, Jackson said.

Kristin Voss, a Madison public school teacher for 24 years, had to retire to help manage and care for her 23-year-old daughter. Her daughter has epilepsy, autism and an intellectual disability and “functions at about anywhere from 6 to 12 years old,” Voss said in a panel discussion that was part of Thursday’s presentation.

Until her daughter was 21, she was entitled to public education, where she got “tons of support” including in her transition period that started when she was 18, Voss said. At 21, those supports were no longer available, however.

Her daughter enrolled in the state’s self-directed long-term care program called IRIS. The program includes a caseworker, but Voss also has responsibility as her daughter’s family caregiver, helping to manage day-to-day changes in her daughter’s placement and activities.

“I don’t mind doing these things, but there’s things that I don’t always know about and I’m not always prepared for,” Voss said. “And so, no, I couldn’t do this and be a public school teacher.”

Instead, she has put together a collection of part-time positions that give her flexibility that she needs — although none of them have health insurance, Voss said.

Unpaid caregivers ‘untangling the mess’

Some unpaid caregivers who leave the workforce may also turn to Medicaid for their health coverage because they can’t afford health insurance or work at a job that doesn’t provide insurance.

“About 4 million people nationally are unpaid caregivers who are in Medicaid themselves,” Jackson said.

Among the changes proposed for Medicaid is a requirement for participants in the program to prove every six months that they are still eligible for the program, instead of once a year, the current standard. Another change proposed is to add a work requirement for certain Medicaid participants.

Both of those changes will mean more paperwork. “Unpaid caregivers are the folks that are keeping people who are in Medicaid programs already,” Jackson said — by filling out the forms that are required to prove the person is still eligible.  

“Often these processes are so complex,” Jackson said. And when something goes wrong, because of an error in an eligibility form or a billing mistake, family caregivers “are the people who are untangling the mess.”

The current version of the bill in the Senate gives caregivers an exemption from the work requirement — but Jackson said the definition has raised concerns.

The current proposal limits the exemption to people who are caring for a person under the age of 14. National advocates have said that “really narrows that caregiver exemption and doesn’t quite fit with the reality that most unpaid caregivers are providing care for people with disabilities and older adults,” Jackson said.

Including exemptions in the proposed work requirement provisions also doesn’t necessarily reduce the paperwork.

“You either have to prove you’re meeting the work requirements, or you have to prove that you’re exempt for those requirements,” Jackson said. “And if you’re a caregiver who’s in Medicaid, you have to do that for yourself and probably the person you’re supporting.”

A bill that passed both the Assembly and the Senate Wednesday would automatically classify ride-share and certain delivery drivers as independent contractors. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Legislation that would declare that drivers for app-based ride-share and delivery businesses are independent contractors will go to Gov. Tony Evers after clearing both houses of the Legislature Wednesday.

The legislation also authorizes the affected companies to offer drivers benefit plans without classifying them as employees.

After two previous attempts to pass the bill, in the Legislature’s 2021-22 and 2023-24 sessions, the Senate and Assembly votes Wednesday — mostly along party lines — marked the first time the measure will get to the governor’s desk.

The bill — AB 269 — applies to drivers for delivery and transportation businesses such as Uber, Lyft and DoorDash who are hired by customers using online apps or similar technology.

It defines those drivers as independent contractors who are not subject to laws guaranteeing minimum wage, unemployment compensation and workers compensation.

Update: The bill passed the Assembly on a vote of 56-36, but as of Friday, the Assembly’s official journal of the session reported that three of four Assembly Democrats who were recorded as voting “yes” for the bill asked that their votes be registered as “no,” and their requests were granted, resulting in a new tally of 53-39. One Democrat supported the bill. 

WisPolitics.com reported the changed votes on Friday. WisPolitics.com also reported that according to the office of Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August, Assembly chief clerk’s office and the Legislative Technical Services Bureau “conducted a thorough testing” of the Assembly’s electronic voting system and found no problems.

In the Senate, the bill passed 16-15, with no Democratic support and one Republican, Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) voting in opposition.

As of Wednesday the Wisconsin Ethics Commission had no public reports on money spent lobbying for or against the legislation. But since early this year DoorDash has been running digital ads on WisPolitics.com and elsewhere promoting the legislation’s “portable benefits” provision.

DoorDash issued a statement Wednesday lauding the bill’s passage. “Dashers and customers in Wisconsin have sent hundreds of letters to the governor, urging him to sign the bill into law,” the company stated.

If Evers signs the measure, Wisconsin would be the first state in the country to enact such legislation. DoorDash has pilot benefit programs without legislation in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Georgia, the company said.

While the bill authorizes the companies to offer the benefit plans, it does not require them to do so. It sets the standards of coverage for such plans if they are offered. It also allows the businesses to establish deferred compensation retirement plans for their drivers.

“This bill will provide meaningful, affordable benefit opportunities for these independent contractors,” said Rep. Alex Dallman (R-Green Lake) at an Assembly press conference before Wednesday’s floor session. “They’ll be able to solidify that they get to choose when and where they want to work, the freedom that they have to be able to earn benefits through the work that they provide for these different companies, and be able to really set themselves up for a future of success by having things such as health insurance.”

A new independent contractor standard

The legislation lists four practices that would exclude a ride-share or delivery company from the independent contractor protections: If it requires drivers to be logged into the service on certain dates, certain times or for a minimum number of hours; if it terminates a driver’s contract for not accepting a specific service request; if it bars drivers from working with other such businesses; and if it bars drivers from working in any other occupation or business.

A company would have to flunk all four of those provisions to be disqualified.

In both the Senate and the Assembly, critics said the bill would serve the contracting companies, not their drivers.

“We don’t need to create a new category of workers with fewer protections, which is what this bill does,” said Sen. Melissa Ratcliff (D-Cottage Grove) on the Senate floor. “The sad realization is that all of the so-called benefits talked about in this bill may never come to fruition for any gig driver. And yet the bill makes mandatory the loss of employee status for every single app-based driver.”

Sen. Julian Bradley (R-New Berlin), said drivers testified in favor of the legislation that “they don’t want to be employees.” Bradley is the lead author of the Senate companion legislation. 

“If you watch any of the hearings, they’ll tell you, ‘We love the flexibility of being an independent contractor.’ They chose to be independent contractors because of the flexibility.”

Under state law and regulations, the state Department of Workforce Development (DWD) uses a nine-part test to determine if workers are employees rather than independent contractors, said Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee) during the Assembly debate.

“The big problem with this bill, though, is that it actually allows the executives of these companies to dictate their own test to fit their own needs,” Sinicki said.

‘Difficult way to pay the bills’

“Driving for ride-sharing services like Lyft or Uber is a grueling, difficult way to pay the bills,” said Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-Milwaukee), who said he’s a ride-share driver.

He said the industry’s claims that a driver collects $25 or $30 an hour are based on the travel time alone.

“So in an hour, if I take two people on rides which cost them $7 each and I get about $3.50 from each of those, Lyft might report that I got $30 an hour because they don’t count all the minutes between the rides. But I actually gross $7 that hour,” Clancy said.

The bill allows a company to contribute up to 4% of a driver’s earnings to the proposed benefits account. He said Uber drivers have an average weekly revenue of $513, so 4% “would come out to just $267 a quarter” — too little to cover a health insurance premium.  

The bill aims to keep drivers from being classified as employees because “it’s far easier to exploit an independent contractor than it is an employee,” he said.

Clancy said drivers across the U.S. have been “trying to get recognized as the employees they are, and to try to get access to basic benefits and workplace protections and access to unemployment insurance, just like the vast majority of employees in Wisconsin.”

Rep. Sylvia Ortiz-Velez (D-Milwaukee), a co-sponsor of the bill was the only Assembly Democrat to support, although three other Democrats were initially recorded as voting “yes” before being granted a request to change their vote to “no.”

“I heard countless testimonies from drivers who wanted the flexibility of being independent contractors,” Ortiz-Velez said, adding that she has received “a ton of emails, a ton of support” for the bill this year as well as in the last two-year session.

“This bill offers portable benefits that right now don’t exist,” Ortiz-Velez said. “It won’t exist if we don’t pass this bill.”

Dallman, the bill’s lead Assembly author, said on the Assembly floor that critics of the bill can simply choose not to work for the companies it covers.

“This is for the independent contractor and the freedom that they have to get ahead in life by working a couple extra jobs, a couple extra trips on a weekend to make a little bit of extra cash,” Dallman said. “While at the same time, voluntarily partnering with one of these companies . . .  to pay for their benefits, to pay for their retirement. Again, the opportunity for workers to make choices on their own to get ahead in life.”

