[Educationforall] FW: A Brief History of Opposition to Public-Sector Unionism

Sat Jun 18 02:59:54 UTC 2011



 > Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:20:43 -0800
> To: 
> From: flonidier at ucsd.edu
> Subject: A Brief History of Opposition to Public-Sector Unionism
> 
> A Brief History of Opposition to Public-Sector Unionism
> 
> By Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman
> 
> Steve Fraser is a historian, editor at large of New Labor
> Forum, and is working on a book about The Age of
> Acquiescence. Joshua B. Freeman teaches history at the
> City University of New York and is completing a history of
> the United States since World War II for the Penguin
> History of the United States. This article will appear in
> the Fall 2011 issue of New Labor Forum and is being
> published here with the permission of the journal.
> 
> 6-08-11
> 
> http://hnn.us/articles/139820.html
> 
> There is nothing new about opposition to public-sector
> unionism. It has been a feature of American life for over
> one 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:
> 
> 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 forbad
> 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 a
> 1965 strike when social workers demanded and won improved
> benefits for their clients, the city government
> specifically forbad bargaining over the level of services
> city agencies delivered, diminishing the possibilities for
> alliances between service providers and service users.
> 
> Such arrangements lessened concern over public-sector
> unionism. When in 1970 postal workers engaged in the
> largest public employee strike in U.S. history, Richard
> Nixon called out the National Guard but also allowed
> Secretary of Labor George Schultz to engage in collective
> bargaining to end the walkout. Reflecting the new
> consensus on public-sector unionism (at least outside of
> the South), and the still formidable power of the labor
> movement, Congress endorsed most of the agreement Schultz
> and the unions worked out and allowed future bargaining,
> but legislators also denied postal workers the right to
> strike or have a union shop.
> 
> The next wave of opposition to public-sector unionism,
> just a few years later, saw new arguments deployed. In
> the mid-1970s, a deep recession left many states and
> cities in fiscal difficulty, with New York City capturing
> national attention as it hovered on the edge of
> bankruptcy. (Cleveland actually did default on its debt.)
> But even at the height of the fiscal crisis, political
> conservatives, like Secretary of Treasury William Simon,
> and bankers, like First National City Bank's Walter
> Wriston, who fiercely opposed municipal unions, by and
> large did not call for a withdrawal of their bargaining
> rights or question their basic legitimacy. Rather, they
> opposed what those unions had concretely achieved through
> bargaining and militant action. Their core argument was
> that public-sector unions had won wages and benefits
> beyond what government entities could afford.
> Accordingly, they demanded that the New York City
> government wrest wage and benefits concessions from the
> unions, which it did, but without threatening their very
> existence.
> 
> For some fiscal crisis-era opponents of the public-sector
> unions, the argument was not simply about budgets. Simon
> and many other conservatives detested what they saw as the
> growth of an extravagant social welfare state, exemplified
> by New York City. They targeted what in their view were
> excessivemunicipal employee pay rates and benefits as part
> of the broad problem of an overly-generous social wage.
> For conservative critics of government unionism, high
> municipal pay rates and pensions were of a piece with free
> tuition at the City University of New York, cheap mass
> transit, and rent control, all of which, except for the
> last, they managed to chip away. Many private employers
> wanted to weaken public-sector unions, too, or at least
> roll back their contracts, because the benefits (though
> not the pay) their companies offered paled in comparison.
> They did not want an ample benchmark of employee benefits
> set by the state. The fight over public-sector unionism
> was thus part of a broader class struggle, an attack on
> the working class by ruling elites in the face of global
> economic stagnation.
> 
> In New York, municipal unions made preserving collective
> bargaining a central goal. Their ability to do so--they
> actually strengthened their institutional rights when they
> got the state legislature to agree to the agency shop
> (requiring workers who decline to join the union
> representing them to a pay a fee in lieu of dues)--was a
> measure of their power, but also of the diminished
> importance of the sovereignty argument questioning the
> very legitimacy of public-sector unionism. The most high
> profile attack on public-employee unionists since the
> Boston police strike, Ronald Reagan's firing of the PATCO
> strikers in 1981, had more impact in the private sector,
> emboldening employers to break strikes and attack unions,
> than in the public sector, where unions continued to grow.
