understand that the ground was shifting beneath the feet of public employees, with an increasingly vocal conservative movement declaring war on public employee unions. In fact, many conservative organizations complained that Reagan had gone too far by agreeing to the terms of the rejected PATCO contract in the first place. Drawing a line in the sand, Reagan set a deadline for the strike to end, and when the striking PATCO workers failed to meet that deadline, he fired over 11,000 air traffic controllers.
Today, many point to the PATCO strike as the root cause of the employer offensive against workers in the 1980s. This is not accurate. While PATCO greatly contributed to the union-busting atmosphere, management’s war against labor was going to happen regardless, as employers had become increasingly aggressive in the late 1970s against both private and public sector workers. The falling rate of corporate profits, pro-management labor law, and the growth of right-wing ideology all developed independent of the PATCO strike. The firing of the PATCO strikers was a dramatic indicator of the new terrain, rather than the creation of it.
Cooperation Instead of Confrontation
As the bargaining climate continued to worsen for public workers in the 1980s, many public employee unionists decided that a policy of cooperation was the best way to move forward. With most public employee unions now favoring participation in electoral politics and behind the scenes lobbying over the confrontational tactics of the previous two decades, public employee strike levels dropped dramatically. Public sector strike activity reached its peak in 1979, with 593 strikes nationwide. Those levels quickly plunged, however, dropping to a mere seven strikes in 1982.12 In sharp contrast to the hundreds of public employee strikes during the 1970s, from 1988 to 1998 there were an average of only 6.5 public employee strikes per year.13 None of this is to say that the strike completely disappeared during this period. State workers struck in Minnesota in 1981 and 2001. Transit workers continued to strike, in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, among other cities. Although at lower levels, teachers continued to strike in states such as Pennsylvania and Vermont. However, for the most part, the confrontational tactics of the 1960s and 1970s were over.
In addition to unions’ newly found belief in cooperation over confrontation, there are several other reasons for the decline of public employee strike activity in the 1980s and 1990s. First, the decline of public worker strikes tracked the overall decline of strikes in the private sector. Historically, public employee strike levels have been highest when other workers were striking as well. During the 1980s, private sector strike activity plummeted. Second, a more aggressive employer response made many unions think twice about striking, with President Ronald Reagan’s firing of PATCO workers the most well-known example of this new hardline approach. Finally, in response to the illegal strike wave of the 1960s and 1970s, laws in many states improved the collective bargaining process. As a result, as of 2011, thirty-one states provided some form of interest arbitration for public workers.14 Under interest arbitration, a neutral arbitrator makes the final decision of what is included in a contract. By providing a mechanism to settle contracts, interest arbitration reduced strike levels.
Furthermore, in response to the strike wave of the 1960s and 1970s, many states passed laws regulating bargaining by public workers. By 1999, thirty-four states had laws on the books providing for collective bargaining, while another six states authorized some form of representation.15 These laws varied widely in terms of which workers were covered, the subjects of bargaining that were permitted, and whether or not workers could strike or utilize binding arbitration. In general though, these laws helped regularize labor relations in the public sector. Whereas in the early days of collective bargaining, unions were free to bring forward matters of policy and issues of concern to the community such as classroom size, under the new framework, bargaining was often restricted to wages and other narrow working conditions. In addition, unlike the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, negotiations were often conducted behind closed doors with little membership participation. Bargaining became routine, and many unions embraced the concept of labor-management cooperation.
This seeming stability, however, masked increasing problems for public sector workers. Just as a segment of the right-wing never accepted bargaining in the private sector and worked for decades to gut the right to strike, similar opposition focused on undermining public sector bargaining. Spurred by libertarian law professor Sylvester Pestro and his anti-public employee Public Service Research Council, these anti-public employee union organizers merged with the tax revolt movement to help propel Ronald Reagan into office in 1980.16 Bashing public employee unions was very much part of their message.
This ascendant conservative movement attracted the support of powerful funders who over the course of the next two decades built up a network of right-wing foundations and think tanks. Years before he was propelled onto the national scene during the upsurge in Wisconsin, far-right billionaire David Koch was funding and building his own conservative empire. The son of one the founders of the far right-wing John Birch Society, Koch ran for vice president in 1980 on the Libertarian Party ticket. Over the next two decades, Koch would help create a web of right-wing organizations which increasingly targeted public employees.
By and large, public employee unions attempted to temper this conservative onslaught by moderating their demands and avoiding confrontation. Initially, this strategy of lying low and engaging in politics produced acceptable results, as public employee unions for the most missed the vicious anti-employer assault of the 1980s and 1990s. While the percentage of private sector workers covered by collective bargaining agreements dropped from 23.3 percent in 1977 to 7.3 percent in 2012, public employee levels remained fairly constant during the period, dropping only from 40.1 percent to 39.6 percent.18 And while most private sector unions have lost defined benefit pension plans and seen increased healthcare costs, public sector unions have largely maintained better retirement and healthcare benefits.
However, this period of seeming stability for public sector unions was, in reality, the calm before the storm. In 2003, Richard Hurd of Cornell University perceptively sounded the alarm in a series of articles about the coming crisis of public employee unionism, arguing that it would be a mistake “to conclude that public sector unions are strong, stable, and immune to the external and internal influences that have brought private sector unions to their knees.”19 In the decade since the publication of these articles, Hurd has proven to be correct and then some, as public sector unions have faced an all-out assault on multiple fronts, including attacks on their collective bargaining rights, wages and pensions.
The Future of Public Employee Militancy
The legislative attacks on public employee bargaining in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and elsewhere over the past few years have clearly demonstrated that the ideology of cooperation adopted by many public employee unions over the past thirty years does not work.
Joseph Slater, who has extensively studied the attacks on public employee unions, offers a sampling of the public employee bashing currently popular with many conservative pundits and politicians:
Thus, for example, a Wall Street Journal editorial last spring made the remarkable claim that ‘America’s most privileged class are public union workers.’ The New Republic titled an article, ‘Why Public Employees are the New Welfare Queens.’ Republican politicians began echoing these sentiments. ‘We have a new privileged class in America,’ said Indiana Governor, Mitch Daniels, who rescinded state workers’ collective bargaining power on his first day in office in 2006. ‘We used to think of government workers as underpaid public servants. Now they are better paid than the people who pay their salaries.’20
This rhetorical attack against public employee unions has been matched by a concerted legislative war on public employee bargaining, the most high-profile of which have been in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan. Despite the protests of tens of thousands of Badger State residents, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed a restrictive public employee bargaining law in 2011 eliminating bargaining rights for certain groups of public