This report was updated Friday, 6/20/2025, to update the Assembly vote on SB 269 after the Assembly journal reported on a request by three Democrats to change how their vote had been recorded.

Sen. Patrick Testin (R-Stevens Point) speaks at a Republican news conference Wednesday before the Senate's floor session. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

On unanimous voice votes, lawmakers approved legislation Wednesday that allows nurses with advanced training to practice independently in Wisconsin.

The bill now heads to Gov. Tony Evers, who vetoed similar bills twice before but who is now expected to sign the measure after negotiating changes to address his previous objections.

“I can’t stress what a team effort this was. It was bipartisan,” said Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc), the lead Assembly author on AB 257, before the vote on the Assembly floor. “People put their pettiness aside and they actually got a good product across the finish line.”

The Assembly passed the legislation Wednesday and the Senate concurred later in the day.

“While this legislation had been vetoed in the previous two sessions, I’m proud to say and stand before you that we have an agreement and a deal that when this reaches the governor’s desk, that is going to become law,” said Sen. Patrick Testin (R-Stevens Point).

The bill creates a new formal nursing credential under state law, Advanced Practice Registered Nurse (APRN).

To win Evers’ signature, authors of the bill agreed to increase the amount of training and supervision before an APRN can practice independently, added additional supervision requirements for APRN practitioners who specialize in pain management and included language to restrict the titles APRN practitioners use so patients aren’t confused about their credentials.

Evers previously vetoed APRN measures in 2022 and 2024, specifying in his veto messages that he didn’t sign them because of those issues.

“I wish it didn’t take us nearly a decade to do this,” said Rep. Lisa Subeck (D-Madison) in the Assembly floor session. “But It needed to and I’m glad that we’re getting it done now and I’m glad that we’re getting it done right.”

Under the proposal, the Wisconsin state nursing board would oversee the credentialing of advanced practice nurses. The credential would include certified nurse-midwives, certified registered nurse anesthetists, clinical nurse specialists and nurse practitioners.

“This is a really important bill,” said Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison) before the Senate passed the measure. “It is going to increase access to high-quality patient care for people around the state, but especially people in underserved communities.”

People protest on June 24, 2022, in front of the U.S. Supreme Court after the release of the ruling in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization that overturned Roe v Wade case and erased a federal right to an abortion. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Two years ago Megan Kling and her husband were eagerly looking forward to the birth of their third child. Then at 20 weeks they got devastating news from their doctor.

The infant, upon being born, would have no chance of surviving. He lacked critical internal organs and his brain and heart were both abnormal.

“Our baby would die, either in utero or within hours after birth,” Kling told reporters Monday morning. “We were in a situation with no good outcome.”

To carry him for another four months, knowing that he would not live, “seemed inhumane,” Kling said.

The diagnosis was confirmed at 22 weeks — and by then, Kling said, her doctors were unable to help her because of an 1849 Wisconsin law that at the time was still being interpreted as a near-blanket ban on abortion.

Kling and her husband, residents of western Wisconsin, traveled to neighboring Minnesota. There, doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester confirmed that, if born, their baby would not be viable. At her request, the medical team induced labor at 23 weeks. Kling gave birth and the couple’s son died in their arms an hour later.

Kling told her story Monday at a news conference held by advocates to draw attention to next week’s third anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling ending a national right to abortion.

Dr. Nike Mourikes of the Committee to Protect Health Care said from the moment the ruling was issued, “I realized how this cruel decision would cause harm to so many lives and undermine the ability of physicians and other health care providers to care for their patients.”

Abortion was a legal right throughout her medical training and practice until the 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mourikes said. 

The Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the first 20 weeks while placing some limits on the procedure later in pregnancy. Although Mourikes had heard “the horror stories” of what women had experienced before that decision, she said, “I never imagined that we would ever, ever go back to those days again.”  

As a physician, she has cared for many women who sought abortion to end a pregnancy. “Each woman had her own unique history, her own unique reasons and circumstances that led her to make this complex decision,” Mourikes said. “But that choice was her choice, not the government’s, not a politician’s. It was her body and it was her right.”

The 2022 ruling effectively reinstated Wisconsin’s 1849 law, which at the time was widely seen as a near-blanket abortion ban.

A September 2023 Dane County Circuit Court ruling reversed that assumption, with the judge holding that the law applied to feticide, but not to elective abortions. A decision on that ruling is now pending in the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, the law “casts a shadow over our state,” Morikes said. Republican lawmakers have been unwilling to repeal the law, and even when Roe v Wade was still in effect, enacted laws “that force doctors to practice medicine not for the good of their patients, but to satisfy anti-abortion politicians.”

Those include a requirement for “an invasive, sometimes painful and medically unnecessary ultrasound” before an abortion, she said, as well as “a medically unnecessary 24-hour waiting period” that requires women to visit a health provider two days in a row before having an abortion.

Sydney Andersen, a government relations specialist for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin, said Planned Parenthood has succeeded in returning abortion services to Wisconsin since the Dane County ruling.

But the organization faces new challenges, she said. Those include the budget reconciliation bill  that passed the U.S. House last month and is now in the Senate. A provision in the bill prevents Planned Parenthood from accepting Medicaid coverage for low-income patients.

Planned Parenthood at risk of closing hundreds of clinics, drastically limiting abortion access

If the U.S. Senate enacts the provision and it becomes law, “more than 1 million patients across the United States could lose their access to birth control, wellness exams, vaccines, STI [sexually transmitted infection] testing, and cancer screenings, including over 50,000 patients in Wisconsin alone,” Andersen said. Black women, other people of color, rural residents and other low-income families would experience “the most significant impact,” she said.

Kling, who is 34 and described herself as a working mother, said she was telling the story of her third pregnancy to make the point that “abortion restrictions can impact anyone who can become pregnant.”

In an interview, Kling told the Wisconsin Examiner that she had not been politically engaged before the experience.

“I was always pro-choice, but after going through this experience I wanted to utilize my story to help people understand that this can impact anyone,” she said.

Despite the current circuit court ruling, the current state of Wisconsin law is such that hospitals “will always create policy that is more restrictive than what the law allows,” Kling said. “There’s a lot of gray area in our law right now with the politics.”

In the news conference, Kling described the emotions that washed over the couple in the hour that she and her husband held their dying infant.

“Our son only knew love,” she said. “But as parents, those were the most helpless and traumatic moments that we have ever had to endure.”

Kling said she tried to contact her Republican state lawmakers in hopes of raising their awareness about the effect of the current state of abortion restrictions. Her state representative has not responded to her calls or email messages, and her state senator’s aide said he was “too busy to schedule a 10-minute meeting to hear my story,” she said.

“Are they unwilling to understand what real women are going through or do they simply not care?” Kling said. “Is this the reality you want the women of Wisconsin to face? Forcing us to flee our state for care?”

Green Bay Conservation Corps workers, from left, Emily Swagel, Zak King and Cailie Kafura, plant native shrubs in Fireman's Park. The work is part of installing a pollinator corridor and a larger land restoration project across Green Bay. (Photo courtesy of Green Bay Conservation Corps)

Jake White says he was lucky.

A University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate with a global health major, White was in his second year of an AmeriCorps placement in the Sawyer County Public Health Department, where he helped out with department reports and outreach to the community. Then AmeriCorps pulled the plug at the end of April — cancelling its grants to agencies all across the country.

White was in the middle of working with a team assigned to produce a community health assessment for the county when he got the news. Sawyer County kept him on so he could stick with the project, converting his position to a  limited-term employee (LTE) through the end of June, when White starts medical school in Wausau.

The reprieve also gave him a chance to hand over a second project, on substance abuse prevention, to another community member, White said. The future of that work was one of his biggest worries about AmeriCorps’ sudden shutdown.

His AmeriCorps experience at the county “really gave me the foundation for the skills and knowledge I will carry into my role as a physician,” White told the Wisconsin Examiner.

The aftermath of the AmeriCorps shutdown didn’t go as  smoothly for Maxwell Robin. He was placed with the St. Vincent DePaul charitable pharmacy in Madison.

“I did whatever needed to be done,” Robin said — working on computer projects at the pharmacy, filling prescriptions, serving as an interpreter for Spanish-speaking patients.

When the AmeriCorps cancellation notice arrived, the projects he was working on “got thrown into chaos,” Robin said a week after the notification.

Now a federal judge has ordered AmeriCorps to restore its grants and reinstate its volunteers. But all of that remains up in the air.

“Things are just very confusing now,” Robin said Friday.

