Divided Unions: The Wagner Act, Federalism, and Organized Labor
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Divided Unions: The Wagner Act, Federalism, and Organized Labor
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Overview
A comparative history of public and private sector unions from the Wagner Act of 1935 until today
The 2011 battle in Wisconsin over public sector employees' collective bargaining rights occasioned the largest protests in the state since the Vietnam War. Protestors occupied the state capitol building for days and staged massive rallies in downtown Madison, receiving international news coverage. Despite an unprecedented effort to oppose Governor Scott Walker's bill, Act 10 was signed into law on March 11, 2011, stripping public sector employees of many of their collective bargaining rights and hobbling government unions in Wisconsin. By situating the events of 2011 within the larger history of public sector unionism, Alexis N. Walker demonstrates how the passage of Act 10 in Wisconsin was not an exceptional moment, but rather the culmination of events that began over eighty years ago with the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935.
Although explicitly about government unions, Walker's book argues that the fates of public and private sector unions are inextricably linked. She contends that the exclusion of public sector employees from the foundation of private sector labor law, the Wagner Act, firmly situated private sector law at the national level, while relegating public sector employees' efforts to gain collective bargaining rights to the state and local levels. She shows how private sector unions benefited tremendously from the national-level protections in the law while, in contrast, public sector employees' efforts progressed slowly, were limited to union-friendly states, and the collective bargaining rights that they finally did obtain were highly unequal and vulnerable to retrenchment. As a result, public and private sector unions peaked at different times, preventing a large, unified labor movement. The legacy of the Wagner Act, according to Walker, is that labor remains geographically concentrated, divided by sector, and hobbled in its efforts to represent working Americans politically in today's era of rising economic inequality.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780812296662 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| Publication date: | 12/13/2019 |
| Series: | American Governance: Politics, Policy, and Public Law |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| File size: | 960 KB |
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Chapter 1
Introduction
On February 14, 2011, Governor Scott Walker introduced his self-proclaimed "budget repair" bill in the Wisconsin state legislature that would strip most public sector employees of their collective bargaining rights. Opposition to the bill represented one of the largest, most sustained protests since the Vietnam War. For more than three weeks from February to March 2011, protestors peacefully occupied the Wisconsin State Capitol, sleeping on the hard marble floors for days on end to oppose the bill. The statehouse occupiers had traveled from across the country, and supporters nationwide called local Madison restaurants to arrange for pizza and takeout food to be delivered to those filling the capitol. Fourteen state senators camped across the border in Illinois to prevent a quorum that would allow a vote. Mass rallies were held in downtown Madison and across Wisconsin excoriating the legislation. School districts were shut down as masses of teachers called in sick and students walked out of class to attend the protests. Why did a bill dealing with the collective bargaining rights of a minority of workers in a single state galvanize Americans, liberals and conservatives alike, during those chilly weeks in February and March 2011?
Just weeks into his first term and days before introducing the bill, Governor Walker stood up at a dinner with his cabinet, held up a picture of Ronald Reagan, and said, "This may seem a little melodramatic, but 30 years ago Ronald Reagan . . . had one of the most defining moments of his political career, not just his presidency, when he fired the air traffic controllers . . . this may not have as broad of world applications, but in Wisconsin's history . . . this is our moment. This is our time to change the course of history" (Schultze 2011). Walker saw his actions through the lens of Ronald Reagan's crushing blow to organized labor. Reagan's firing of striking air traffic controllers broke the strike and the union and, for supporters, was seen as a decisive moment of presidential leadership. In the governor's mind, this would be his own crushing blow to organized labor that would recast Wisconsin politics and, with his eyes on the 2016 presidential election, further Walker's own political career.
