Gov. Tony Evers’ appointees on the UW Board of Regents stripped pay raises from more than 5,200 state workers of color because the Regents didn’t want to shift 43 DEI positions to focus on student and academic success.
Yet Evers says he supports their destructive act, and a host of legislative Democrats are gloating about the vote.
Even though Republicans in the Legislature weren’t trying to eliminate the DEI positions – they just wanted to shift some of them to help all students – the nine Regents voted down a compromise plan to fund the pay raises for 34,000 middle and working-class state workers.
In so doing, the Regents shafted thousands of people of color employees just so they could prevent 43 DEI positions from being expanded to help all students, not just students of color.
UW faculty are already making 8.4% less than their peers. However, the staff members aren’t just faculty. They include campus cops, librarians, IT workers, food service workers, janitors, instructional academic staff, and more. Republicans in the Legislature had offered to grant their pay raises in the compromise plan rejected by the Regents.
It goes without saying that the Regents’ refusal to accept the $800 million in funding from the state Legislature in the compromise plan will also have a negative impact on all students, including many students of color.
The compromise plan would have improved accessibility issues in a UW-Whitewater building, built a new engineering building at UW-Madison, and funded other building projects. It would have frozen DEI positions and shifted the 43, not eliminated the positions. It would have guaranteed admission to the UW for top-performing Wisconsin students, who are sometimes being turned away as the UW turns to out-of-state and out-of-country students who bring in more tuition dollars.
The UW’s own chart also shows that the number of racially diverse UW workers was already steadily climbing in 2006, well before “DEI” became a buzzword, and it started to drop in 2019, around the time DEI also took off as a trend.
We were inspired to look up the numbers by comments made during the meeting by Hector Colon, a Regent appointed by Evers who voted with eight others to pass the compromise plan. The CEO of Lutheran Social Services of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan, Colon said the pay raises would affect “the livelihoods of employees and their families, including those from underrepresented groups.”
Colon said the funding for workforce development and a new engineering building would help produce “individuals from diverse backgrounds in health care, engineering, and technology.”
Voting to kill the pay raises and funding were: Angela Adams, Amy Blumenfelt Bogost, Evan Brenkus, Edmund Manydeeds III, John W. Miller, Joan Prince, Jennifer Staton, Dana Wachs, and Karen Walsh. The Regents, all appointed by Evers, include trial lawyers, students, former DEI execs, a former Democratic politician, and a wealthy animal welfare donor. Some are major Tony Evers and Democratic political donors.
The UW’s own data shows that the Regents just stripped pay raises from:
1,032 black employees.
2,216 Asian employees.
1,407 Hispanic employees.
429 employees of more than one race.
131 American Indian employees.
Obviously, the pay raises also affected thousands of Caucasian employees. We are not saying that matters less; however, the employee of color numbers are revealing because Democrats and the Regents are positioning as if the vote helped people of color.
Read the full round-up of what the plan would have done here.
