Labor unions generally
bypassed government employees because they were controlled mostly by the
patronage system used by the political parties before the arrival of civil
service. Post Office workers did form unions. The National Association of
Letter Carriers started in 1889
and grew quickly. By the mid-1960s it had 175,000 members in 6,400 local
branches.
Several competing
organizations of postal clerks emerged starting in the 1890s. Merger
discussions dragged on for years, until finally the NFPOC, UNMAPOC and others
merged in 1961 as the United Federation of Postal Clerks. Another round of
mergers in 1971 produced the American Postal Workers Union (APWU). In 2012 the APWU had 330,000 members. The various postal unions did not engage
in strikes.
Historian Joseph
Slater, says, "Unfortunately for public sector unions, the most searing
and enduring image of their history in the first half of the twentieth century
was the Boston police strike. The strike was routinely cited by courts and
officials through the end of the1940s." Governor Calvin
Coolidge broke the strike
and the legislature took control of the police away from city officials.
The police strike
chilled union interest in the public sector in the 1920s. The major exception
was the emergence of unions of public school teachers in the largest cities;
they formed the American Federation of
Teachers (AFT),
affiliated with the AFL. In suburbs and small cities, the National Education
Association (NEA) became
active, but it insisted it was not a labor union but a professional organization.
In the mid 1930s
efforts were made to unionize WPA workers, but were opposed by President
Franklin D. Roosevelt. Moe points out that Roosevelt, "an ardent
supporter of collective bargaining in the private sector, was opposed to it in
the public sector."Roosevelt in 1937 told the nation what
the position of his government was: "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 to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee
organizations.
Change came in the
1950s. In 1958 New York mayor Robert Wagner, Jr. issued an executive order, called "the little Wagner
Act," giving city employees certain bargaining rights, and gave their
unions with exclusive representation (that is, the unions alone were legally
authorized to speak for all city workers, regardless of whether or not some
workers were members.) Management complained but the unions had power in city
politics.
By the 1960s and 1970s
public-sector unions expanded rapidly to cover teachers, clerks, firemen,
police, prison guards and others. In 1962, President John Kennedy issued Executive Order 10988, upgrading the status of unions of federal workers.
After 1960 public
sector unions grew rapidly and secured good wages and high pensions for their
members. While manufacturing and farming steadily declined, state- and
local-government employment quadrupled from 4 million workers in 1950 to 12
million in 1976 and 16.6 million in 2009.
In 2009 the U.S.
membership of public sector unions surpassed membership of private sector
unions for the first time, at 7.9m and 7.4m respectively.
In 2011 states faced a
growing fiscal crisis and the Republicans had made major gains in the 2010
elections.
Public sector unions
came under heavy attack especially in Wisconsin, as well as Indiana, New Jersey and Ohio from
conservative Republican legislatures. 2012 update.Conservative state legislatures tried to
drastically reduce the abilities of unions to collectively bargain.
Conservatives argued that public unions were too powerful since they helped
elect their bosses, and that overly generous pension systems were too heavy a
drain on state budgets.
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