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  • In the Rearview MirrorA Brief History of Opposition to Public Sector Unionism
  • Steve Fraser (bio) and Joshua B. Freeman (bio)

There is nothing new about opposition to public sector unionism. It has been a feature of American life for over a hundred years. But in some ways, the current wave of anti-unionism is a departure. Three different eras of opposition to public sector unionism, including the current one, have been distinguished by distinct core arguments against collective bargaining for public employees.

From the early 1900s through the 1960s, opposition to public sector unionism largely rested on the idea that it undercut the sovereignty of government. Unions of government employees were unusual during this period, though non-union associations of government workers—which engaged in lobbying, advocacy, and fraternal activities—were fairly common. When government workers tried to engage in private sector-type unionism, they ran into fierce opposition. The 1919 Boston police strike—which occurred in the middle of the post-World War I “red scare” and an extraordinary year-long series of militant strikes in virtually every industry—showed how far public employers would go to block public sector militancy and the political gains to be made in doing so. The Boston police commissioner did not object when police officers joined a local, independent association. But when they affiliated their group with the AFL, in effect claiming the same rights and status as private sector workers, he suspended nineteen officers, precipitating a walkout. Governor Calvin Coolidge, in the name of defending “the sovereignty of Massachusetts,” fired all the strikers, brought in state troops to patrol the city, and recruited a new police force from demobilized soldiers. He rode his strike-breaking into the 1920 Republican vice-presidential nomination and ultimately to the White House.

Many liberals shared Coolidge’s belief that government employees should not be allowed to unionize, or at least not engage in private sector-style unionism. In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a letter to the head of a federal employees group, proclaimed that: [End Page 93]

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service...The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or bind the employer...The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives.

This is the essence of the sovereignty argument against public sector unionism—that collective bargaining undercuts the inherent power of the state as a sovereign representative of the people, and therefore is anti-democratic.

To this day, a few states, clustered in the South, completely ban collective bargaining by state and local government workers, while others limit it in various ways, often resting on the same state sovereignty argument Coolidge and Roosevelt made many decades ago. But over time, in much of the country, sovereignty objections to public sector unionism diminished. The vast expansion of the labor movement in the mid-twentieth century made everyone, including political authorities, more accustomed to the central presence of unions in American life.

Starting in the late 1950s, a set of ideas and laws emerged which created in the public sector a variation of unionism that granted workers different, and usually reduced, rights compared to private employees. In most of the country, when public sector workers won the right to unionize, they did so under rules and systems designed, in part, to address the sovereignty issue. In 1959, Wisconsin—with its long history of progressive labor legislation and a recent increase in Democratic power—passed the first state law granting the right to public sector collective bargaining after a campaign by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The law exempted public safety workers—the Boston police strike cast a long shadow—and forbid government employees from striking. In New York City, which pioneered municipal unionism, public employee strikes were illegal, too, though they nonetheless occurred. The federal government, which allowed collective bargaining beginning in 1962, likewise banned strikes. Some government employers also forbid collective bargaining over public policy, again addressing the sovereignty issue. In New York City, for example, after...

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