The TAA Shows the Love & Sparks An Uprising: Valentine’s Day 5 Years Ago

When Scott Walker was elected governor in the fall of 2010, union workers and other progressive activists knew trouble lay ahead. Beyond cuts to pension and health care benefits for public employees, we weren’t sure what else was in store. Whatever was coming, we knew it wouldn’t be good.

So in January of 2011, the Teaching Assistant Association (TAA) at UW-Madison began planning a pre-emptive Valentine’s day protest. They got students to make Valentines for the governor, telling him that they loved the UW and asking him not to “break our hearts” with cuts to their University. Valentine’s day fell on a Monday that year; the preceding Friday afternoon Governor Walker released his by now infamous “budget repair bill.”

The Monday protest now took on a new urgency. Instead of the few hundred students they expected, a thousand activists turned out to march and chant down State street to the capitol and directly to the office of the governor. The late long-time AFSCME leader Marty Beil says in our film:

They had been planning this for a long time. I gotta give those folks credit. I was at the capitol on the State street side. I saw those folks coming up State street; I mean, I was
amazed. The whole [Uprising] rose on delivering Valentines to the governor.

The TAA and other students had sparked an historic protest. In the weeks ahead, graduate students from UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee (the GAA), together with undergraduate and high school students played key roles in occupying the state capitol and sustaining the protests. Our film tells the story of the Uprising primarily from the POV of TAA activists. Today we heart the TAA, the GAA, and all the young people who worked so hard to prevent the passage of union-busting legislation.

See video of the Valentine’s protest, shot by TAA activist Shahin Izadi, below. Look for more of Izadi’s work in our upcoming film!