> 
> Which brings us to the third, current wave of opposition
> to public-sector unionism. What we are seeing now is the
> recapitulation and revival of all the old arguments
> against public-sector unionism, and then some new ones.
> Budgetary problems have been the occasion for reopening
> the question of public-sector unionism, and the
> justification for seeking to lower pay, benefits, and
> bargaining rights. Some harsh anti-union officials, like
> New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, have been pretty much
> willing to stop at reducing the cost of publicly-employed
> labor. But, as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker
> demonstrated, even when unionists have addressed budgetary
> concerns anti-unionism has continued, suggesting that the
> recession--perhaps together with the drastic decline in the
> power and reputation of the labor movement generally--has
> been an opportunity for, as much as a cause of, the
> revived assault.
> 
> In Wisconsin and elsewhere, the sovereignty argument has
> reemerged in several forms. It is often recast as an
> efficiency issue; government leaders need flexibility to
> provide the best and most cost-efficient services as
> possible. Particularly in regard to teachers unions,
> critics have argued that seniority systems and tenure
> impede the workings of meritocracy, which they claim makes
> the private sector more efficient than government. And
> the sovereignty cum democracy argument has now been
> revived as an effort to take on unions as a special
> interest that has hijacked the people's government for its
> own behalf. Some of the proposals for revising state
> public employee bargaining laws specifically ban
> bargaining over public policy issues.
> 
> But other arguments and motivations have emerged, too,
> some unspoken. Part of what we are seeing is a partisan
> strategy to defund the Democratic party, which has
> received massive amounts of money from the union movement
> in recent years, especially from public-sector unions
> (which nationally now represent a majority of union
> members). Thus the new push to deny public-sector unions
> bargaining rights is a largely Republican phenomenon. In
> Massachusetts, though, Democrats led an effort to deny
> municipal workers the right to bargain over health care
> benefits, infuriating their union backers.
> 
> Finally, there is one more basis for the current push
> against public-sector unions, and that is that they are
> seen as representatives of the state itself, which is now
> cast in almost completely negative terms. Government
> worker power and pay, so the argument goes, should be
> chopped down to size because government should be chopped
> down to size. Government is bad because it impedes
> liberty and sucks resources from its citizenry. This is
> almost the reverse of the old sovereignty argument. The
> problem with government employee unions is not that they
> undermine the power of the state but that they are part of
> it, symbolically and practically. Unions hamper the
> disassembly of the state: lay-offs, agency closures,
> budget cuts, privatization, and the elimination of welfare
> benefits. Therefore, unions have to go.
> 
> So today we face layer upon layer of anti-public sector
> union arguments. It is a tough challenge. But, of
> course, the amazing mobilizations that occurred in
> response to anti-union attacks in Wisconsin, Indiana,
> Ohio, and elsewhere make it clear that there is another
> side to this story. Americans, by and large, do not hate
> school teachers, policemen, or the highway crew. Some may
> think government is too big and their taxes are too
> high--though it is not clear that most do--but they do not
> share the broad anti-statism that informs much of the
> current attack on public-sector unions. Some low-paid
> workers no doubt resent paying taxes to finance government
> worker benefits like pensions and health insurance that
> they themselves do not receive. But today's attack on
> public-sector unionism is not a populist revolt but a
> movement from the top down, led and financed by some of
> the wealthiest people and corporations in the country.
> The solidarity displayed in Madison, which extended beyond
> the public-sector unions to the entire union movement and
> to students, activists, and common citizens, suggests
> that-- although the public sector unions and their allies
> confront both a fiscal crisis and a thick layering of
> arguments against them--there are good reasons for hope.
> 
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