Christopher Lane’s employment prospects were bleak. In 2015, the 45-year-old former felon lost a Milwaukee city government job when he was arrested on a charge that later was dropped. With a 20-year prison term for armed robbery on his record, Lane found his opportunities limited to temp work and side jobs. Then a chance encounter rekindled his hope.
Wisconsin heads to the polls Tuesday as a state divided. It’s a swing state that’s gone blue in every election since 1988, but the government is under full Republican control. Governor Scott Walker ran a flash-in-the-pan presidential campaign, but only after surviving a brutal recall fight. The state also borders two metropolitan areas — Minneapolis-St. Paul and Chicago — so economically powerful they’re distorting Wisconsin’s key indicators.
Segregation. The word conjures images of the Deep South, a Jim Crow past of snarling police dogs and whites-only toilets. In fact, it is a national problem that has long outlasted the era of openly racist law. It persists, five decades after the U.S. government passed the anti-discrimination Fair Housing Act. It persists under the country’s first black president. It persists in a place barely farther south than Toronto.
Two weeks after voting to strike and two days after Thanksgiving, members of Auto Workers (UAW) Local 833 are staffing picket lines round the clock near the Kohler plant in the Wisconsin village that bears its name. It’s 35 degrees outside and sunny—in fact, almost balmy compared to what it will be when the Wisconsin winter sets in. While hopeful that the strike won’t last that long, UAW members are nonetheless prepared to tough it out.