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"A Wagner Act for Public Employees": Labor's Deferred Dream and the Rise of Conservatism, 1970–1976
Joseph A. McCartin
| The explosive rise of public sector unions in the United States in the 1960s and the early 1970s resembled in many ways the breakthrough of industrial unionism in the 1930s. The unionization of teachers, police officers, fire fighters, secretaries, sanitation workers, and other government employees was every bit as sudden and unexpected as the depression-era industrial union upsurge had been. Membership in public sector unions grew tenfold between 1955 and 1975, topping four million by the early 1970s. Moreover, newly organized government workers behaved just as militantly as did auto and steel workers a generation earlier. In 1958 there were a mere 15 public sector strikes recorded in the United States; in 1975 the number hit 478.1 It is little wonder then that so many observers compared public sector unionism to the rise decades before of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Describing a scene reminiscent of a famous history of the 1930s by Irving Bernstein, the journalist Irwin Ross suggested in 1968 that the upsurge in government workers' activism had created a "turbulent state" by the late 1960s. Ralph J. Flynn, a lobbyist for the fastest growing public sector union, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), also used a depression-era benchmark. Surveying AFSCME's prospects in 1974 he concluded that "today is 1934 in the public sector." And, when a Pennsylvania state official tried to understand the unionization of state workers, he also drew on history: "We went through this in the '30s in the private sector," he explained. "Now we are going through it in the public."2 |
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While similarities between the CIO and public sector unions were apparent to contemporary observers, it is the differences between these two waves of union organization that loom larger now, a generation later. One crucial difference between the heyday of 1930s industrial unionism and the public sector union upsurge has become clear: unlike the CIO, the public sector unions were unable to revive the rest of the labor movement. Rather, the rise of public sector unions in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the accelerating decline of private sector unions. By the end of the twentieth century, overall U.S. union membership had dipped below 15 percent of all non-agricultural workers, and, although government workers made up 40 percent of labor's total membership, public sector unions had lost their forward momentum. This article argues that the failure of the public sector unions to ignite a broad and enduring labor movement revival owes in part to another heretofore unexamined difference between the rise of the CIO and the emergence of the government workers' unions. The labor agitation of the 1930s produced the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, better known as the Wagner Act, the passage of which opened the way for the CIO. By contrast, the public sector labor agitation of the 1960s and 1970s never achieved a national law granting all government workers the right to organize and bargain collectively. Labor's inability to win what organizers called "a Wagner Act for public employees" in the 1970s was a profound failure that historians have so far ignored. Explaining labor's failure helps illuminate important connections between U.S. labor and political history.3 |
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