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1. THE STRIKE AND THE MAKING OF PUBLIC EMPLOYEE UNIONISM

Public employee unions are under relentless attack. In a remarkable shifting of blame, public employees have been targeted as the cause of the nation’s fiscal problems, rather than the Wall Street profiteers who plunged the US into 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 The City of Boston, however, refused to recognize the police union or bargain for an agreement. After the police union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, the department fired numerous officers, targeting union leaders. At the time, government employees, and particularly police, could be fired for simply belonging to a labor organization, which was treated as a conflict of interest or disloyalty. In response to the firings and the failure of the police commissioner to address their concerns, on September 9, 1919, 1,100 Boston police officers walked off the job. The mayor took a hard line in response, and fired the striking workers. Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge, later to become President of the United States, sent in almost 5,000 National Guard troops to bust the strike. (In later years, the impact of the strike would be sensationalized, with reports of looting and vandalism.) Although many unionists in Boston pushed for a general strike in support of the officers, the leaders of the conservative Boston Central Labor Union backed away from this call, as they were “not ready to undertake what would have been one of the most daring and radical acts in the history of the AFL.”¹⁴ Ultimately, the police department refused to reinstate the striking police officers.

For public employee unionists of the era, the defeat of the Boston police strike had the same chilling effect on unionism and strikes as Ronald Reagan’s firing of striking air traffic controllers in 1981. “The aftermath of the Boston strike significantly restrained the movement for public sector unions,” writes Joseph Slater. “All police locals affiliated with the AFL were soon destroyed.”¹⁵ Other public employee unions reacted by adopting no-strike clauses in their constitutions. As a consequence, the tremendous growth of public worker unions stalled, with the rate of unionization holding at barely eight percent throughout the 1920s.

In the decades that followed, the failure of the Boston police strike was used to combat public employee unionism. As Joseph Slater summarizes, “Beyond the numbers, memories of the Boston strike inhibited the growth of public sector unions for decades; it became too easy to equate any form of public sector unionism with the calamitous confrontation.”¹⁶ Even today, opponents of public employee unionism still dredge up the Boston police strike. For example, conservative columnist Cal Thomas commenced a diatribe against the Chicago Teachers Union strike in 2012 by citing Coolidge’s famous quote during the Boston police strike: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.”¹⁷

From the 1920s through the 1950s, public employee unionism and strike levels continued to languish. As one scholar noted,

Collective bargaining was not generally considered applicable to public employment until the late 1950s. The doctrine of state sovereignty, the domination of state legislatures by rural and anti-labor interests, unqualified acceptance of the prohibition against strikes by public employees, and the weakness of unions in public employment all contributed to the view that it was not a viable approach to improving the economic status of civil servants. The labor movement generally shared this view.¹⁸

Private sector unionization levels, however, skyrocketed during this time, as workers in key industries such as auto and steel forced employers to recognize their unions. Employing such tactics as mass picketing and sit-down strikes, private sector workers won major increases in real wages, employer-provided health care, and retirement plans. Public employees were for the most part left out of this upsurge, with public employee union density still stuck at 9 percent in the late 1950s. Part of the reason for this was that, until the late 1940s, “courts in all regions of the country imposed greater restrictions on unions in the public sector than on their counterparts in the private sector.”¹⁹

That’s not to say that public workers did not strike at all during this period. Notable exceptions included teacher strikes over non-payment of wages during the Great Depression. However, these were short strikes over specific grievances, and did not result in union recognition. Most public employee strikes during the 1930s were concentrated among workers at the Work Projects Administration (WPA). From the start of the WPA in August 1935 through the end of 1937, “it did not have a single strike less month. In that period of two years and one-half it had at least 571 strikes.”²⁰ WPA workers struck over a wide range of issues, including a living wage, establishing the union rate for skilled craft workers, and working conditions such as free transport to distant job locations. Strikers used a variety of tactics from picketing to takeovers of legislative meetings to sit-down strikes.²¹ Inspirational as these examples were, they paled in comparison to the dramatic upsurge of private sector workers. Public employees for the most part sat out the strike wave of the 1930s. As a result, an entire generation of public workers missed out on the benefits of unionization.

The Beginnings of the Public Employee Upsurge

In the years immediately following World War II, a significant number of public workers struck as part of a massive strike wave of private sector workers. Many of the strikers were teachers, driven by “the post-war inflation” which was “creating a desperate situation for American teachers…. The average pay for a teacher was $37 compared with $41 for a meat packer and $53 for a car worker.”²² As one study of teacher unionism noted, “during the war years, the average real income of industrial workers rose 80 percent while teachers’ real income fell 20 percent. By 1945, the pent-up frustration of teachers burst forth in a brief but notable wave of strikes.”²³ Despite opposition from their national organizations—both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association opposed strikes—“there were successful strikes over pay in many communities,” including Norwalk, Connecticut, Rankin, Pennsylvania, and Patterson, New Jersey. There were also significant strikes in St. Paul, Minnesota—with 1,160 teachers striking for over a month—and in Buffalo, New York, “where in February 1947, 2400 teachers walked out, closing eighty schools.”²⁴