Despite that, Robin has been able to move on. He is waiting to hear back from several job applications.

And he still volunteers part-time at the pharmacy, where he developed a strong interest in working in the nonprofit sector.

“We were able to take people who, for whatever reason, had been kicked to the side,” Robin said.

But program administrators still don’t know for sure what will happen and when.

“We are still waiting for official notification from AmeriCorps,” said Jeanne Duffy, the executive director of Serve Wisconsin, in an email message Friday.

Serve Wisconsin, based in the Wisconsin Department of Administration, is the state administrator for AmeriCorps.

Wisconsin has 25 AmeriCorps programs operating in more than 300 locations across the state — volunteers who are paid a stipend and who work in health care, help with environmental projects, assist in school classrooms and carry out  other projects.

When the Trump administration canceled AmeriCorps grants April 25, the action caught participants in the program as well as officials responsible for coordinating its work by surprise.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul joined the federal lawsuit brought by 25 states to challenge the AmeriCorps shutdown.

Thursday’s order, by U.S. District Judge Deborah L. Boardman in Maryland, found that the Corporation for National Community Service, the agency that operates AmeriCorps, and its administration “likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to engage in notice-and-comment rulemaking before making significant changes to service delivery, that the plaintiffs will be irreparably harmed if this injunction does not issue, and that the balance of the equities and the public interest favor an injunction.”

The cancellation affected programs all over Wisconsin that have worked with AmeriCorps, some of them for years, and the volunteers who have flocked to AmeriCorps looking for experience through community service work.

“It’s a tragedy,” said state Rep. Supreme Moore Omokunde (D-Milwaukee), who spent two years as an AmeriCorps participant 15 years ago. “AmeriCorps is about volunteerism. We have limited resources and we have this unlimited need.”

In Green Bay, AmeriCorps helped staff the Green Bay Conservation Corps. Founded in 2022, the Conservation Corps has fielded teams of AmeriCorps members each year on projects that have included establishing a pollinator corridor through the city, removing invasive plants, maintaining walking trails and restoring area streams.

“Altogether we’ve seen over 70 AmeriCorps members come through our doors,” said Maria Otto, the Green Bay Conservation Corps coordinator. “They’re the ones getting the work done.”

The Green Bay city council passed a measure covering the rest of the 2025 service year from city funds.

“After two weeks of uncertainty, our entire crew was able to work for the Conservation Corps again” thanks to the funds, said Cailie Kafura, one of the AmeriCorps volunteers. The money will allow the program’s work to keep going through August.

“We were doing a lot of work that people maybe don’t even know is being done,” said Kafura. “I know that the work I’m doing, I want to be doing that kind of work in the future. I want to be using my body and my mind for good out in the world.”

Lynn Walter operates a nonprofit, New Leaf Foods, that promotes access to healthy food and education in the greater Green Bay area. Founded 15 years ago, New Leaf began working with AmeriCorps five years ago through a partnership with Marshfield Clinic. The clinic deploys AmeriCorps participants on health-related projects around the state.

Walter said Friday after the cancellation she was able to retain one of her three AmeriCorps participants this year on a contract basis. A second AmeriCorps member chose to stay on as a volunteer to complete a project she had been working on, while the third needed more paid hours and went to another job.

Even with the court ruling, Walter said, she’s been told that what happens next remains uncertain. And she fears there’s been longer-term damage regardless of what happens in the court case.

“Even if the program starts up again, there won’t be the momentum that there has been in the past,” Walter said. She expects prospective participants to be wary of signing up in the future: “What would you tell a young person?”

In his early 30s, Omokunde joined Public Allies, a leadership development nonprofit, in 2010 and 2011 as an AmeriCorps participant. He called the experience “a tipping point” for him personally and professionally.

“One of the core values is collaboration,” Omokunde said. “It taught me that collaboration is one of the most difficult things to do — but it’s one of the most necessary things to do.”

Omokunde is blunt in his assessment of why AmeriCorps was targeted in President Donald Trump’s second term.

“I think it follows a long tradition of people not valuing the work that is done in certain communities,” Omokunde said. “Donald Trump is a bully. He doesn’t want anything in opposition to him and his agenda.”

Omokunde ticked off a list of colleagues in politics who came up through AmeriCorps and Public Allies: State Rep. Darrin Madison (D-Milwaukee), Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, former state Rep. David Bowen, and the late Milwaukee alder Jonathan Brostoff, also a former Assembly member.

“When he sees this cadre of individuals who are rooted in community and learning about asset-based community development, diversity and being committed to anti-oppression as well, people who represent all people, he doesn’t want that kind of opposition,” Omokunde said. “He just wants people to go along and do his bidding.”

Unemployment benefits application (photo by Getty Images)

This report has been updated.

In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a Catholic Charities organization in Wisconsin doesn’t have to take part in the Wisconsin unemployment insurance (UI) system.

The ruling rejected a Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion that said the agency’s purpose was essentially secular and didn’t qualify for a religious exemption in state unemployment law.

Advocates who supported Catholic Charities cheered the ruling as a blow for religious liberty and against attempts to define whether or not an organization’s motives are sufficiently rooted in faith.

“We have maintained throughout the process and in an amicus brief that Catholic Charities is in fact a religious institution and is eligible for the unemployment insurance tax exemption offered by the state law,” said David Earleywine, associate director for education and religious liberty at the Wisconsin Catholic Conference.

Organizations that represent workers, however, have raised questions about the decision’s broader implications for employees of other institutions connected to churches, including the large networks of Catholic hospitals across the U.S.

“It is crucial that employees, especially low-wage workers, have the protections of unemployment insurance, regardless of the identity of their employer,” said Larry Dupuis,  director of litigation and advocacy at Legal Action of Wisconsin. The law firm joined with groups including the Economic Policy Institute, the Century Foundation and the National Employment Law Project on a friend of the court brief supporting the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling.

“Unemployment payments help the laid off worker, and the economy as a whole, during a downturn by supporting consumer demand,” Dupuis said.

Thursday’s ruling overturns a 4-3 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision issued in March 2024 that declared the work of Catholic Charities Bureau Inc. of the Superior Diocese of the Catholic Church doesn’t get a pass from Wisconsin’s UI law on religious grounds.

The Wisconsin ruling, written by Justice Anne Walsh Bradley, declared that the Catholic Charities work is “secular in nature” and that the agency and its subsidiary organizations that took part in the case “are not operated primarily for religious purposes” as defined in the UI law’s religious exemption.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote Thursday for the U.S. Supreme Court that the Wisconsin high court majority’s arguments amounted to giving preference to one religious denomination over another.

The Wisconsin ruling held that the agencies’ work was not religious in nature because they didn’t attempt to preach the Catholic faith to participants and did not serve only Catholics.

“Petitioners’ Catholic faith, however, bars them from satisfying those criteria,” Sotomayor wrote. The ruling quoted from the dissent by Justice Rebecca Bradley in the Wisconsin decision.

“Wisconsin’s exemption,” Sotomayor wrote, “as interpreted by its Supreme Court, thus grants a denominational preference by explicitly differentiating between religions based on theological practices. Indeed, petitioners’ eligibility for the exemption ultimately turns on inherently religious choices (namely, whether to proselytize or serve only co-religionists).”

Earleywine said the decision reflected the position of Catholic Charities and its supporters. 

“For Catholic Charities in particular, serving the poor is part of our Catholic mission — that is something that we are called to do,” he said.

Sotomayor’s ruling noted that the church offers its own unemployment compensation program for laid-off workers and dismissed the suggestion that the organizations were “more likely to leave their employees without unemployment benefits.”

Earleywine underscored the ruling’s reference to the Catholic unemployment compensation program as  “essentially equivalent” to the state UI program. 

The employment lawyers’ amicus brief disputed that comparison, however, and also noted that there’s no guarantee other religious employers made exempt would have any kind of substitute benefits program. The brief also argued that in the event an individual diocesesan employer can’t afford to pay benefits for a laid-off employee, the overall program has renounced any obligation to pick up the tab. 

Earleywine said the ruling enables Catholic Charities organizations to sign up with the church system, which is available to employees of Catholic dioceses, including church parishes and schools. Other Catholic-related organizations without a diocesan connection — such as Catholic hospital systems or universities — are not eligible under current rules.  

Justice Clarence Thomas, while joining in the unanimous opinion, wrote a separate concurrence stating that because the Wisconsin ruling did not defer to the Bishop of Superior’s assertion that Catholic Charities and its affiliates are “an arm of the Diocese, the Wisconsin Supreme Court violated the church autonomy doctrine.”

