In a stairwell in Van Hise Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jon Shelton displays messages from UW system employees urging UW's Board of Regents to authorize campuses to hold discussions with employees and their unions about salaries and working conditions. AFT's Autumn Pickett records Shelton as he discusses the campaign. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Universities of Wisconsin employees affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers are calling on the UW Board of Regents to formally authorize chancellors in the system to meet with employees and the union to discuss pay and working conditions.

On Friday, about two dozen AFT members and supporters gathered outside Van Hise hall on the UW-Madison campus, where they attempted to deliver a letter to Board of Regents President Amy Bogost. The letter urges Bogust to put on an upcoming regents meeting agenda employees’ request for a formal discussion process with university chancellors to address wages and working conditions.

The group was unable to get access to the floors where the Board of Regents offices are located in order to deliver the letter in person. They left copies of their letters with campus police officers, WORT radio reported. 

The UW system’s communications director did not respond Friday to a request for comment. 

UW employees lost all union rights under Act 10, the 2011 law that stripped most collective bargaining rights for public employees except for some law enforcement officers and firefighters. 

Most public employee groups retained the right to formal union representation with an annual certification process. But except for graduate student teaching assistants, for UW employees even the right to certify a union representative was wiped out, said Jon Shelton, incoming president of AFT-Wisconsin and a UW-Green Bay faculty member. 

“We have no avenue to talk about salaries and working conditions,” Shelton said.

AFT members are not seeking a formal collective bargaining relationship — something outlawed under Act 10 — but in its place, a formal structure of meetings where employees can air their concerns about their jobs, Shelton said. The AFT’s request includes a detailed proposal on what that structure would look like. 

For other public employee groups, the 2011 law limits collective bargaining to the subject of wages, and limits wage increases to the rate of inflation. To cover a wider range of workplace issues, some Wisconsin public employers and  unions have engaged in “meet and confer” relationships through which they discuss pay and working conditions more broadly. 

Act 10 permits meet and confer relationships so long as they are not collective bargaining, Shelton said. “Many tech college unions have it,” he said. “Many K-12 [school] unions have it.” 

Where meet and confer relationships are in place, “it improves everything,” Shelton said. “It improves outcomes for students. It improves the feelings of morale for workers, it improves workplace conditions and improves retention.” While not the same as collective bargaining it’s “like a conduit … for people, faculty and staff, to channel their voices.”

Shelton said chancellors at nine UW campuses have either ignored or rejected AFT groups’ requests to discuss meet and confer arrangements. 

The campaign to bring meet and confer relationships to some campuses has its roots in reductions in academic staff at UW Oshkosh and on other campuses a couple of years ago. 

“No one in our union is saying that nothing can ever be cut. We understand the reality of the situation,” Shelton said. “But chancellors are just sort of unilaterally making these decisions.” 

Without “a seat at the decision-making table, then our [campus] administrations are going to make decisions that are going to disadvantage our students,” he added.

“There’s really a feeling across the UW system that faculty, academic staff and university staff are all overworked, under-compensated and really need to have a voice,” Shelton said.

“Positions are not being filled very intentionally,” said Neil Kraus, a UW-River Falls professor and president of the AFT union on that campus, “and the UW system is basically implementing the Republicans’ higher ed agenda, which is to narrow the curricular offerings …  massively increase online education and buy as much tech as possible. Those things are contrary to the interests of our students and our communities.”

The return to the White House of President Donald Trump after the November 2024 election has also posed “pretty existential threats to public higher education,” Shelton said — such cuts to longstanding research grants that could slash university resources.

“If that happens, we all need to be working together to make sure that we’re preserving student learning outcomes and preserving our publicly important research,” Shelton said. “At a time like this, it’s never been more important that administration and faculty and staff, representing their unions, are on the same page and defending the public education system and making sure things are good for every worker.”

Nearly 200 AFT members from UW campuses across the state have written to individual regents, asking them to address their call for a meet-and-confer relationship, according to the union.

“The regents, up to this point, some of them haven’t been as willing to have conversations about this as we would like,” Shelton said.

The refusal by chancellors to engage the proposal has led him to believe there may be a broader policy directive “telling chancellors not to do this,” Shelton aid. Regents are ultimately responsible for running the UW system, he added, “and so we can most definitely ask them to pass a policy to basically obligate our chancellors to do it.” 

The heads of the DOA and DSPS both spoke with lawmakers Tuesday. Wisconsin State Office Building. Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner.

The Wisconsin Assembly Government Operations, Accountability, and Transparency (GOAT) Committee questioned leaders of government agencies about telework policies, use of work space and cybersecurity during its first public meeting Tuesday. 

The committee was formed this session to serve as the Wisconsin version of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project launched by President Donald Trump and led by billionaire Elon Musk. 

There are some similarities between the efforts. The acronyms come from internet pop culture: GOAT refers to the “greatest of all time” and DOGE comes from a 2013 meme and a later cryptocurrency. Both are purported to address potential “waste, fraud and abuse” in government. But whereas Musk and DOGE’s work has been quick and widespread, with attempts to fire thousands of federal employees and a goal of ending $1 trillion in government spending, the GOAT committee is starting off more slowly.

Committee chair Rep. Amanda Nedweski (R-Pleasant Prairie) said that Tuesday’s informational hearing was scheduled due to “increased demand from the public for transparency and efficiency in government” and to look at telework practices in state agencies. She also repeated her intent for the committee to be “very close to the public” and ensure there is transparency for how taxpayers’ money is being used.