Teachers were not the only group of public sector workers caught up in the excitement of the great post-World War II strike wave. In 1946, nearly 500 city workers in Rochester, New York “were fired for forming a chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).” The city workers only got their jobs back when “30,000 private-sector workers quit work to rally in support of them in downtown Rochester.”²⁵

Legislators responded aggressively to these rumblings of public employee unionism, passing a flurry of anti-strike legislation “which explicitly covered public sector unions, but…were designed chiefly to provide draconian penalties for government workers who struck.”²⁶ These laws were inspired by the burst of labor militancy in 1946, which “were a product of the era that produced the anti-union Taft Hartley Act.”²⁷ For example, New York State’s Condon-Wadlin Act, passed in response to the strike by teachers in Buffalo in 1947, required the automatic dismissal of any striker and required that any striking teacher who was rehired get no pay increases for three years and serve a five-year probationary period.²⁸

As a result of these anti-public employee measures, the postwar strike wave soon subsided, and public employee strike activity remained low during the 1950s, with public employee unions of this period favoring backroom deals over militancy. In addition, the red scares of the 1950s further dampened public employee militancy. At the same time, private sector unions were at the peak of their influence. Private sector workers struck repeatedly during the 1950s, averaging 350 strikes of over 1000 workers per year during the decade.²⁹ In 1953, private sector union density peaked, with 35 percent of workers belonging to unions. In contrast, public workers rarely struck during this time, and when they did, their strikes were “illegal, small, and short.”³⁰ In 1958, for example, there were only fifteen public employee strikes of any size in the entire nation.³¹

Lacking a strike or other mechanisms to resolve disputes, bargaining for public workers during the 1950s was little more than “collective begging.” Unions lobbied government agencies for pay increases and were often unable to produce meaningful gains for their members. As Joseph Slater writes, “Absent statutes granting institutional rights, employers—mayors, school boards, and heads of departments—issued regulation that controlled labor relations. Not surprisingly, these policies were typically quite restrictive, often prohibiting affiliation with labor or organizing at all.”³²

The Public Employee Strike Wave

While the situation for public workers looked bleak at the conclusion of the 1950s, in reality, it was the calm before the storm. In a great strike wave that would span the next two decades, public workers across the nation would force obstructionist public employers to finally recognize public employee unions. Rejecting the backroom lobbying favored by the old guard, aggressive young public employee leaders demanded real collective bargaining, backed up with the right to strike. As a result of this surge, “Public sector strike activity increased dramatically during the 1960s and 1970s, despite the fact that such strikes were illegal in most states. Furthermore, public sector work stoppages increased to record levels at a time when strike activity was decreasing in the economy as a whole.”³³

Far and away the most militant group of public workers during this period were teachers. Teacher activism would reach its high point in the late 1970s, amounting to “nearly 44 percent of all work stoppages by local government employees during the 1974-1980 period . . . the largest percentage of work stoppages in public employment.”³⁴ Following the example of teachers, sanitation workers, air traffic controllers, and social workers all embraced workplace militancy. From 1958 through 1970, the number of strikes of public workers “rose from 15 to 412 per year, workers involved from 1,720 to 333,500, and man-days of idleness as a result of strikes from 7,510 to 2,023,200.”³⁵ This explosion of strike activity spanned the breath of the country, from major northern cities to rural western towns to southern “right to work” states.

Even police and firefighters joined in the workplace uprising. To take but one example out of many, police in the small Oregon community of Klamath Falls struck for union recognition in 1973. Entering the 1970s, the police officers of Klamath Falls were among the lowest paid in Oregon, received no overtime pay, and were often forced to work off the clock writing reports. When their department refused to bargain, eighteen police officers and clerks walked off the job on June 5, 1973. As a history of the strike noted, “although police strikes in Oregon were illegal, this was not to be the crucial issue. ‘The big talk was not whether the strike was legal or not. It was a moral issue with the guys.’”³⁶ The city attempted to run the department with sergeants as both sides dug in for a long fight. The key breakthrough came when the sergeants, fed up with working twelve hour shifts during the strike, “complained they had lost their patience and would walk out if the strike was not settled soon.”³⁷ The strike was ended shortly thereafter, earning the officers a ten percent pay increase. At the same time the police of Klamath Falls were striking, Oregon legislators were voting on passage of public employee bargaining legislation. The strike “served as a prime example of the type of dispute a comprehensive bargaining law was aimed at preventing.”³⁸

