By Collin Roth

One year ago this week, Wisconsin politics was turned on its head as Governor Scott Walker issued a Budget Repair Bill that curtailed collective bargaining rights for public employees. We all know the story of what happened next. Weeks of protests, fake sick notes for teachers, Democrats fleeing to Illinois, demonstrators storming the Capitol, and the eventual passage of the bill in mid-March 2011.

One year later, property taxes are plummeting and Wisconsin balanced it’s budget without massive layoffs, budget gimmicks, or tax hikes.

Nevertheless, Big Labor planned a number of events to mark the anniversary of Governor Walker “dropping the bomb.” Among the co-sponsors for the “Week of Action” are groups representing the “Occupy” protests as well as two different Socialist organizations.

One of the first such events was a rally in Madison at the Capitol with speakers like Rep. Peter Barca and Mahlon Mitchell. The Wisconsin State Journal reported that a whopping 500 demonstrators turned out at the Capitol, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of protesters from a year ago.

And the Wisconsin State Journal had to reach out to Cornell University professor Ileen Devault for this gem of propaganda:

Ileen DeVault, a professor of labor history at Cornell University, agreed. DeVault said the protests changed not only state and national politics, but “I think it has reinvigorated the labor movement as well.”

Of course it has been reported recently that union membership in the United States and in Wisconsin is dropping rapidly. According to Wisconsin Reporter, union membership has dropped by 16,000 in Wisconsin alone in the last year causing WEAC to shed 40% of their administrative staff.

Across the United States, Wisconsin Reporter states:

While labor unions gained members in 19 states last year, union membership nationally dropped from 11.9 percent of the employed population in 2010 to 11.8 percent in 2011, continuing a decades-long trend.

Union members also tended to be older than nonunion members, according to the BLS data. Union membership was 15.7 percent among workers 55 to 64, but 4.4 percent for those 16 to 24.

The BLS data highlights a potential problem for unions, whose political might depends largely on their ability to mobilize their membership in support of specific candidates or causes, such as Wisconsin’s recall battles of 2011 and 2012.

That hardly sounds like a “reinvigorated” movement at all. In fact, it looks to be a movement in it’s last desperate death throes with the most radical core fighting for their lives to preserve gold-plated pensions and expensive entitlements that are bankrupting governments across the country.