While Thursday’s ruling was emphatic, it also appeared to suggest how Wisconsin’s UI religious exemption might be rewritten to produce a different outcome.

The Wisconsin UI law exempts all churches, church conventions or church associations “without differentiating between employees actually involved in religious works” and those who are not, Sotomayor wrote.

Dupuis of Legal Action Wisconsin pointed to another concurrence, by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who wrote that state UI laws could cover nonprofit employees of religiously associated organizations by focusing on the work involved rather than its underlying motivations to determine who is and who is not exempt.

“As Justice Jackson’s concurrence shows, this ruling still gives states the ability to limit the scope of the religious exemption so large employers that provide services that are not inherently religious, like hospitals, must still cover their employees,” Dupuis said.

When the federal law was revised in 1970 to include nonprofit employees in state UI programs, Congress exempted certain church-affiliated employees. The goal, Jackson wrote, was to avoid the state getting involved in a dispute “over the sufficiency of a fired employee’s prayers or the accuracy of their scriptural teaching.”

The intent of Congress was to exempt “a narrow category of church-affiliated entities” that could produce such an entanglement “precisely because their work involves preparing individuals for religious life,” Jackson wrote.

She concluded: “It is perfectly consistent with the opinion the Court hands down today for States to align their [federally-based] religious-purposes exemptions with Congress’s true focus.”

Children at Mariposa Learning Center in Fitchburg. (2023 file photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

While providers, their supporters and Democratic lawmakers are pressing for a substantial continuing direct state investment in Wisconsin’s child care sector, Republicans in the Legislature are pursuing another route: expanding a child care tax credit for employers.

So far, child care providers and some small business owners aren’t interested.

The legislation circulated in draft form in early May. On Friday, May 30, it was formally introduced in the Assembly (AB 283) and the state Senate (SB 291).

“We really think it’s an important opportunity to reward employers for getting involved in child care,” Neil Kline, who says he encouraged GOP lawmakers to draft the tax credit legislation, told the Examiner.

Kline is executive director of Family Friendly Workplaces, a nonprofit based in Woodville that works with businesses in Burnett, Pierce, Polk and St. Croix counties. The organization certifies employers as family-friendly “to support their recruitment and retention efforts,” Kline said. To that end, one of its missions is focusing on workforce-related problems such as housing and child care access.

In early May Sen. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green) and Rep. Karen Hurd (R-Withee) circulated the proposed bill seeking cosponsors.

The legislation was written “to encourage more businesses to invest in child care in their communities,” Marklein and Hurd wrote in their May 12 cosponsor memo. “These changes will increase the number of available child care slots and provide more options for families.”

Demanding direct support

The legislation has been introduced while child care providers and Democrats are continuing their campaigns to revive direct support for the child care sector.

During the COVID-19 pandemic the Evers administration used federal pandemic relief funds to pay child care providers monthly stipends through the Child Care Counts program. The $20 million a month that the state doled out helped providers stabilize child care, increasing workers’ pay while keeping care more affordable for families.

When Evers tried to use $360 million from the 2023-25 budget to continue Child Care Counts with state money, none of the Legislature’s Republican majority got behind the measure. The governor was later able to reallocate other federal dollars to fund Child Care Counts through June 2025, but at half the original amount: $10 million a month.

With lawmakers now writing the 2025-27 budget, Evers, child care providers and their advocates have been campaigning for $480 million to continue the program for the next two years. A survey commissioned by the state and conducted by the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty forecast closures and tuition hikes if the state payments end.  

At their very first budget vote, however, Republicans on the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee removed the proposal along with more than 600 other items Evers had included in his budget draft. The GOP outnumbers the Democrats 3 to 1 on the committee.

Democratic lawmakers responded by circulating a draft stand-alone bill to reinstate the Evers proposal.

“Child care providers are facing increasing cost to operate while still making poverty-level wages,” said Sen. Sarah Keyeski (D-Lodi) at a May 22 press conference to announce the Democrats’ bill. “This has made it extremely difficult to hire and retain quality staff. [Meanwhile] providers desperately want to avoid rising costs and rates on families already struggling to afford child care.”

Child care as business investment

As yet no Republican lawmakers have gotten behind the Child Care Counts proposal.

Instead, the bills that Marklein and Hurd have introduced would make changes to the Business Development Tax Credit, which is provided through the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC).

That tax credit is granted to reward a variety of business investments and reduces the state income tax that a business pays by the amount of the credit.

Currently, a business that spends money on starting a child care program for its employees can get up to 15% of that cost taken off its tax bill. The credit applies only to capital investments, however — building or remodeling the child care facility.

“Unfortunately, we have heard that the current program parameters limit the incentive for businesses to invest in child care programs,” Marklein and Hurd wrote in their co-sponsor memo. “While many businesses may want to provide child care as a benefit to employees, the current credit limitations reduce the incentive for this investment.”

In addition to capital expenditures, the draft bill would extend the tax credit to cover 15% of several other costs:

• An employer’s spending on child care program operations;
• Spending to reimburse employees for their child care expenses;
• Spending to buy or reserve openings for its employees at a child care center;
• Contributions an employer makes to an employee’s flexible spending account for dependent care.

The draft bill also allows the tax credit for “any other cost or expense incurred due to a benefit provided by an employer to facilitate the provision or utilization by employees of child care services.”

The tax credit would be refundable: Even if the credit totals more than the employer pays in taxes, the company would get its full value back from the Wisconsin Department of Revenue. 

It also would give a refund to nonprofit employers, which don’t pay taxes.

“While not a silver bullet, these changes are another step in the right direction to address the child care issue in Wisconsin,” Marklein and Hurd wrote in their memo.

Kline, the Family Friendly Workplaces director, said the proposal would help engage employers more directly in addressing child care shortages.

“We really think it lays the groundwork for ongoing, self-sustaining support of child care in Wisconsin,” he said. “The primary goal is to help introduce new money into the child care — really, the child care ecosystem — by rewarding employers to support the ongoing expenses of child care, because the reality is that the sector needs additional money in it.”

Kline said he understands that “the ongoing operational economics” is a central problem for the child care sector. “That’s why we are so focused on helping employers find avenues and be rewarded for helping defray the expenses that are related to child care and helping support that ongoing operational side of child care.”

Chilly reception

To date the existing child care employer tax credit hasn’t had any takers, according to the WEDC. In January, as part of an overall evaluation of the state’s business development tax credit, an outside consultant told WEDC that “due to the high operational costs of childcare centers, affordability would likely be better achieved through subsidy as opposed to a tax incentive.”

The proposal to expand the tax credit isn’t gaining traction with providers or small business owners.

Main Street Alliance, which organizes small business owners to advocate for state and national legislation, has already announced objections to the bill.

“These kinds of programs and tax credits are often advantageous for employers who can afford compliance and the procedural costs and have economies of scale,” said Shawn Phetteplace, MSA’s national campaign director. That leaves out the typical small business, said Phetteplace, who sent lawmakers a memo calling the proposal “deeply unserious.”

Evan Dannells, a chef and owner of two Madison restaurants, questioned how a relatively small business like his would benefit from the tax credit.

Of his eight full-time employees, one has two children. Most of the others are graduate students. Directly paying for the one employee’s child care, even if receiving a tax credit, doesn’t feel fair to the others who don’t have that expense, Dannells said.

“If you put the onus of taking care of child care on the employer, the employer won’t hire people with children,” he said.

Dannells considers the cost of child care a legitimate use of his tax dollars. “This is why government should be doing this,” he said. He observed that children are required to go to school when they reach the age of first grade. “Why can’t we take care of them from age 1 to 5?”

While the tax credit may make it easier for a particular company’s employees to afford child care thanks to the employer’s support, skeptics of the proposal say that assistance only helps some people — not the system as a whole.

“That doesn’t help keep the doors open,” said Heather Murray, who operates a child care center in Waunakee. “We’re hitting crisis mode and centers are shutting down now, and a quarter of them will be gone if [Child Care Counts] isn’t renewed. We need the investment to go directly to providers to make sure that the doors stay open.”

Child care as a public good

National child care analyst Eliot Haspel is also skeptical. Haspel is a fellow at Capita, a think tank that works in the area of family policy. In February 2024, the think tank New America published his report raising questions about the impact of various employer-sponsored child care benefits.

Haspel views child care as a public good that benefits society broadly. For that reason, he contends, it should serve families regardless of whether they work for an employer able to fund a child care benefit.

“Small business will never be able to offer a really robust child care workplace benefit,” Haspel says. That puts small businesses and small business employees at a disadvantage if supporting child care is primarily an employer’s responsibility, he argues.