Rejecting the self-imposed prohibitions that had been in place since the 1919 strike in Boston, police began to strike across the nation, including in locations not considered union strongholds such as Oklahoma City, Tucson, and Las Cruces, New Mexico.³⁹ In October 1975, nearly 600 Oklahoma City police walked off the job, frustrated by the city’s refusal to bargain. This was their third job action in eight years, which had included ticket writing slowdowns in 1967 and 1972. Fed up with years of inaction, administrator raises and poor supervisory practices, police again engaged in a ticket writing slowdown. The slowdown hit the city in the pocketbook, depriving it of revenue. An arbitrator then ruled that the police should be given large pay increases, but city officials refused to accept the ruling. (In many areas during this period, arbitrators would issue non-binding decisions which public officials often ignored if they did not agree with the ruling.) After city officials refused to abide by the decision of the arbitrator, outraged police officers began a campaign of radio silence, refusing to even acknowledge police calls. After an officer was rumored to be fired, the police began an impromptu march to city hall, with all on duty officers pulling their squad cars in front of the building. After one leader tossed his badge on the table at the city manager, “most of the department’s 583 officers…filed into the meeting room and tossed their badges on the table as officers outside the building cheered.”⁴⁰ Both sides were careful not to call the action a strike, which was settled after three days. Although the settlement included a 9 percent raise, it also included a penalty of two days for striking in addition to the three days lost pay during the strike. The city council at first refused to endorse the settlement, but threats by the police officers to initiate political recall petitions convinced enough council members to vote for the settlement and the parties were soon able to establish a good bargaining relationship.

Even firefighters struck frequently during the 1970s. In Memphis, firefighters, upset that a purported $12 million city deficit had miraculously transformed into a $1.5 million surplus, struck for three days. After returning to work following an injunction, the firefighters walked out again after rejecting the proposed settlement, this time joining police on the picket line. After the involvement of the governor and the business community, the strike was settled in a compromise after eight days.⁴¹

Not all of the public employee strikes of this era were sanctioned by union leadership. In 1979, white collar state workers in New Jersey were represented by an independent union—the State Employees Association. After the SEA negotiated an agreement which failed to keep worker pay in line with the soaring inflation rate of the times, 15,000 New Jersey State workers responded with a wildcat strike.⁴² Lined up against the striking workers was the state government, the courts, the media and their own employee association. Facing enormous pressure, the workers returned to work after three days, with no improvement in the state’s position. The energy and solidarity developed on the picket line was not wasted, however. Dissatisfied with their union’s response, the workers formed the State Workers Organizing Committee, which challenged the SEA in a state election. Affiliating with the Communication Workers of America, Committee organizers went on to win a representation election for 35,000 state workers in 1981. Building on the solidarity from the wildcat strike, the new union launched an aggressive contract campaign featuring informational picketing and grassroots mobilizing, backed up by a strike vote. With the 1979 wildcat strike fresh in management’s memories, the first CWA contract secured “an unprecedented 17 percent across-the-board pay increase over two years,” better healthcare, and greatly improved contract language.⁴³

Factors Behind the Upsurge

A variety of factors contributed to the rise of public employee unionism during the 1960s and 1970s. First, there were profound changes in society, including a massive expansion of public employment, which provided the material basis for the public worker upsurge. Labor historian Robert Shaffer writes about how “[t]he opportunity for public employee unions to arise was rooted in major postwar transformations in American life. These changes were at the core of a dramatic increase in overall public sector employment.” Over a twenty-year period from 1946 to 1967, the number of public employees rose from 5.5 million to 11.6 million.⁴⁴

This public employee upsurge was part of a larger movement for social change that took place during the 1960s, with the women’s and civil rights movements in particular aggressively asserting their rights. These movements helped infuse public employees with a hopeful attitude about change, with younger public workers, caught up in spirit of the times, bringing a culture of protest into the workplace. Labor arbitrator Arnold Zach, writing in 1972, noted that among the factors contributing to the rise of public employee militancy was “a rising civil disobedience in the nation, as demonstrated in the civil rights movement, draft resistors’ movement, anti-poverty activities and war protests, [which] convinced militant public employees that protest against ‘the establishment’ and its laws was fruitful and could be a valued vehicle for bringing about desired change.”⁴⁵ These social movements also provided natural allies for the rising public employee labor movement, a phenomenon which would be seen most clearly with the organization of sanitation workers in the South, who were able to strike and win collective bargaining agreements despite the anti-union attitudes prevalent in the region. Sanitation workers drew much of their strength from their civil rights movement allies. (As those movements waned and/or became institutionalized, sanitation strikes became less successful.)

In addition, since the private sector labor movement was far stronger than it is today, public employee unionists could point to other work groups such as unionized autoworkers or janitors who were receiving the benefits of collective bargaining. This not only fueled their demands, but made their arguments more credible to policymakers. Private sector unions also proved to be strong allies for striking public workers, with union labor councils pressuring public officials to settle disputes. Since private sector strike levels remained high during this period, public employee strikes reflected what was considered “normal” labor relations of the period.

All of these factors combined to create a favorable climate for public employee strikes during the 1960s and 1970s. Obviously, many of these conditions no longer exist. The modern private sector labor movement is on life support, barely able to sustain itself, let alone assist public employees under threat. Other social movements are similarly weak, with the great grassroots activism of the 1960s largely absent today. Despite all of this—or maybe because of all of it—the lessons of the militancy of the 1960s and 1970s are more important than ever for today’s public employee unionists.