Act 10 is a 2011 Wisconsin law, formally 2011 Wisconsin Act 10, that eliminated most collective bargaining rights for the state’s public employees and required them to pay substantially more toward their own pensions and health insurance. It passed during a projected $3.6 billion biennial budget shortfall and applies to teachers, state agency staff, University of Wisconsin employees, and local government workers. Police, professional firefighters, and certain deputy sheriffs were left largely untouched.
Who Act 10 Applies To
The law sorts Wisconsin’s public workforce into two groups. “General employees” face the full set of restrictions. “Public safety employees” are mostly exempt.
General employees are the vast majority of public workers in the state. The category includes anyone employed by a city, village, town, county, school district, sewerage district, transit authority, or other political subdivision, along with workers at state agencies and the University of Wisconsin System. K-12 teachers and school support staff are in this group. Act 10 also eliminated collective bargaining for UW System faculty and academic staff and brought UW research assistants under the state employment labor relations framework for the first time.1Wisconsin State Legislature. 2011 Wisconsin Act 10
The public safety exemption covers police officers, professional firefighters, and certain deputy sheriffs. It does not extend to civilian dispatchers, administrative staff at police or fire departments, or most correctional employees. If you work on a public payroll in Wisconsin and you are not in the narrow public safety group, you are a general employee for Act 10 purposes.
What Can No Longer Be Bargained
Before Act 10, Wisconsin’s public-sector unions negotiated over wages, hours, and working conditions much like private-sector unions. The law eliminated bargaining over hours and conditions of employment for all general employees, state and municipal.1Wisconsin State Legislature. 2011 Wisconsin Act 10 What remains is a narrow right to bargain over “total base wages.”
That phrase is doing a lot of work. “Total base wages” excludes overtime, premium pay, merit pay, performance bonuses, supplemental compensation, pay schedules, and automatic step increases.1Wisconsin State Legislature. 2011 Wisconsin Act 10 Health insurance plan design, vacation accrual, grievance procedures, workplace safety protocols, scheduling practices, and staffing ratios are all set unilaterally by the employer through handbooks and administrative policies.
In practice, a school district can restructure its health plan, change class sizes, or alter schedules without negotiating with its teachers’ union. The only question still on the table is whether the base pay rate goes up, and even that answer is capped.
The CPI Cap and Referendum Requirement
Any proposed increase in total base wages cannot exceed the percentage change in the Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers over the prior 12 months.1Wisconsin State Legislature. 2011 Wisconsin Act 10 When inflation is low, the cap can be tight. When the CPI falls, the cap requires a corresponding reduction.
A local government that wants to exceed the cap must adopt a resolution specifying the overage and put it to voters in a November referendum. The result applies only to the next contract period.1Wisconsin State Legislature. 2011 Wisconsin Act 10 Any above-inflation raise requires direct taxpayer approval at the ballot box.
Pension and Health Insurance Costs Shifted to Employees
Before Act 10, many Wisconsin public employers paid most or all of their employees’ pension contributions. The law shifted a significant portion of that cost onto workers. General employees must contribute to the Wisconsin Retirement System at a rate set each year through actuarial calculations. For 2026, the employee contribution rate is 7.2% of salary across all employee categories, up from 6.95% in 2025.2Wisconsin Department of Employee Trust Funds. 2026 WRS Contribution Rates Approved by ETF Board The number moves from year to year with revised actuarial assumptions and salary experience.
Health insurance costs moved the same direction. General employees must pay at least 12.6% of the average premium cost for their coverage.1Wisconsin State Legislature. 2011 Wisconsin Act 10 Before Act 10, many public employees were covering roughly 5% of their premiums. The combined pension and health deductions reduced take-home pay for most workers by several thousand dollars annually when the law first took effect.
Annual Recertification and the Ban on Dues Deduction
Act 10 made it considerably harder for unions representing general employees to continue operating. Two provisions push in the same direction.
Every year, the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission must conduct a recertification election for each bargaining unit containing general employees. The union has to receive “yes” votes from at least 51% of all eligible employees in the unit, not 51% of those who actually vote. A worker who skips the election is counted the same as a “no.” If the union falls short, the commission decertifies it, and those employees cannot form a substantially similar bargaining unit for 12 months.3Wisconsin State Legislature. Wisconsin Code 111.83(3)(b) – Annual Certification Elections
Act 10 also prohibits employers from deducting union dues from a general employee’s paycheck.1Wisconsin State Legislature. 2011 Wisconsin Act 10 Unions must collect from individual members directly, through separate billing or bank arrangements. The two provisions together led to steep membership declines across Wisconsin’s largest public-sector unions in the years after the law passed.
The 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME, which barred states from requiring non-members to pay agency fees to public-sector unions, had little added effect in Wisconsin. Act 10 had already gone further seven years earlier.4Supreme Court of the United States. Janus v State, County, and Municipal Employees
Why Public Safety Workers Were Treated Differently
Police officers, professional firefighters, and certain deputy sheriffs kept the right to bargain over wages, hours, and conditions of employment under the framework that existed before 2011.1Wisconsin State Legislature. 2011 Wisconsin Act 10 Their contracts are not subject to the CPI cap, and their employers can continue covering the full cost of pension contributions and health premiums.
Courts that reviewed the split found it survived rational basis review, the most deferential standard of constitutional scrutiny. The government’s stated interests were giving state and local employers more budgetary flexibility with the general workforce while maintaining labor peace among emergency responders.
Where Act 10 Stands in Court
Act 10 has faced repeated legal challenges, and its core provisions have so far survived. In WEAC v. Walker, the Seventh Circuit upheld the different treatment of general and public safety employees. The Wisconsin Supreme Court reached a similar conclusion in MTI v. Walker in 2014, holding that the distinction between union-represented and non-represented employees was rationally related to providing budgetary flexibility.5Wisconsin State Legislature. Court Decisions on 2011 Wisconsin Act 10
Litigation has continued into 2024 and 2025, with lower court rulings questioning portions of the law. The legal picture remains in flux as those cases move through appeals, but the statute as described above is still the operative framework for Wisconsin public employment.