The large number of low-wage workers and “gig workers” “also raises the specter of increasing inequalities,” he writes in the New America report.

Haspel says that tying child care to a job also locks people into a job — or strands them from needed care if they lose their job. It also disrupts children’s early education at a time when they need consistent and reliable connections with their caregivers, advocates say.

“It’s really bad for workers and it’s really bad for kids for your child care to be tied to your employment,” Sen. Kelda Roys said at the Democrats’ May 22 press conference.

Tying health insurance to employment has been “a disaster,” Roys said. Health care is “rationed based on the job that you have or the wealth that you have,” she added, “and we do not want to exacerbate the current problems in our child care system by tying it to people’s employment.”

In his New America report and in an interview, Haspel says the problem isn’t providing child care at the workplace.

“I’m not against the idea of onsite child care — that can make all the sense in the world,” he says. “You can have an onsite center as part of a publicly funded system” — one to which employers contribute as taxpayers.

Focusing on the employer, however, carries with it “an opportunity cost,” Haspel says. “The more we say child care should be solved primarily through employers, the harder it is to say we need a fully public system that is universal and reaches everyone.”

Carol Lemke, a member of the nurses union bargaining team at Meriter hospital in Madison, addresses nurses before they return to work Sunday morning after ratifying a new labor contract. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Nurses at Meriter hospital in Madison returned to work Sunday with a new contract at the end of a five-day strike, the first in the hospital’s history.

The agreement, reached Saturday and ratified by union members late Saturday night, for the first time gives nurses direct input on staffing concerns at the hospital, said Pat Raes, president of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Wisconsin and also a nurse at the hospital. Raes spoke at a short return-to-work rally Sunday morning outside the hospital.

While it falls short of establishing guaranteed ratios of patients to nurses, Raes said the new two-year contract  establishes a precedent by including  language about staffing concerns.

Wages will go up by 10% over two years, Raes said. She said the wage gain offered “meaningful raises” including 8% across the board and the other 2% for “step increases recognizing our experience and attracting new talent.” 

Raes said the contract also contains  “enforceable language” addressing the safety of health care staff and patients, including a commitment to install a metal detector by the end of the summer.

Staffing concerns and a push for the hospital to guarantee specific ratios of patients to nurses on duty were among the issues that the union stressed in contract negotiations and during the five-day walkout.

In public statements during the contract talks and strike, UnityPoint Health-Meriter officials said they shared the union’s concerns for safe staffing levels but opposed dictating ratios, claiming it would hinder  flexibility to respond to changing conditions.

Raes said the agreement builds on an existing system of committees in which nurses are in charge. “We really felt that was the format for having the staffing discussions and noting where those issues were,” she said Sunday.

The contract also commits the hospital to an annual discussion with the union on staffing concerns and issues, Raes said.

“This was a long and difficult negotiation,” Raes said. “We acknowledge Meriter’s management for ultimately coming to the table and reaching an agreement that prioritizes the needs of our patients and our dedicated professionals. Today, we turn the page.”

The final negotiating sessions were conducted with the aid of a mediator from the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC).

“We did not want to walk,” said bargaining committee member Carol Lemke, “but we felt it was the only thing we could do” to get staffing-related language in the contract.

In a statement distributed by UnityPoint Health-Meriter Saturday night after the agreement was announced, Sherry Casali, the hospital’s chief nursing officer, said, “We are grateful for the dedication and hard work of everyone involved in the negotiations. This tentative agreement represents meaningful progress toward a contract that recognizes the important contributions of our nurses.”

Raes said the union is now turning its attention to state legislation lawmakers have reported they are drafting that would establish a state mandate for the ratios of health care workers to patients in health care institutions. 

After five days of large throngs of picketing nurses, the crowd outside the hospital Sunday morning was smaller. The scene was cheerful and celebratory, accompanied by a sense of relief.

Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway turned out for the 6:30 a.m. return-to-work rally.

“I want to thank you for your courage because I know this wasn’t easy,” she told the nurses.

While she said she was grateful “mostly to the nurses,” Rhodes-Conway also said she was “grateful to management for coming to the table and finally understanding that we are stronger when we collaborate.”

The contract was ratified Saturday night by “a supermajority” of nurses, Raes said. Although the union didn’t release the official vote count, Raes said, “We had more people vote for this contract than we have ever had vote in the past.”

The union pushed to ensure the votes were cast and counted before midnight because the pay increases take effect with the start of the next pay period, Sunday morning.

The timing was also important for another reason. Meriter management told the union and employees that nurses on strike would be removed from the list of active employees effective Sunday, which would end their health insurance coverage.

The union wanted to complete the ratification process Saturday night “so there would not be any issues — there would not be any threat,” Raes said.

“We have nurses that are being treated for long-term health issues that cannot afford to lose their insurance who were out striking, and we have had other ones that felt they had to cross the picket line to not risk their health insurance,” Raes said.

She said she doesn’t expect divisions among members because of those choices, however. “Everybody, all the nurses, will continue to work together and have each other’s back on the floors,” Raes said, “because that is how we have to work.”

Participants hold candles at a vigil for striking nurses outside Meriter hospital in Madison Thursday evening. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Roughly 150 nurses and their allies gathered at dusk Thursday for a vigil to show support for the strike underway at Meriter hospital in Madison.

The crowd was smaller than the throngs that have gathered outside the hospital during daily picketing and rallies, but the feelings they conveyed were no less intense.

“We’re holding this vigil because beneath the charts, beneath the chants, beneath the signs and beneath the daily strength that it takes to strike is something deeply serious,” said emergency room nurse Shelby Davis. “We’re not just here for better contracts. We’re here for safety, for dignity, for the basic right to care for our patients without risking their lives or our own.”

With the vigil, organized with the involvement of two church pastors, the nurses and their union sought to cast the issues that led to the five-day walkout as a matter of moral principle.

“You are doing holy work,” said Pastor Justin Dittrich of Lake Edge Lutheran Church, opening the vigil at Brittingham Park on Madison’s near South Side, a block from the hospital grounds.

“The strike is not the end, but the beginning of a more just health care system for all people, workers and participants,”  Dittrich added. “We stand with the nurses of Meriter because they are healers, truth tellers, and agents of faith and justice.”

UnityPoint Health-Meriter and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Wisconsin are in the midst of negotiations for a new labor agreement for about 1,000 nurses who work at the hospital. The nurses union began a five-day strike Tuesday after a bargaining session May 19 ended without a new agreement, and after the union’s bargaining team said management negotiators were not responding adequately to their concerns about staffing levels, hospital security and compensation.

Negotiations resumed Thursday, during which union bargaining team members reported some progress, and continued on Friday.

Among the union’s primary issues in negotiations has been a demand for specific ratios of nurses to patients.

“Even though I work in the ER and not on the floor, I see how staffing levels affect every part of the hospital,” said Davis. “I’ll never forget the one moment during my nurse residency, a new grad was recognized for taking care of seven patients on their own. Seven. That wasn’t a badge of honor, that was a red flag.”

The hospital management has said dictating ratios would interfere with its need for flexibility to respond to changing conditions.

Speakers said the demand is not just in the interest of nurses, but a matter of concern for patients as well.

“Ratios are for us — yeah, absolutely,” said nurse Dara Pierce. “But they’re also for everybody else and I think sometimes that goes unnoticed.”

The fear of violence in the workplace has driven nurses to demand a stronger role in formulating security policy, speakers said, along with measures such as metal detectors.

“We’ve had violent or unpredictable situations come through our doors with just one security guard assigned to ER and no metal detectors,” said Davis. “No one should have to feel unsafe when they’re coming to a hospital and no nurse should be expected to risk their life just to do their job.”

The lingering impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which began five years ago, continues to weigh on health care workers, nurse Annette Bernas told vigil participants.

“We were considered essential, but let’s be honest, we were expendable,” she said. “We didn’t complain. We showed up. We held hands when family members couldn’t.”

As the pandemic laid bare the importance of health care and health care workers, “we were hopeful that everything we gave would open the eyes of the world to the importance of nurses and support staff,” Bernas said. “But here we find ourselves in a deeper crisis. The burnout is real. Nurses are leaving in waves. PTSD from those years is something we still carry, and yet we’re being asked to do more with less.”

After the speeches the crowd walked behind a large yellow banner, carrying flickering candles from the park to the hospital entrance on Brooks Street.

There Pastor Raymond Monk of Milwaukee offered a benediction. 

