Wisconsin Defenders United (WIDU) is a wall-to-wall union representing the employees of the Wisconsin State Public Defender.
Our mission is to zealously represent clients, protect constitutional rights, and advocate for an effective and fair criminal justice system. Our commitment is to treat our clients with dignity and compassion.
Why Unionize?
Our interests will often align with SPD administration, but as the people working in trial and appellate offices every day, we know the urgency with which our issues need to be addressed. As long as the agency works for us, we will work with them to solve urgent issues like caseload, support staff compensation and training, and indigency standards. Even when interests align, the agency itself can’t always vigorously pursue core issues due to political and bureaucratic factors. Changing how our system works is never an easy task, but together we advocate for an effective and fair system of indigent defense.
What can we do Under Act 10?
Act 10 made it essentially impossible to use “collective bargaining” to accomplish meaningful change, but these parts of Act 10 were recently declared unconstitutional by a Dane County circuit court. Even if this decision is eventually reversed and Act 10 survives, we retain some of our most powerful union tactics:
Concerted Activity
We retain our First Amendment rights. Concerted activity is when two or more coworkers come together to talk about and/or advocate for changes in the workplace. An employer cannot discipline or coercively question employees about this protected concerted activity. As a union, we can do almost unlimited activities, including:
- openly talking about wages, benefits, and working conditions
- circulating a petition demanding better hours
- participating in a concerted refusal to work in unsafe conditions (but strikes are prohibited)
- joining with co-workers to talk directly to the employer, to a government agency (like the legislature), or to the media about problems in the workplace.
Advocating for Changes in Law
The unique thing about many of our issues (like caseload or criminal justice reform) is that they are controlled directly by the legislature, a government body we have the right to petition, pressure, and lobby.
As individual SPD staff, we have little power to change the law, and may even have limited rights due to limits on political advocacy. But as a union, we represent a powerful interest group of uniquely situated and constitutionally necessary legal practitioners.
Meet and Confer
Some of our issues require direct negotiations with our employer. Collective bargaining forces the employer to enter negotiations, though it does not require the employer to agree to anything substantively. Through traditional meet and confer, we can still make demands of our employer for better wages, hours, or working conditions. The difference is they aren’t forced by law to come to the table.
That’s not really much of a difference, though: Whether it’s through collective bargaining or traditional meet and confer, we can only ever get what we want through our negotiations if we have the solidarity and leverage to pressure them into meeting our substantive demands.
Wisconsin Defenders United 