Union leaders, union members, and their allies who opposed the bill were in agreement with Walker that the moment had significance beyond both the bill itself and Wisconsin's borders. Seven thousand protesters packed outside the Senate chamber chanted, "The whole world is watching!" as the Senate acted on the bill (NBC News 2011). But the bill's opponents interpreted the significance of the bill quite differently from the way Walker did. The battle to oppose the bill was seen as "labor's last stand" and "the death knell for Big Labor" (McAlevey 2011; Samuelson 2011). Supporters feared that organized labor, which had already become "little labor," would become "mini labor" if the bill passed (Samuelson 2011). The assault on government unions was viewed as a point of no return for organized labor in the eyes of pro-union supporters, embodying a threat to the last bastion of union power in the United States, the public sector.
On March 9, after nearly a month of protests, Republicans hastily called together a Senate-Assembly conference committee, giving the sole Democrat present, Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, only a few minutes to review the 138-page bill. The bill was then stripped of its fiscal provisions in a procedural maneuver, enabling the Senate to avoid the usual quorum that would require the absent fourteen senators to be present in order to pass the bill. Having bypassed the quorum, the Senate approved the bill with no Democrats present late that afternoon. The next morning, Republican lawmakers in the Assembly passed the legislation over the protests and screams of "Shame!" from Democrats (Spicuzza and Barbour 2011).
Barca described the maneuvers used to pass the bill as "trampling on democracy." His fellow Democratic assemblyman, Bob Jauch, called the methods "an act of legislative thuggery." Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller, across the border in Illinois watching the proceedings online with his fellow Democrats, said, "We saw the complete stripping of long-held rights before our eyes. . . . It was stunning" (Spicuzza and Barbour 2011). On March 12, an estimated 100,000-125,000 protestors surrounded the capitol to protest passage of the bill, now formally known as Act 10, after receiving Governor Walker's signature, to no avail (Stein and Marley 2013). Walker's "budget repair" bill had become law.
Act 10 dealt a crippling blow to public sector workers' collective bargaining rights and to public sector unions in Wisconsin. The legislation limited what services unions could provide their members by allowing employees to bargain only on wage increases at or below inflation while prohibiting negotiations on issues like working conditions and pensions; the Act also stipulated that any state employee who participated in a strike or other disruptive tactic like a sick-out would be fired. The law further threatened the viability of unions by requiring annual union certification elections of a majority of all workers, not just those voting in the election, and prohibiting automatic payroll deductions of union dues (Freeman and Han 2012a, 391). Certification elections and collecting union dues require significant amount of time and resources that detract from other union activities like contract negotiation and political action.
The Act has undeniably harmed public sector union viability in Wisconsin. After the Act's passage, public sector unions had to convince their membership each year that they were worth the effort of voting in the certification election, and, in turn, the union had to decide every year whether the effort of certification elections was worth the limited bargaining role now granted to them by the law. Many unions, faced with diminished options and resources, chose not to pursue recertification. As a result, public sector union density in Wisconsin dropped from 50.3 percent in 2011 to 22.7 percent in 2016. This represents a loss of over 95,000 public sector members in just five years—in a state with only approximately 350,000 union members total in 2011 (Hirsch and Macpherson 2017). Wisconsin was the first state to grant public sector employees collective bargaining rights in 1959. How was Act 10 possible in a state that had been at the forefront of government unionism for over half a century?
Although Wisconsin has been the most high-profile example of attacks on public sector employees, the state is certainly not alone. Indiana governor Mitch Daniels had ended public sector collective bargaining rights in his state six years earlier in 2005, and in 2017 Iowa passed a law that is very similar to Act 10 in Wisconsin. Other states have targeted specific parts of union organizing. For instance, on February 9, 2015, newly elected Illinois governor Bruce Rauner issued an executive order dismantling compulsory union dues for state workers. These examples are just a few of the myriad pieces of legislation concerning government employee collective bargaining rights that have made their way through statehouses across the country. For example, a total of 2,355 bills concerning public sector collective bargaining were introduced in the United States from 2011 to 2015; 36 of these bills were enacted into law (NCSL 2017). Only a fraction of these bills curtailed public sector collective bargaining, but the sheer number of bills and enacted laws illustrate the volatility of government employee collective bargaining rights. Of late, the fluctuation in collective bargaining rights has included the elimination of these rights for government workers in states like Wisconsin and Indiana.
