| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joseph E. Slater. Public Workers: Government Employee Unions, the Law, and the State, 1900–1962. Ithaca, N.Y.: IRL Press. 2004. Pp. viii, 260. $39.95.
Although the iconic representation of the union worker has continued to be the industrial factory worker, forty-three percent of union members in America today are public sector workers. Their workplaces are school cafeterias, hospitals, state offices, nursing homes, and day care centers. While union density has declined in the U.S. private sector over the last two decades, public sector union density has held steady. Clearly, it is time to rethink what the American labor movement has been. Moreover, since most discussions of public sector unionism start with the 1960s and 1970s, Joseph E. Slater's book offers a welcome and much needed opportunity to think about the union movement in conjunction with the expansion of the modern state over the entire twentieth century. The book reveals a labor movement that long sought to include public workers—even while remaining ambivalent about tactics like striking. It was the opponents of unionization who perpetually argued the public sector was different and thereby long denied its employees rights won by other workers.	1
Since the 1910s, Slater shows us, public sector workers have organized and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) granted them union charters. Through this story, he offers a refreshing look at the AFL, unburdened by Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) mythology that so often portrayed the CIO as carrying the progressive mantle of history forward and the AFL as short-sighted and ossified. Here we glimpse an AFL that opened it doors, albeit cautiously, to teachers, police, janitors and "janitresses."	. . .

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