the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.1 Thus, when Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels asserted that “We have a new privileged class in America,” in 2010, he was speaking not of corporate executives, but of public workers.2 Public workers are currently facing assaults on multiple fronts, including legislative attacks on their collective bargaining rights, bipartisan demands to gut hard won job protections and retirement benefits, and threats to privatize public services. In this hostile environment, understanding the incredible history of public employee militancy is a matter of survival for today’s public sector unions.
The public employee strike wave of the 1960s and early 1970s provides historical evidence for the necessity of reviving the traditional, production-halting strike. In my previous book, Reviving the Strike, I argued that the contemporary labor movement needed to focus on redeveloping an effective strike. Reviving the Strike focused primarily on private sector unionism, using relatively few examples from the rich history of public employee unionism. This book aims to correct that imbalance, while also using the history of public employee unions as a jumping-off point to continue the larger discussion of how to regain union power. For a new generation of public employee unionists facing unprecedented attacks on their bargaining rights, learning this history is essential.
Prior to attending law school, I was the president of Local 1164 of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Even as an involved public employee trade union leader, I knew very little about the birth of the public employee union movement. While there were plenty of books on the struggles of private sector workers in the 1930s, not many materials covered the equally inspiring struggle of public workers in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, the official history of our union stressed the role of politicians in passing laws permitting collective bargaining, ignoring the story of the tremendous grassroots upsurge that was actually responsible for the rise of public employee unions. As Joseph McCartin, one of the few historians to extensively write about public employee strikes, points out, “The explosive rise of public sector unions in the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s resembled in many ways the breakthrough of industrial unionism in the 1930s. … (N)ewly organized government workers behaved just as militantly as did auto and steel workers a generation earlier.”3 Today, as public employee unions face pressure on multiple fronts, the traditional methods of gaining influence—including lobbying and electing friendly politicians—have become less effective. That’s why learning about the militant burst of collective action during the 1960s and 1970s is so important.
Finally, the story of the public employee upsurge of the 1960s and 1970s deserves to be told in its own right. Unfortunately, this history is currently mostly unwritten. As one professor complained, “I was at first surprised, and soon appalled, at the absence in virtually all survey textbooks, as well as in textbooks of the recent (post-1945) U.S., of any mention of the upsurge in public employee unionism in the 1960s and 1970s.”4 While much has been written about the other great protest movements of the era—the African American liberation struggle, the women’s and anti-war movements—this inspiring bit of labor history has been largely neglected. Yet as Joseph McCartin explains, we should treat these public employee struggles as an important part of this period of protest:
While the antiwar protests of 1970 are better remembered, the militancy of government workers was not less evident. New Jersey alone saw twenty-five public sector strikes—up from only one in 1962. During the first three months of 1970, U.S. public workers struck government agencies at a rate of one every thirty-six hours. Over a ten-week period, strikes erupted in twenty-four cities and twenty-eight schools systems.5
Public employees of the 1960s and 1970s faced many of the same issues that their counterparts do today. How to win bargaining rights in the face of repressive laws? How to build unionization in situations where formal recognition or majority support are not available or feasible? Should unions even have bargaining rights and the right to strike? How can unions win public support in the face of employer attempts to isolate them?
To many private sector workers, this list of challenges will sound familiar. Many of the topics addressed in this book—the relationship between labor law and strike activity, how to cope with injunctions, the right to strike—will be of interest to public and private sector workers. After all, there are not two different labor movements in this country—a public and a private—but only one, whose fates are inextricably woven together.
A Brief History of Public Sector Strikes
Public workers in the United States have a long history of strike activity, even though striking was illegal for public employees in every jurisdiction in the United States until the late 1960s. According to the first comprehensive survey of public employee strikes, One Thousand Strikes of Government Employees, public workers struck 1,116 times from the mid-1800s through 1940 (571 of these strikes were against the depression-era Works Project Administration). While this is a mere fraction when compared to the approximately 300,000 private sector strikes in US history, this strike activity nevertheless demonstrates a longstanding desire among public workers to win a better life for themselves and their families through unionization.
One of the earliest public sector strikes occurred in 1835, when workers at the Navy Yard at Washington, D.C. “struck for a change in work hours and a general redress of grievances.”6 In all likelihood, those workers did not think of themselves as public employees on strike, but rather aggrieved workers looking to shorten the length of their workday to tolerable levels. According to labor historian Joseph Slater, “Distinctions between the public and private sectors were…more blurred in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth…Organized public employees were typically members of the predominantly private sector unions, such as skilled tradesman working in naval yards.”7
Postal workers in the 1860s were the first group to attempt to form public employee-specific unions. However, their efforts were slowed when the postal service banned union membership in the 1890s, and President Teddy Roosevelt subsequently put in place a gag order limiting federal workers from lobbying for union membership. After years of agitation by the labor movement, Congress overturned Roosevelt’s order with the Lloyd-La Follette Act of 1912, which allowed federal workers to join unions. The Lloyd-La Follette Act, however, failed to provide a mechanism for collective bargaining, and as a result, unionism in the federal sector languished for decades.8
It was not until the early 1900s that public workers “began organizing more extensively as government employees.”9 Because of these efforts, public employee unionization levels rose dramatically during this period, from less than 2 percent in 1905 to 3.5 percent in 1910, to 7.2 percent by 1921.10 Much of this growth came during the great private sector union upsurge after World War I.
One of the most-discussed public worker strikes in US history occurred during this period—the 1919 Boston police strike. Like the 1981 air traffic controllers strike, the Boston police strike shaped public employee unionism for a generation. As a matter of fact, the issues at stake in the Boston police strike are still in play today. Writes Joseph Slater, “More broadly, the debate over the Boston Police Union turned on a central issue in American labor history: the extent to which government employees could be part of organized labor.”11 In the years preceding the strike, police around the country had begun to organize themselves into unions, submitting dozens of applications for charters to the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Worried about the strike activity of public workers, and ambivalent about accepting police officers as members given their traditional role in busting strikes, the AFL initially rejected the police applications. However, the 1919 AFL convention determined that “since police in various cities had organized and requested affiliation, the AFL would ‘go on record as favoring’ the organization of police unions and grant them charters.”12
The complaints of the Boston police were “typical of all workers: low wages, long hours, unhealthy conditions and despotic supervisors.”13