Why have public sector unions been the target of conservative attacks? Moreover, why have these attacks been largely successful? To answer these questions and understand organized labor's current political weakness, it is important to explore the historical underpinnings of today's events. Conservative politicians have set their sights on scaling back public sector unions because they represent an increasingly larger share of the union movement. Over the last half century, organized labor has undergone a dramatic transformation. Public sector union members, less than 5 percent of labor's membership in the 1950s, outnumbered private sector union members for the first time in American history in 2010 (Jamieson 2013; Greenhouse 2010). As Figure 1 illustrates, private sector union density—the percentage of the private sector workforce that belongs to a union—reached its peak in the mid-1950s and has been steadily declining ever since. In contrast, public sector union density rose dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s and then plateaued at a relatively high rate of over 35 percent.
Thus, because public sector union members now make up around half of the labor movement, to hobble government unions today is to hobble the labor movement as a whole. Government unions have become a target because of their growing prominence in the labor movement combined with their legal vulnerability. Public sector collective bargaining rights have a separate legal foundation from those of their private sector counterparts, which has enabled these legislative attacks. Indeed, as a result of this weaker legal foundation, government unions have faced such attacks on their collective bargaining rights for decades. The source of this legal weakness and the growth in the public sector within the labor movement have deep historical roots.
To understand today's attacks and the weakness of the contemporary labor movement, we must look back to a crucial moment in the history of American labor: the exclusion of public sector employees from the foundation of private sector labor law, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, more informally known as the Wagner Act. The decision by the drafters of the Wagner Act to exclude government employees in 1934-1935 created separate legal and institutional jurisdictions within which private and public sector labor laws operate, which have had lasting consequences for organized labor's development.
The Wagner Act formally established private sector collective bargaining rights at the national level. This national floor of protection served as an organizing catalyst, enabling the private sector labor movement to grow by leaps and bounds in the years after passage. More recently, the failure to update the Wagner Act due to obstruction in the Senate has hobbled private sector labor's ability to organize and adapt to modern-day realities.
In contrast, the exclusion of public sector employees from the centerpiece of private sector American labor law, the Wagner Act, left the question of public sector collective bargaining rights unanswered at the federal level; this meant that individual states and localities were left to negotiate with public sector unions on their own. Public sector collective bargaining rights were slow to develop as government employees struggled to overcome public fears of their organizing and gain enough legislative momentum. Unable to ride on the coattails of private sector union growth at the national level thanks to the Wagner Act, public sector employees had to fight for legal recognition in every state and locality, which progressed slowly. Federalized, divided labor law consequently "artificially repressed" government union expansion as the absence of a national law for public sector employees dampened union organizing at the very time public sector employment began to grow (Slater 2004, 199).
When demand for public sector collective bargaining rights reached a critical mass in the 1960s, it was at the state and local levels, which had important ramifications for the quality and durability of government employees' collective bargaining rights. Having to pursue their collective bargaining rights in the states and localities not only delayed public sector union expansion but meant the fruits of public employees' struggles could not compare to those of their private sector counterparts. In contrast to the firm, standardized private sector collective bargaining rights situated at the national level—including over eighty years of case law reinforcing placement at the federal level—public sector collective bargaining rights remained an open question with passage of the Wagner Act in 1935. States and localities have had the freedom to address this question in a variety of ways and face little pressure to adhere to national standards and equal treatment within their individual jurisdictions. Instead, federalism welcomes and encourages variation and experimentation in the United States. Targeting their demand-making at the state and local levels meant government employees had some success after being shut out at the national level, but the rights they have obtained have been limited to a set number of union-friendly states—reinforcing the geographic concentration of labor—and have been erratic and subject to revision. Public sector collective bargaining rights have proven inherently more unequal and vulnerable to retrenchment as a result of the federalized nature of U.S. labor law.
