When the Wisconsin Legislature gave state employees the right to collectively bargain in 1959, they created the groups called bargaining units that would independently decide if they wanted to collectively bargain and if so, who they wanted to represent them.
When forming the bargaining units mentioned above, the Legislature said “in order to foster meaningful collective bargaining, units must be structured in such a way as to avoid excessive fragmentation whenever possible”. They created a list of groups who could collectively bargain. The group that WPEC represents is the Fiscal and Staff Services bargaining unit. The Legislature then gave the Office of Employment Relations (it was called something else back in 1959) the authority to assign individual classifications to bargaining units.
There are currently over 200 classifications represented by WPEC. A listing can be found in the most current version of our collective bargaining agreement (i.e.., contract) which is found at www.wpec.org or http://oser.state.wi.us/.