On Monday, five of the biggest unions in Wisconsin — teachers, state workers, service workers, Teamsters — asked the state Supreme Court to reinstate a ruling that Act 10 is unconstitutional.

Act 10 is the 2011 Wisconsin law that stripped collective bargaining rights from most public employees. Fifteen years later, it is still in court.

That's a useful reminder of something worth saying plainly: taking away a worker's right to bargain is not a one-news-cycle event. It's a thing that shapes paychecks for a generation, and the people who did it usually get promoted.

Here is a look at Republicans in Congress with the worst records on workers — including the man who ran Act 10 through the Wisconsin Senate.

Scott Fitzgerald wrote the playbook

Scott Fitzgerald was Wisconsin's Senate Majority Leader when Act 10 passed. His brother Jeff was Assembly Speaker. Between them, the Fitzgerald brothers controlled both chambers of the legislature that sent the bill to Scott Walker's desk.

It is still the most consequential thing he has ever done.

And the reason Act 10 is still in court traces to which workers the law let off the hook. It exempted certain public safety employees — including the State Patrol. Three days before the bill was introduced, the Walker administration had named Stephen Fitzgerald — Scott's father — superintendent of that same State Patrol.

The Wisconsin State Journal's editorial board called the appointment out at the time under the headline "Fitzgerald pick to head State Patrol smacks of favoritism." We laid out the full timeline here.

The dissenting appeals judge in this case made the point sharper: the unions that kept their bargaining rights under Act 10 had backed Walker's election months earlier. Your rights depended on which side you'd been on.

Glenn Grothman called the protesters "slobs"

When tens of thousands of Wisconsinites filled the Capitol to protest Act 10, then-state senator Glenn Grothman dismissed them as "a bunch of slobs taking up the building" who were "mostly college kids having fun."

That was not a one-off mood. It's a worldview, and he's kept at it in Congress.

He asked the Trump administration to fire 200,000 federal workers, explaining that "a lot of these people are not working very hard at all". And he wrote a bill making it easier to pay workers with disabilities a median of $3.46 an hour — stripping out 2014 protections that keep teenagers with disabilities from being funneled straight into subminimum-wage jobs.

Pete Stauber wrote a union bill, then voted twice to kill it

This one is in a category of its own, because Pete Stauber didn't just vote wrong. He wrote the bill.

In September 2025 he co-authored the Faster Labor Contracts Act with a New Jersey Democrat. It addresses a real problem: workers vote to unionize, and the employer simply runs out the clock instead of bargaining. Stauber's own release said it takes an average of 458 days to reach a first contract.

He sold it on his biography: "As a former police office who organized my union, I've seen firsthand how unfair and frustrating this process can be." The Teamsters' general president praised him. Nearly 20 national unions endorsed it.

Then, on June 9, 2026, the bill needed procedural votes to actually reach the floor.

He voted no. Twice. On his own bill.

There is a way to tell whether a politician wants a bill to pass, and it isn't the press release at the Teamsters hall.

Byron Donalds: no water, no shade, no break

OSHA proposed the first federal rule ever written to protect workers from extreme heat. When the temperature passes 80 degrees, employers would have to provide rest breaks, shade, and clean drinking water.

That's the whole rule. Water, shade, and a break.

Byron Donalds — running to be Florida's next governor, in a state where people roof houses and pick crops in July — is one of 60 Republicans co-sponsoring a bill to block it, and to bar OSHA from ever issuing anything "substantially similar."

Rich McCormick wants you fired for using the Fifth Amendment

Rich McCormick revived a bill that would bar people from federal employment if they decline to answer certain questions from members of Congress, and let lawmakers refer them to the Justice Department for prosecution.

His pitch: "If you don't want to answer questions about what you did wrong, we should be able to fire you."

The Fifth Amendment is not a loophole. The Supreme Court settled in 1968 that a public employee cannot be fired simply for invoking it. McCormick's bill would put roughly two million federal workers to a choice between their constitutional rights and their jobs.

Robert Aderholt deleted the job training

Robert Aderholt chairs the House subcommittee that writes the spending bill for Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education — the panel deciding what goes to worker training and to the agencies that enforce wage laws.

In the bill his subcommittee advanced in June 2026, the job training programs aren't trimmed. They're zeroed out. He then announced $22 million for his own district.

He described the bill as one that "restores accountability."

Tom Tiffany takes the anti-union lobby's money

Tom Tiffany's donor list includes Associated Builders and Contractors, the anti-union construction lobby — an organization whose central purpose is keeping job sites non-union.

He also promoted DOGE while it brought office closures and funding cuts to Wisconsin, threatening the livelihoods of 18,000 Wisconsin federal workers.

This isn't seven bad apples

The tell isn't any one of these records. It's what happened when the whole conference had to vote.

Two executive orders stripped collective bargaining from 84.4% of the unionized federal workforce. A bipartisan bill to restore it passed the House 231-195 — every Democrat in favor, and 195 Republicans against. The Senate has sat on it for eight months.

Meanwhile the administration has been subpoenaing the financial records of labor unions and putting a teachers' local on a criminal conspiracy chart shown to a grand jury.

Fifteen years after Act 10, Wisconsin's public workers are still in court trying to get back what was taken. That is how long this fight lasts once you lose it — which is exactly why the people who take it away count on you forgetting who they were.

They're on the ballot in November.