Further, in the absence of a national legal provision for public sector workers, government employees' collective bargaining rights continue to be contested because they lack the national-level floor of protection that private sector employees possess thanks to the Wagner Act and decades of federal case law. At the time, the decision to exclude public sector employees from the Wagner Act was little discussed or noticed, but the exclusion put public and private sector unions on separate developmental trajectories with lasting ramifications for the strength of organized labor and the vulnerability of government unions.
American Labor's Comparative Weakness: An Enduring Puzzle
Understanding why the American labor movement is relatively weak has been an enduring puzzle; it began in 1906 when Werner Sombart famously asked, "Why is there no socialism in the United States?" The question has been expanded to ask why the United States never developed a labor party, and why total union density, even at its peak, remains much lower in the United States than in other advanced industrialized countries. To this day, we struggle to understand organized labor's weakness in the United States when viewed against labor movements in other advanced industrialized nations. This research offers a crucial missing component to help figure out this lasting puzzle: the public sector. In general, studies of organized labor pay scant attention to the public sector. There is little research that explores the history of public sector unions, can shed light on the recent public sector attacks, or, on a very basic level, actually talks about the labor movement as comprised of two sectors, private and public. Understanding the history and trajectory of public sector unionism can help explain labor's comparative weakness.
When we look at both the public and private sector labor movements, the traditional explanations for the private sector's comparative weakness cannot also account for the public sector. First, proponents of economic explanations for union decline see decreasing unionization in the United States as a result of deindustrialization, changing occupations, and reduced employee demand (e.g., Farber and Western 2002; Sloane and Witney 2007, 3). However, public sector union density trends do not fit these explanations: the public sector grew in a brief, sharp bout that does not track the overall steady growth of government employment, which began much earlier and continued beyond the 1960s-1970s. Further, public sector union density spread unevenly across states despite growing public sector employment across the country and remains geographically concentrated. Thus, public sector union growth does not seem to track easily with overall trends in the expansion of government employment.
Second, proponents of cultural explanations argue that the United States is exceptional in its individual, anti-statist, anti-union attitudes that have always been antithetical to union organizing (Lipset 1987, 1995, 1996; Lipset and Marks 2000; Lipset and Meltz 2004). For cultural scholars, the real question is: Why was there a spike in private sector union density during the Great Depression and World War II given the United States' cultural antipathy to unions? Their response is that this period is the great exception to Americans' traditional anti-union sentiment, and thus the decline in private sector union density since that time is just union density returning to the American cultural mean (Lipset and Meltz 2004, 174). However, the cultural explanation cannot account for the dramatic growth in the public sector. This increase occurred after the exceptional period of the 1930s and 1940s, and public sector union density has remained relatively steady. Government union expansion occurred without the unique events of war or depression to explain the rise, and it has yet to revert to an American cultural mean.
When we consider the public sector alongside the private sector, our traditional explanations for the comparative weakness of the American labor movement come up short. How can we thus explain the overall weakness of the U.S. labor movement compared to that of other nations, including both the steady decline of the private sector and the brief rise and then plateauing of public sector union density? Because economic and cultural explanations cannot answer this question for both private and public sector union development, looking at political institutions, particularly American federalism, is enlightening.
When comparing the United States to similarly advanced industrialized nations, American labor law is distinct in two relevant respects. First, while these countries all have national legislation that addresses private sector labor relations, none have left their original laws largely untouched since their inception. For example, substantial amendments to private sector labor law were passed in Canada in 1995, Finland in 2001, France in 1971 and 1982, Germany in 1972, 1976, and 2004, and the United Kingdom in 1999 (Casale and Tenkorang 2008). In contrast, the foundation of American private sector labor relations, the Wagner Act (1935) and Taft-Hartley Act (1947), has remained largely intact since the passage of these two acts. The second important way in which the United States differs from other nations is with respect to the rights of public sector workers. In other industrialized nations, with very few exceptions, public sector workers possess the right to collectively bargain and "a single, national collective bargaining law prevails for all public workers" (Kearney and Mareschal 2014, 49; Casale and Tenkorang 2008; Public Services International 1985). As Chris Brewster et al. note, "In most industrialized countries, public sector employment is synonymous with unionized employment; union membership . . . has been just as much a feature of public service as employment security" (2001, 136). In contrast, there is no national-level law governing public sector workers in the United States, and various courts have held that public sector employees have no constitutional right to bargain collectively (Kearney and Mareschal 2014, 51).