“This new course has caused many of you all to make a decision to make sure that your voices are heard and the voices of those who are hurting, their voices are heard also,” said Monk. “I want to encourage you at this pivotal moment in history to continue to defy the norms and to make known to the world that things must change and that things must change right now.”

Faith upholds their cause, he suggested, adding that God “is always on the side of the oppressed.”

State Sen. LaTonya Johnson (D-Milwaukee) argues Thursday in the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee for including the full budget request from the state Department of Safety and Professional Services in the 2025-27 Wisconsin state budget. (Screenshot/WisEye)

Republicans on the Legislature’s budget committee rejected a proposal Thursday to add permanent staff to the state agency responsible for ensuring that a range of professionals have licenses they need to do their jobs.

Instead, the Joint Finance Committee voted along party lines to extend five contract positions for three more years as well as add a handful of other positions.

The 2025-27 state budget marks the fourth one in which Gov. Tony Evers has been rebuffed after urging lawmakers to increase staffing at the Department of Safety and Professional Services (DSPS) to speed up the agency’s license and permit administration.

There was no debate during the 45-minute meeting Thursday.

All four Democrats on the committee spoke up, either to advocate for their proposal for the agency or to criticize the GOP proposal as inadequate. None of the Republicans, however, made arguments for their plan for DSPS or against the Democrats’ alternative.

In addition to issuing professional licenses in health care, personal services, professions such as accounting or architecture and for skilled tradespeople such as plumbers and electricians, DSPS also oversees a variety of building and other public safety licenses and permits.

Starting more than three years ago, Republican lawmakers raised criticism of the agency amid heavy backlogs in the licensing process for a wide range of professionals.  

Democratic lawmakers — as well as some outside groups representing licensed professionals — have charged the backlog was a result of the Legislature’s failure to authorize more positions at the department.

The department is almost entirely self-funded through the fees it collects from license applications, but the size of its staff requires the approval of the Legislature.  

In the 2023-25 draft state budget, Evers requested 74 new positions at DSPS, but the final spending plan drafted largely by the Republican majority on the finance committee added 17.75 positions.

Evers redirected pandemic relief funds to DSPS to hire more contract workers to help manage the licensing process. In the last couple of years, the backlog has been reduced so that on average a license is issued in two weeks, according to state Rep. Deb Andraca (D-Whitefish Bay), a finance committee member.

In his 2025-27 budget draft, Evers requested 30 new positions at the agency. On Thursday, Democrats on the finance committee proposed adding 31 positions, including 14 to staff the department’s call center serving license applicants and nine additional employees to process license applications.

Authorizing fewer people than DSPS has requested “has a tremendous risk of causing significant delays or or even just making it a little bit harder for people to be able to get their license,” said Rep. Tip McGuire (D-Kenosha). “We want people to be able to get the licenses that they need so they can go to work. We want people to get the renewals that they need so they can continue working.”

State law requires about 10% of the fee revenue from professional licenses in health and business professions to be transferred to the state budget’s general fund.

“We have been pulling funds out of an agency that’s almost basically self-sufficient and dumping the money into the general fund, all while the demand for licenses is exploding,” said Sen. LaTonya Johnson (D-Milwaukee).

Johnson warned the committee that if the licensing process gets bogged down again, shortages in fields such as health care in particular are likely to worsen.

Falling short of funding the department’s full request “impacts every single person in the state, whether you’re a licensee or not,” said Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison). “What we are doing is starving that system and making it harder for every single one of us to access needed professional services.”

The Democratic proposal failed on a 4-12 vote, with all the Republicans on the 16-member committee voting against it. 

The Republican measure passed 12-4, with only Republicans’ support.

It extends five contract call center positions that expire Sept. 30 for another three years.

The GOP motion omits three lawyers and three paralegals the department had requested for professional regulation compliance and for the state’s Prescription Drug Monitoring Program.

The motion also transfers $5 million from DSPS revenues to the state budget’s general fund, in addition to the annual 10% from license fees. 

The Republican measure authorizes a consultant for pharmacy inspections that was part of the original budget draft. It also includes funding to continue a youth firefighter training grant that was in the original request and the Democratic proposal.

The committee’s co-chairs, Sen. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green) and Rep. Mark Born (R-Beaver Dam), released a joint statement later Thursday declaring that “Joint Finance Republicans voted to invest in important government services while holding the line on spending.”

The statement cited funding for DSPS call center staff “to help credential holders and the public navigate licensure platforms” and said the funding “ensures the department can operate effectively and provide these critical services to professionals.”

Immediately after the final vote, however, Andraca told her colleagues that the outcome was a missed opportunity.

“We could be sitting here claiming a bipartisan success story, because today the median time to get a license is only 15 days,” Andraca said. “We should be continuing the success story and taking a victory lap, and instead we’re chipping away the progress that we’ve made — and that’s very disappointing.”

Flanked by state Sen. Mark Spreitzer (D-Beloit) and state Rep. Lee Snodgrass (D-Appleton), Rep. Christian Phelps (D-Eau Claire) outlines a joint resolution for Pride Month, (Screenshot/WisEye)

Wisconsin Democratic lawmakers are circulating four draft bills and two joint resolutions to address issues of discrimination against members of the lesbian, gay, trans and queer community.

The package was announced just before  Pride Month begins on June 1.

“We celebrate the history of the LGBTQ+ movement and the future of our population, and I can’t think of a more important time to do that,” said Rep. Christian Phelps (D-Eau Claire), at a Capitol press conference Thursday. “Meanwhile in Washington the Trump administration and Republicans here in Wisconsin are engaging in rhetoric and political activity that seeks to erase LGBTQ+ people and target us …  the goal in that rhetoric and in that movement is to make us feel alone.”

Embracing diversity and joining with  allies give the community strength, Phelps said.

“Everybody who is not themselves a member of the LGBTQ+ community knows and loves at least one person in the community. And I think when they shut out all the noise and look inside, they know that they want the best for that person or those people,” Phelps said.

In addition to a joint resolution embracing Pride Month, the Equality Agenda legislation includes measures to:

• Update various Wisconsin laws pertaining to married couples, including laws on adoption and on in vitro fertilization, to ensure they apply to same-sex couples.
• Prohibit “conversion therapy” aimed at changing a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity and subjecting licensed professionals who practice it to professional discipline.
• Bar the use of a “gay or trans panic” as a defense by persons accused of crimes.
• Provide grants for training school counselors and social workers on LGBTQ+ rights.

Also part of the package is a proposed amendment to the Wisconsin Constitution that would repeal the 2006 amendment declaring marriage to be only between one man and one woman.

The amendment preventing the state from legally recognizing same-sex marriages remains on the books although it was overridden by the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage across the country.

“With the 20th anniversary of Wisconsin’s constitutional amendment that banned marriage equality coming up next year,” said Sen. Mark Spreitzer (D-Beloit), chair of the Legislature’s LGBTQ+ Caucus. “It is long past time to give voters the chance to remove that discriminatory language from our constitution.”

Striking nurses picket outside UnityPoint-Health Meriter hospital Wednesday. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Nurses at Meriter hospital in Madison and the hospital’s management team are returning to the bargaining table Thursday, the third day of a five-day strike over a new labor agreement covering nearly 1,000 union-represented nurses.

The nurses, represented by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Wisconsin, went on strike Tuesday after their last negotiating session with UnityPoint Health-Meriter on May 19 ended without an agreement.

As nurses rallied and picketed in front of the hospital Wednesday, the issue of staffing requirements was at the forefront of arguments offered by both the nurses and the hospital’s management.

“Let me be very clear, it is not unreasonable to want safe staffing guaranteed in our contracts,” said Carly Dickmann, a Meriter obstetrics, labor and delivery nurse.

“It is not unreasonable to want to feel safe at work and to have a voice in the procedures that impact us and our patients,” Dickmann continued. “It is not unreasonable to want fair compensation for our labor. It’s long past time for management to take us seriously. It’s time that Meriter listen to nurses and come to the table ready to make real, tangible changes to improve the hospital we love so dearly.”

A management position paper distributed Wednesday by the hospital’s communications department asserted that the hospital and the union both “agree that staffing levels are a critical component to safe patient care.”

The paper stated that the hospital’s approach to staffing assignments needed “to remain flexible” so it could move personnel in response to “patient needs and census changes.” It said the hospital would review “the staffing matrix” in four units the union identified as having problems, and that nurses and support staff in the affected units would be included in the process.

At the union’s picket line rally on Tuesday, bargaining team member Amber Anderson said the management proposal fell short.

“Meriter management refuses to put staffing solutions in our contract,” Anderson said, calling the management proposal “a vague promise to review staffing with no timelines, no accountability and no enforceable standards. That is not enough.”

The union has also focused on security and on wages. Union proposals have sought  increases particularly for nurses with the longest tenure, as well as metal detectors in certain areas.

The management paper said average wages would go up by $4.67 an hour over the life of the agreement under the hospital’s proposal, and that Meriter had plans to install weapons screening equipment in its emergency department this summer.

At Wednesday’s picket line rally, striking nurses heard messages of support from Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley and U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth).

Pocan recalled his visit to Meriter for three clogged arteries seven and a half years ago.

“And I got time to spend in the ICU and other rooms here at Meritor, and I received excellent health care,” Pocan said. “Not because of the comfort of the bed or the colors of the wall, not because of the profitability of the hospital, but because of the staff and the nurses at Meriter.”

Johnson came to Madison because he sees issues in the strike as important “not just for nurses in Madison, but really for nurses all across the state of Wisconsin,” he said in an interview. “When you stand with labor, it’s not just a sometime thing, it’s an all the time thing.”

Strikers also got support from union activists organizing at other area health care employers.

“The people who own the health care industry are running a race to the bottom, where executives try to lower quality of care, increase ratios as much as they possibly can get away with,” said Colin Gillis, who has been active in the effort begun more than five years ago to win union representation for nurses at the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics in Madison.

“And when they do it here, at the hospital next door, they look at their nurses and they say, ‘Hey, they take six patients at night, so can you,” Gillis said. “Well, you and your nurses are here to say, ‘Heck, No!’”

Dr. Ira Segal, who has been among the employees at Group Health Cooperative in Madison organizing a union, said his coworkers see the Meriter nurses as allies.

“Together, we will persevere and we will shape a future where workers and patients come before profit, and where every voice is heard,” Segal said.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) website for enrolling in Medicaid and other state benefits programs. (Screenshot)

Among changes to Medicaid tucked in the federal reconciliation bill that passed the U.S. House last week is one that requires participants in the state-federal health plan for the poor to prove they’re eligible every six months.

Wisconsin advocates said Tuesday the provision is likely to reduce Medicaid enrollment — not because people don’t qualify but because of administrative errors and confusion.

Under current state and federal law, people covered by Medicaid must have their eligibility confirmed every year. Eligibility depends on various factors, chief among them household income. People whose Medicaid services are tied to a disability undergo an annual evaluation to determine whether their disability still qualifies them.

“We already do a really good job about making sure that everybody who’s in Medicaid is already eligible to be there,” Tamara Jackson, policy analyst and legislative liaison for the Wisconsin Board for People with Developmental Disabilities, said in an interview.

Checking eligibility more frequently isn’t likely to uncover more people who are enrolled in Medicaid and don’t qualify, Jackson said: “It will lead to a different result because people who are eligible for the program are losing coverage because they didn’t get the paperwork in on time.”

“It’s going to probably result in kicking people off the program — some of it through error and some of it just benign neglect,” said Bobby Peterson, executive director of ABC for Health. The nonprofit is a public interest law firm that assists people navigating the health care system get coverage and address problems such as medical debt.

“It’s part of a blizzard of paperwork to keep people off the program,” Peterson said of the twice-yearly Medicaid eligibility test. “And it’s not necessarily going to be very effective in maintaining program integrity.”

He said Medicaid participants are already required to report changes in their income that could change whether they’re eligible.  

“It’s calculated to deter people from staying with the [Medicaid] program,” Peterson said. “It’ll leave more people out and less people covered, more people uninsured.”

With fewer people covered by health insurance, that could lead to “higher rates of medical debt, higher rates of uncompensated care, and then the socialization and redistribution of all that medical debt onto everybody else’s [health care] bill,” Peterson said. “So, it’s a lose-lose proposition.”

The House Republican majority drafted the reconciliation legislation in order to extend tax cuts enacted in 2017 during President Donald Trump’s first term.

The bill’s tax cuts largely benefit higher-income households, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The bill’s spending cuts to Medicaid and other programs, including federal nutrition aid, were included to reduce the tax cuts’ impact on the federal deficit.

In Wisconsin, about 1.3 million people are covered by Medicaid, according to the state Department of Health Services (DHS). About 900,000 are enrolled in BadgerCare Plus, which provides primary health care for families and single adults with incomes below the federal poverty guidelines. Another 250,000 are in one of several Medicaid programs for long-term care for people with disabilities or the elderly, and the rest are in other specialized programs.  

The change in how often Medicaid recipients must qualify for the program is just one of many changes in the program under the House reconciliation bill.

In a report produced in late April before the bill’s passage, the state Department of Health Services (DHS) calculated that its proposed Medicaid changes could cost Wisconsin up to $16.8 billion over the next date.

Current federal Medicaid regulations forbid states from determining a person’s eligibility more often than once a year. The House reconciliation bill would effectively override that rule.

A requirement to check every Medicaid recipient’s eligibility twice a year was part of state legislation that Wisconsin Republican lawmakers introduced earlier this year. That bill was met with sweeping criticism at a public hearing in April and has not advanced in the state Legislature.

Supporters of the change have argued that more should be done to reduce fraud in  the Medicaid program. But health care experts contend that the Medicaid cuts in the House bill are unlikely to address genuine fraud.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government temporarily suspended the annual Medicaid renewal requirement to ensure that people had health coverage and would seek medical help if they felt sick.

“Obviously if there’s a public health emergency, you want to maintain connections and access to health care and coverage,” Peterson said. Some people may have been still covered under Medicaid after they were no longer eligible, he added, and some “didn’t even know they had Medicaid or BadgerCare Plus in addition to some private insurance at various times.”

Nevertheless, “it wasn’t like there was wide-scale fraud” in the Medicaid program, Peterson said. “There’s very little evidence of a lot of consumer-related fraud in the program.”

Striking nurses and supporters circle the UnityPoint Health-Meriter hospital in Madison on the first day of a five-day walkout Tuesday. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

With a spirited rally, a picket line march around the building and a small brass band, nurses at UnityPoint Health-Meriter hospital in Madison launched a five-day walkout Tuesday, reiterating their demands for changes in safety practices, minimum ratios of nurses to patients and improved pay.

The strike — the first ever by nurses at Meriter hospital — is scheduled to run through Saturday. It follows the end of bargaining on Monday, May 19, when the nurses’ union bargaining team turned down the hospital management’s latest proposal.

Services Employees International Union (SEIU) Wisconsin and UnityPoint Health-Meriter have been in negotiations since earlier this year on a new contract covering about 950 nurses. The nurses’ most recent two-year agreement expired in late March and they have since been working without a contract.

The nurses’ contract demands include establishing required ratios of nurses to patients, improved safety for hospital employees and pay increases — particularly for senior nurses, according to union officials.

“Time and time again, Meriter’s management refused to meet us halfway,” said nurse Lindsey Miller, one of three bargaining team members who spoke at the strike’s opening-day rally Tuesday morning. “At our last bargaining session, it was management, not nurses, who walked away from the bargaining table.”

Miller said the most recent management officer included “an unacceptable raise that doesn’t cover the cost of living” and made “no progress” towards the nurses’ union’s demands for staffing commitments or security improvements.

“I am striking because I love working here,” said Madison Vander Hill, a birthing center nurse and one of six union speakers at the rally. “I love getting to walk alongside and care for families as they go through one of the most transformative experiences of their lives.”

Vander Hill said she and other nurses were striking “because we must see tangible change from management in order to ensure that safety and security are prioritized and the things we love about the work that we do are protected.”

Her coworker, Audrey Willems Van Dijk, said the nurses’ concerns extended to concerns for the hospital’s patients.

“We are fighting for every single person who walks through Meriter’s doors,” she said. “Yes, we deserve adequate compensation, but more than that, we deserve safety and security for ourselves and our community. We deserve respect.”

Dane County Executive Melissa Agard declared her support for the nurses and connected their dispute with former Gov. Scott Walker’s signature legislation after he took office in 2011 — Act 10, stripping most public workers of most union rights.

“It was his mission to crack the foundation of union rights in the state of Wisconsin. And that crack has continued not only in Wisconsin but across our nation, and you guys are here to say, ‘No more,’” Agard said.

As the strike got underway this week, Meriter told nurses that health benefits — including health insurance — would be cut off as of June 1 for nurses who do not report for their first scheduled shift during the strike this week.

A union spokesperson said the effect of the order would be to cut off benefits for strikers for the month of June if the two sides don’t reach a tentative agreement on Thursday, when their next bargaining session is scheduled.

Meriter spokesperson Nicole Aimone confirmed in an email message Tuesday that nurses who do not report for their first shift during the strike will be put on “inactive status” through Sunday, June 1, with their benefits ending as of that date.

Nurses whose benefits are cut off would have to use the federal law known as COBRA to maintain their coverage, paying for their insurance out of pocket. The law, enacted in the 1980s, enables fired or laid-off workers to maintain their employer’s health insurance temporarily at their own cost.

“They will have the ability to re-enroll once they are placed back into active employee status,” Aimone said.

The union has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board over the hospital’s action.

“It is outrageous and it is disgusting,” said Ben Wikler, the outgoing chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, addressing the rally. Wikler went on to lead hundreds of sign-carrying nurses and supporters in chanting, “Union busting is disgusting!”

“When management says you’ll lose your health insurance if you insist that there [should be] enough nurses on the floor to make sure that everyone is taken care of — it is disgusting,” Wikler said.

He described the dispute in the larger context of President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

“They think that the Trump administration and the National Labor Relations Board that this administration has gotten is going to turn its back on working people,” Wikler said.

“They will still have to come back to the negotiating table and they will have to do what’s right, because you are building the power to make them do what’s right,” he added.

The hospital is continuing to operate during the strike. Aimone said that the hospital has contracted with an outside agency for replacement “travel nurses” to support ongoing patient care.

She said she did not have information on the cost for the contract nurses who are filling in during the walkout.

In a 5-2 ruling the Wisconsin Supreme Court kept alive a woman's lawsuit against a doctor who had recommended surgery to another doctor that was performed on the woman without her knowledge. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)

A patient whose ovaries were removed without her knowledge during colon surgery can sue the doctor who she says recommended the procedure, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Friday.

In the opinion, five of the Court’s seven justices agreed that lower courts were correct when they refused to dismiss the patient’s lawsuit. With the ruling, the case is sent back to Rock County Circuit Court.

The patient, Melissa Hubbard, was being treated for endometriosis in 2018 by an obstetrician/gynecologist, Dr. Carol Neuman. During the time, Hubbard also was referred for surgery to remove a section of her colon.

The surgery was performed by Dr. Michael McGauley. During the procedure, Hubbard’s ovaries were removed, but she wasn’t told beforehand that would be part of the operation.

Hubbard initially sued McGauley, but that lawsuit was dismissed. She subsequently sued Neuman, charging that — without telling her — the OB/GYN had suggested to McGauley that he remove Hubbard’s ovaries during the colon surgery.

The lawsuit charges that when Neuman made the recommendation to McGauley, she violated Hubbard’s right to informed consent under Wisconsin law.

Neuman’s lawyers filed a motion in Rock County circuit court to dismiss the lawsuit on saying that, in the context of the surgery, Neuman was not Hubbard’s “treating physician” under the informed consent law.

Neuman’s lawyer argued that because the state law’s informed consent requirement applies to the “treating physician,” Hubbard had no case against Neuman since she did not perform the surgery and she never gave a formal order to the surgeon to remove Hubbard’s ovaries.

The circuit court judge denied the dismissal motion, and the state 4th District Court of Appeals agreed.

With Friday’s opinion, the Wisconsin Supreme Court also denied the motion to dismiss the case.

“We disagree with Dr. Neuman,” Chief Justice Anne Walsh Bradley wrote on behalf of the majority. “The essence of the inquiry is whether Hubbard’s complaint sufficiently alleges that Dr. Neuman was a ‘physician who treat[ed]’ Hubbard, even though she did not actually remove Hubbard’s ovaries herself. We conclude that it does.” 

Bradley was joined in the majority by Justices Rebecca Dallet, Brian Hagedorn, Jill Karofsky and Janet Protasiewicz.

According to the opinion, the complaint depicts “Neuman’s intimate involvement with the removal of Hubbard’s ovaries” — first, diagnosing Hubbard with a severe case of endometriosis and then advising her to consider removing her left fallopian tube and ovary.

“Second, after Hubbard agreed to undergo colon surgery, Dr. Neuman allegedly helped plan the surgery with Dr. McGauley,” Walsh Bradley wrote. “The physicians’ pre-surgery discussions and plans included Dr. Neuman’s plan to attend and participate in Hubbard’s surgery and to remove Hubbard’s ovaries herself. Hubbard also alleges that Dr. Neuman recommended to Dr. McGauley that he remove Hubbard’s ovaries.”

Those allegations in the lawsuit are enough to consider Neuman a treating physician in the case, Walsh Bradley wrote.

Justice Annette Ziegler, joined by Justice Rebecca Bradley, disagreed. 

“To be a treating physician under [the informed consent statute], the physician needs to either provide the treatment at issue himself or formally order the treatment at issue,” Ziegler wrote, citing the text and history of the law along with “the decisions of courts across the country that have addressed who qualifies as a treating physician.”

While Hubbard never told Neuman she wanted her ovaries removed and never consented to their removal in the surgery, Ziegler wrote, “the complaint never expressly alleges, nor reasonably implies, that Dr. Neuman performed or participated in the surgery or attended the surgery.” 

State Sen. Kelda Roys, holding her toddler, speaks about legislation Democrats are proposing to provide ongoing funding for child care providers. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Democratic lawmakers are circulating a draft bill to extend the soon-to-end state child care support program and fund it with $480 million that was stripped from the 2025-27 state budget.

The proposed legislation follows action earlier this month by Republican lawmakers to remove child care support and more than 600 other items that Gov. Tony Evers included in his draft budget.

Both Evers’ proposal and the Democrats’ bill aim to continue support that child care providers have been receiving since 2020 as part of federal pandemic relief.

“This funding has been essential in continuing successful programs that support our early educators, child care providers, parents, and most importantly, our kids,” said state Rep. Alex Joers (D-Middleton) at a Capitol news conference Thursday announcing the legislation.

The $20 million that Wisconsin paid out each month to providers through mid-2023 “kept our early educators in the workforce, held tuition down for parents and provided a direct investment in our children during the most crucial years of their childhood development,” Joers said.

Payments were cut to $10 million a month in June 2023, and the last of those funds will be paid out by early July.

“But with this impending deadline, child care providers and early educators are faced with the impossible decision to either raise rates or have to close altogether,” Joers said. “Without assurance of this funding lifeline, many have already made that decision and have devastatingly shut their doors forever.”

Citing recent reports, Joers said that there are 48,000 children on waiting lists for child care in Wisconsin. In a survey of providers, 78% said they would have to raise fees for infant care — the most expensive age group in most child care programs.

“Altogether, if nothing changes, parents are looking at having to find an additional up to $2,600 in their yearly budget,” Joers said.

First-term Sen. Sarah Keyeski (D-Lodi), the lead state Senate author on the legislation, said that when she was running for office last year, voters repeatedly shared their concerns about the cost and scarcity of child care.

“We have historically undervalued and underpaid child care and early education professionals,” Keyeski said. “This is no longer tenable.”

She described the plight of one constituent who had to change providers three times after the first and then the second provider went out of business because of financial difficulties or other constraints. The mother told her that her current provider — the third — had rates that are “at the top” of what the family could afford.

Keyeski said the provider has told the woman that unless the state can continue with its support, the center’s rates will go up $40 a week, or $160 a month. For the couple, “this increase is unsustainable,” she said. “Her family is left wondering, what to do next?”

Wisconsin’s rural communities have been especially hard hit, she added: In 70% of them, there are three or more children for every child care opening.

“In my district alone, over 34,000 children need care, but there are only about 26,000 available slots,” Keyeski said.

Child care should be viewed as essential infrastructure, said state Rep. Renuka Mayadev (D-Madison).

“And as a state, we support infrastructure. We maintain roads, we maintain bridges. Why is funding childcare such a fight?” Mayadev said.

Wages of less than $14 an hour are driving child care workers out of the field, she added. “There is no other industry where such high value work is being done at such dismal low wages.”

Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison) — accompanied by her toddler son before she took him to his child care provider near the Capitol — said the legislation calls for $480 million in state funds over the next two years.

“But I think the real question is what it will cost the state if we don’t do it,” Roys said. She forecast “continued massive closures” of child care centers.

“Already over 60% of child care providers have classrooms sitting empty or slots that can’t be filled because they don’t have the teachers to fill them,” she added.

Roys said child care was a critical need in order for the state to address persistent shortages of people to fill jobs.

“In critical areas like public safety, in K-12 education, in health care — what is it going to mean if the parents of even more kids can’t get child care?” Roys said. “We can’t afford that. We have to make this investment.”