| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Teachers United: The Rise of New York State United Teachers. By Dennis Gaffney. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. x, 273 pp. $25.00, ISBN 978-0-7914-7191-3.)
Although union growth in the public sector has outpaced that in the private sector for some forty years, labor history is only beginning to catch up with this trend. Thus, a book devoted to the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) and Albert Shanker, the New York teacher unionist who would later head the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), is most welcome. Dennis Gaffney's own enthusiasm for his subject drives both this book's strengths and its weaknesses. His personal interviews provide a wealth of detail but almost exclusively from the AFT's perspective.	1
The book begins with a participant's view of an illegal teachers' strike in 1960. The strike inspired activists, including Shanker, to form the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). A uft strike in 1962 won collective bargaining rights. Militancy increased through the 1960s, even by affiliates of the National Education Association (NEA), which school administrators had traditionally controlled. The UFT struck again in 1967 (with a "mass resignation"), defying the Taylor Act immediately after its passage. The union won a 20 percent pay increase but was fined $150,000, and Shanker was jailed. In 1968 the Ocean Hill–Brownsville dispute pitted union concerns regarding transfers against black leaders' desire for local control. The union prevailed, but the strike had a bitter legacy.	. . .

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