Most advanced industrialized countries have seen more robust public sector union density rates compared to those in the private sector over the last half century. U.S. union density rates, however, reveal the delayed growth of the public sector compared to the private sector, as well as the very sharp rise of public sector union density and then plateauing at a relatively lower rate than in other advanced industrialized countries (Visser 2012). Whereas the rate of public sector workers' union density peaked at nearly three-fourths of all workers or more in other advanced industrialized societies, in the United States the rate has never exceeded 40 percent (Visser 2012). Across countries, economic pressures have led to decreasing private sector union density and, in general, the public sector has been more protected from these challenges. However, economic explanations cannot account for the distinct features of U.S. public sector union development. A variety of forces—economic, political, and social—shape and constrain labor unions in most advanced industrial countries, but to understand the distinct features of labor's dual trajectories in the United States requires an institutional explanation attuned to the divided nature of American labor law.
Canada is a particularly useful comparison for grasping the distinctiveness of U.S. labor law because it also has a federalized system with much of collective bargaining law set at the provincial level. However, while provinces play an important role in labor law just like the states do in the United States, since the 1960s, public sector workers in Canada have been guaranteed collective bargaining rights across the provinces and in the federal service (Farrell 2008). In Canada, public sector union density is nearly double that of the United States, and we do not see the same brief rise and then plateauing of government union density that we do in the United States. Instead, after Canada extended collective bargaining rights to government employees, public sector union density rose and kept on growing; nearly three-fourths of the sector is currently unionized (Visser 2012). The lack of a basic floor of protection and the distinct development of the public sector labor movement that followed set the United States apart, even from other federalized systems like Canada. Thus, two aspects of American labor law—the lack of private sector labor law reform and the absence of national collective bargaining rights for public sector workers—distinguish the United States from other nations. It is these institutional arrangements, more than economic or cultural forces, that have been fundamental in shaping labor's development in the United States and help explain labor's comparative weakness.
Is the Public Sector Part of the Weak Labor Movement?
It is important to pause for a moment and consider a counterclaim: some might argue that public sector unions are tangential to understanding America's weak labor movement because government unions are actually quite dominant and powerful. For instance, Terry Moe argues that teachers unions are at "the heart" of education problems in the United States as these unions, acting as special interests, have "reigned supreme," dominating education politics and collective bargaining to steer school districts in the direction of their interests rather than those of the children they are supposed to serve (2011, 6-7). Moe's portrayal overstates the dominance and power of teachers unions, and this critique can be expanded to the broader public sector union movement.
Moe portrays the power of teachers unions within school districts and education politics as in "equilibrium"; their steady membership levels and dominance have solidified over the last thirty years (2011, 48). When we examine this equilibrium in detail, however, it stands on less solid ground. First, the timing of this stable system is important for understanding labor's current weakness. Moe rightly notes that the equilibrium has only been in place for the last thirty years or so. As this book makes clear, the delayed emergence of public sector unions, including those of teachers, is consequential. Government union growth was artificially repressed, and its delayed growth during the peak of private sector union ascendance was a key missed opportunity. Thus, whatever gains have been made in the last thirty years came only after a decisive missed opportunity for the labor movement as a whole to have both the private and public sector union movements at the peak of their power.