The extent of remote work by state employees has been an ongoing point of criticism among Republican lawmakers since the COVID-19 pandemic. Nedweski and Sen. Cory Tomczyk (R-Mosinee) recently introduced a bill to require state agency employees to work in person at state agency offices starting on July 1. 

During the hearing, the committee heard from the Legislative Audit Bureau about a 2023 audit on telework. Hearing witnesses also included leaders of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), Department of Administration (DOA), Department of Safety and Professional Services (DSPS), Department of Health Services (DHS) and the Universities of Wisconsin, as well as some leaders of private businesses. 

Testifying for DPI, Deputy Superintendent Tom McCarthy said that telework policies have been helpful for allowing the agency to hire employees. DPI Superintendent Jill Underly was absent, which Rep. Shae Sortwell (R-Two Rivers) pointed out multiple times during the meeting. 

“We’re never going to compete. We’re never going to be able to punch dollar for dollar at salary for the private sector, especially in IT or high demand fields, so the flexibility that we can provide staff is the thing that continues to allow us to pull larger applicants around the state to some of those very hard to fill jobs,” McCarthy said. 

McCarthy also said the department has made changes since the audit. 

“We are constantly trying to find ways to improve the productivity of our workforce and make sure that we are serving our partners well in the field, as well as taxpayers in general, being available and being current with best practices,” McCarthy said.

One of the biggest changes, he said, was that the agency looked at the amount of time employees were working in-person versus remotely and said they have tied reductions in the amount of time working in person to a reduction in available work space. 

While Nedweski sought to keep conversation focused on telework throughout the hearing, Sortwell, who serves as vice-chair, asked about spending related to a diversity, equity and inclusion conference DPI hosted. Sortwell recently launched inquiries to county and city governments in Wisconsin about their DEI policies.

Nedweski sought to cut that conversation short, however. “We have lots of people here today, totally, and we’re going to try to stay on topic,” she said. 

Department of Administration Secretary-designee Kathy Blumenfeld agreed that allowing more remote work has helped the state fill openings more easily. She said the vacancy rate for the Division of Enterprise Technology, which is the agency’s IT department, dropped from 12% to under 6% after the start of its “Hire Anywhere in Wisconsin” program.

Blumenfeld also noted that the agency has made some changes since the audit by updating its space standards. Permanent desks are reserved for employees who typically need to be in the office three days a week, she said, while those in the office less than three days a week have access to smaller work stations. She said the state has also revised its policy for documenting work agreements. 

Nedweski questioned how the agency is managing its employees who  work remotely and how Wisconsin taxpayers can know that they are “getting maximum productivity” from state employees.

Blumenfeld turned the question back on the public. 

“Are they getting the services that they expect?” she asked. “I mean, when something goes south we usually hear about it and we investigate and look… is it a people issue? Is it a process issue? Is it a technology issue? What’s causing this?” She added, “I would say to the people of Wisconsin, if you’re not getting the services you expect, let us know.”

Rep. Mike Bare (D-Verona) asked what the consequences could be for rolling back state policies to what they were pre-pandemic. 

Blumenfeld said that the agency has worked to decentralize decision making when it comes to remote work so that people can evaluate each position and the amount of in-person versus remote work is necessary for the job. She said that eliminating remote work policies would also affect  the agency’s ability to compete for employees with private sector businesses. 

Blumenfeld noted that young employees especially have different expectations from those of  older employees.

“The way they work is so different. Of course, they expect to have flexibility in their job and they expect remote,” Blumenfeld said. “They’ve tasted it. They felt it. It’s what they know, and it is totally in our future.”

Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman told lawmakers that in his perfect world everyone would be in the office every day, but that it would be hard to “put the genie back in the bottle” at this point. 

Rothman said the UW System has to be an attractive employer and would have trouble attracting and retaining people with  a strict five-day in office work policy. He said the UW system is also looking at combining office spaces.

“The cost of losing people is often more expensive,” Rothman said.

Nedweski pushed the question of productivity. 

“Has there been an analysis performed in positions as to is a job done more productively in person or remotely or in hybrid?” she asked. “Has an analysis been performed or are we just moving into this hybrid, telework world permanently because it’s what the workforce is demanding?” 

Rothman said there isn’t a simple way to measure productivity in the university system’s work. He said employees have specific objectives that they’re required to fill and that guide evaluations. 

“We don’t measure how many widgets did we manufacture today, because that’s not what we do,” Rothman said. “We don’t have the ability to check keystrokes… I’m fine if people are sitting there thinking about something really creative and something new to do. They may not touch a keyboard for two hours. They may have been incredibly productive in that environment, so I think it comes down to an individual by individual determination… I’m proud of the work that they are doing in support of the 164,000-plus students.” 

Nedweski also brought up the capital requests from the UW System. Gov. Tony Evers announced a sweeping proposal this week that includes $1.6 billion in investments for UW System capital projects. 

“If people are going to be teleworking more and more, I have a hard time justifying investment in new buildings that house people who are mostly going to be teleworking,” she said. 

Rothman noted that the majority of the system’s capital requests were not for administration, but are rather for students and staff. “We’re not trying to build substantial edifices for our administration,” he said. “We’re focused on our students.”