Second, Moe's claims about the dominance of teachers unions overstate the size and scope of these unions. Moe contends that across the states, the majority of teachers are members of unions. He reports that the lowest density of union members is 35 percent in Mississippi, that only five states have membership under 50 percent, and that in half the states over 80 percent of teachers are unionized (2011, 54-55). When we look at the Current Population Survey (CPS) union membership data, however, the percentage of union members among teachers is much lower. Over the same period Moe examines, the CPS data count 52 percent of elementary, middle school, and secondary school teachers in a union (Hirsch and Macpherson 2017). These revised numbers reflect the public sector union movement more broadly, which is more robust than the private sector union movement but by no means as omnipresent as Moe suggests. Although it is true that public sector union density has remained relatively steady since the 1970s, union density in the government sector stands at just over a third of the public sector workforce. This is a far cry from the high levels of public sector union membership in other advanced industrialized societies, which remain at over 50 percent in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany, and over 70 percent in Canada, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden (Visser 2012).
Finally, Moe's concept of equilibrium implies consistency and stability rather than change in government unionism. However, public sector labor law is neither consistent nor stable. Moe acknowledges that there is tremendous variation in collective bargaining rights for teachers across the states (2011, 56-59). When we look at all types of government employment, the variation in collective bargaining rights is even more extreme. As this book will illustrate, the reason for this variation (divided labor law) and the continued presence of variable law have limited public sector union expansion and continue to create unequal protections for government employees. Moreover, public sector collective bargaining rights remain an open question and open to contestation. For instance, since 2011, sixty-nine bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the country to eliminate automatic dues checkoff, an important tool that allows public sector unions to collect dues from the paychecks of their members (NCSL 2017). Only a small fraction of these bills were successful, but they illustrate the continued volatility surrounding government unions. The level and durability of these rights have been subject to expansion and retrenchment that challenge the idea of equilibrium.
Government unions, including teachers unions, have had success and gained ground in union-friendly areas where statutes protect their collective bargaining rights. But these unions stand on shifting sands because their collective bargaining rights lack a national floor of protection. Set at the state level, government employee collective bargaining rights are open to attack. As a consequence of the most recent assaults (2009-2016), public sector union density declined from just over 37 percent to just over 34 percent (Hirsch and Macpherson 2017). This represents a decline of nearly eight hundred thousand union members in a labor movement of around fifteen million union members, a decline of just over 5 percent. Thus, when it comes to total membership levels and legal protections, the public sector union movement is not necessarily as stable as we might first assume. As a result of divided labor law, the power government unions have gained in the last thirty years came late, was geographically limited, was unequal to that of their private sector counterparts, and was subject to attack and retrenchment.
Labor Law and Federalism
The federalized nature of American labor law has had important consequences for the development of organized labor in the United States. In particular, the exclusion of public sector employees from the Wagner Act created a durable divide between public and private sector labor law. Private sector labor law was placed firmly at the national level with a growing body of case law to reinforce this position. In contrast, public sector collective bargaining was an open question. Barring public sector employees from the cornerstone of private sector labor law delayed public sector union expansion as government employees struggled to gain legal recognition at the state and local levels—sites where the fruits of their struggle would never compare to those of their private sector counterparts.
Federalism has played a crucial role in constraining and shaping the development of organized labor in the United States. There is a tendency to assume that federal arrangements that empower states and localities are either positive, enabling innovation at the local level (Skocpol 1992; Freeman and Rogers 2007), or negative, enabling bastions of prejudice to be formalized into law (Mettler 1998). As the following analysis will demonstrate, both assessments of federalism are accurate when looking at organized labor. However, previous research has underemphasized a central feature of American federalism that is clearly illustrated by the distinct paths of public and private sector labor in the United States: federalism's results are inconsistent not just because states and localities have been laboratories for both liberal and conservative causes but also because laws made at the state level lack the protections and egalitarianism of those set at the national level.
Rights and privileges granted at the state and local levels are not only unequal but also inherently more tenuous compared to national-level rights because: (a) at any time, a state or locality has abundant examples of policy alternatives in action; (b) groups engaged in political conflicts that have become intractable at the national level can find more success capturing politics at lower levels of government; (c) national-level rights become reinforcing as case law over time creates path-dependent pressures to maintain existing law; (d) federalism as a governing structure welcomes and even encourages variation and innovation at the local level; and (e) most fundamentally, states and localities lack the expectations of national standards and equality—in other words, a floor of protection—that have been central to rights protections at the national level. A floor of protection is a crucial foundation for union growth. Thus, dividing public and private sector labor law not only set labor on two different paths but also made them inherently unequal: public sector labor law has had more room for innovation, but the rights and standards established have been more vulnerable to outright retrenchment of collective bargaining rights. The gains they have been able to achieve at the state and local levels have been mixed, unequal, and tenuous in comparison to the Wagner Act's unswerving commitment to all private sector workers. In order to understand the development of organized labor, a seemingly private organization, over the last half century, we must be attentive to the ways government policy has patterned labor relations. Labor's enduring divide began with an ostensibly minor decision within one clause of the Wagner Act that has had far-reaching ramifications.
Economic Inequality: Labor's Continued Relevance and Importance
Tracing organized labor's development over the last half century can seem distant and removed from modern-day politics. But exploring how federalized labor law has shaped the size, composition, organizational cohesion, and, ultimately, success of organized labor is of crucial importance because organized labor has a unique role in American politics. Terry Moe, writing about teachers unions, argues that "union leaders are special interest advocates" and their unions are "special interest organizations" (2011, 21). While labor unions undoubtedly focus on their members' and their organizations' interests, it is a mistake to classify unions as purely self-interested. Labor is not simply one among many interest groups in the United States. Despite declining union density, there are over 14 million union members in the United States (Hirsch and Macpherson 2017). Union density may have been cut more than in half since the peak in 1953, but the number of union members has declined by less than 3.5 million from the 1953 level (Jamieson 2013). Today's 14 million members and their labor unions represent a highly active, organizationally sophisticated group working on behalf of not only their members but also the larger cause of working America.
Labor's unique position in American politics is quantifiable. American labor unions continue to act mutually as a fundamental financial and an organizational arm of the Democratic Party. They are consistently among the top contributors to federal elections and spenders of independent expenditures through PACs, and this money is overwhelmingly directed to Democratic candidates (Francia 2010, 294). This leads Dorian Warren to conclude that "measured by both members and money, the labor movement is the most powerful and resourceful political constituency on the political left in American politics" (2010, 848). Labor's power lies largely in their get out the vote (GOTV) efforts during elections. During the 2008 presidential election, the AFL-CIO's GOTV efforts "included knocking on 10 million doors, distributing 27 million flyers at worksites, sending 57 million political mailers, and making 70 million phone calls to encourage union voters to go to the polls." Likewise, Change to Win, a coalition of labor unions, "dedicated 1,500 organizers to their member-to-member voter canvass, made 20 million phone calls, sent 10 million pieces of direct mail, and enlisted the help of 50,000 volunteers on Election Day" (Orr and Francia 2012). Unions continue to field an impressive ground game in American elections.
Labor's influence in American politics is most evident in the grassroots mobilization of their membership; union members compose a disproportionate share of the voting population. Peter Francia estimates that "union households accounted for more than one of every five voters in the 2004, 2006, and 2008 elections" (2012, 4). Broken down by region, "three of every ten voters in the Northeast came from union households in both the 2004 and 2008 elections" (4). In the Midwest, 25-30 percent of the electorate in the 2004, 2006, and 2008 elections were union members. In the West, more than 20 percent of the electorate in the 2004 and 2008 elections were union households. Few other organizations can claim the membership size, political influence, grassroots mobilization, and ideological commitment of organized labor.
Organized labor is a unique force of singular importance on the American left in U.S. politics. Thus the vulnerability of organized labor is of concern because of the central role the labor movement plays in American politics and, further, because of the growth in economic inequality and insecurity in the United States. The United States "now possesses a small class of very rich Americans who are much richer than other Americans, than the affluent of other nations, and than American elites in historical perspective" while at the very same time the majority of Americans are working more hours but experiencing greater income volatility and lack the economic security they had in the mid-twentieth century (Hacker, Mettler, and Soss 2007, 7). These economic trends are neither natural nor inevitable, and organized labor's declining density has "abetted rising inequality" (Hacker and Pierson 2010, 57). Organized labor boosts wages and benefits and, more significantly, has "had a much broader and less appreciated effect on the distribution of American economic rewards" by offering "an organizational counterweight to the power of those at the top" (57). Thus, with the decline of union density, "middle- and working-class Americans lost a powerful, vigorous champion on pocketbook issues" (143). The labor movement has served as a key force in American politics, helping elect candidates and lobby on behalf of policies to assist working Americans, while simultaneously mobilizing and engaging a broad swath of voters. But labor's important role in American politics is under threat by declining union density. Public sector unions are the last bulwark of union power, one of the final counterweights to redress rising economic inequality and insecurity in the United States. Why, given that organized labor is the best-positioned group to lobby on behalf of working Americans, particularly to reduce rising income inequality, are unions in decline, their political and economic power waning?
Understanding why public sector unions are vulnerable to retrenchment of their collective bargaining rights and, more broadly, why the labor movement is comparatively weak is of crucial importance. For this reason, this book is focused on studying private and public sector unions over the last century—we cannot understand organized labor today without tracing both sectors' historical development. The most recent attacks on public sector unions, the organizational divides between public and private sector unions, and the changing composition of union membership all have their roots in policy decisions made over eighty years ago.
Overview of the Book
The rest of the book follows chronologically the path of public and private sector union development, illustrating how a seemingly minor exclusion in the Wagner Act has set public and private sector unions on separate development paths that continue to resonate today. In doing so, the links between past decisions and today's labor movement as well as the powerful role of federalism in shaping organized labor will become clear. Chapter 2 details the exclusion of public sector employees from the 1935 Wagner Act, setting up the critical moment that is the turning point for public and private sector unions. Chapter 3 discusses the peak of private sector union membership, the 1940s and 1950s, and how public sector unions missed this key moment. This chapter demonstrates how public sector unionism was artificially repressed and reflects on what the labor movement could have achieved with a vibrant public sector union movement growing in tandem with the private sector. Chapter 4 describes events in 1961 that were a watershed moment for the emergence of public sector collective bargaining laws in the 1960s. The chapter further discusses the unique form of these laws—piecemeal and set at the state level—and the consequences of this federal arrangement. Chapter 5 explores the beginning of organized labor's decline in the 1970s and how the separate development paths of public and private sector unions led to conflict rather than cooperation in facing these challenges. Specifically, public sector unions came under attack during the fiscal crises and tax revolts of this period. Rather than support them, private sector union members were sometimes part of the backlash against government unions. Chapter 6 provides an overview of organized labor from the 1980s onward as a movement on the defensive, one that was just beginning to unify public and private sector unions with mixed results because they had missed the optimal time period for cooperation and success—the mid-twentieth century. Chapter 7 examines the wave of legislation that attacked public sector collective bargaining rights across the country in 2011 and situates the book's broader argument within the events that occurred in Wisconsin in 2011, illustrating how the course of labor's development has led to today's weak labor movement and rendered public sector unions vulnerable and under attack. Chapter 8 brings together the historical story of earlier chapters to assess the consequences of labor's dual trajectories, linking the historical overview to larger conclusions about federalism and labor's current political weakness. The chapter concludes by offering an outlook for the future of organized labor, the dangers of a weak labor movement, and specific policy suggestions, namely a unified, national labor law.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. The Wagner Act: A Critical Exclusion
Chapter 3. After Wagner (1936-1960): Life Without Collective Bargaining Rights
Chapter 4. 1961: The Public Sector's Watershed Moment
Chapter 5. The 1970s: Labor Out of Alignment
Chapter 6. The Late 1970s to the 2010s: Labor on the Decline
Chapter 7. The 2010s: The Modern Assault Against Public Sector Unions
Chapter 8. Conclusion: The Consequences of Labor's Enduring Divide
Appendix: Interview Method Description
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments