Bringing the State's Workers in: Time to Rectify an Imbalanced US Labor Historiography
2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 47; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00236560500385934
ISSN1469-9702
Autores Tópico(s)American History and Culture
ResumoAbstract This article considers the reasons why labor historians have continued to neglect the history of workers and unions in the US public sector. It argues that the most compelling explanation for historians’ failure to examine the history of public sector unions is that conducting such an examination would challenge a number of deeply rooted preconceptions regarding the history of American labor since World War II. The article goes on to suggest what we might learn if US labor historians began to probe the experience of public sector workers more fully. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Jerry Friedman for his incisive comments on an earlier draft of this essay and the participants in the 2003–4 seminar at Harvard's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History for helping me to formulate some of the thoughts presented here. Notes Notes [1] ‘Union Members in 2004,’ Bureau of Labor Statistics New Release, USDL 05-112, 27 January 2005. [2] Estes, ‘“I AM A MAN!”;’ Shaffer, ‘Where Are the Organized Public Employees?,’ 315. It should be noted that labor economists have done a much better job than labor historians in studying public sector labor. See, for example, Lewin et al., Public Sector Labor Relations; Troy, New Unionism; Freeman, ‘Unionism Comes to the Public Sector.’ [3] Shaffer pointed out that Labor History published only two articles on public employee unions and reviewed only six books on that subject in the years between 1990 and 2000. Shaffer, ‘Where Are the Organized Public Employees?,’ 315, 331. [4] Barnard, American Vanguard; Boyle, The UAW; Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement; Halpern, UAW; Lichtenstein, Most Dangerous Man in Detroit; Thompson, Whose Detroit? [5] The best survey of AFSCME's early years can be found in Kramer, Labor's Paradox. Some scholars have probed aspects of AFSCME history yet no full-length study of the union has yet been produced. See Ryan, ‘Everyone Royalty;’ McAndrew, ‘Politics of the Public Workers Union;’ Kupferberg, ‘AFSCME.’ [6] On Reuther, see Lichtenstein, Most Dangerous Man in Detroit; Barnard, Walter Reuther; Carew, Walter Reuther. Reuther was also the subject of less scholarly treatments. See Gould and Hickok, Walter Reuther; Dayton, Walter Reuther; Howe and Widick, The UAW. The only biography of Jerry Wurf remains Goulden's Jerry Wurf. [7] See Lichtenstein et al., Who Built America?, index. [8] Murphy, Blackboard Unions; Golin, Newark Teachers Strikes; Eaton, American Federation of Teachers. [9] Boyle, Organized Labor; Stebenne, Arthur J. Goldberg, 313; Dubofsky, The State and Labor; Lichtenstein, State of the Union; McCartin, Labor's Great War. [10] Slater, Public Workers; Rung, Servants of the State. [11] Freeman, Working-Class New York; Beifuss, At the River I Stand; Bellush and Bellush, Union Power; Johnston, Success While Others Fail; Maier, City Unions; Spear, ‘Lessons to Be Learned.’ [12] Thompson, Whose Detroit?; Cowie, Capital Moves; Stein, Running Steel; Green, Race on the Line. [13] Slater, Public Workers, 1. [14] Barkin, Decline of the Labor Movement, 6–7. [15] Goldfield, Decline of Organized Labor, 15–17, 188. [16] A representative work in this literature would be Filippelli and McColloch, Cold War in the Working Class. [17] African Americans played a leading role in both the UPWA and its predecessor organizations. For example Secretary-Treasurer Ewart Guinier and organizer Marie Richardson Harris built a solid organization in the Bureau of Engraving. See Hanson, ‘United Public Workers.’ [18] Private sectors unions grew by 12 percent (not as fast as the growth in the private sector workforce), while public sector union grew by 88 percent. Ross, ‘Those Newly Militant Government Workers,’ 104–5. [19] See Cyrus Vance to David E. Bell, 22 March 1961, Government Service file, Box 11, Myer Feldman Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. Vance's role in the process of drafting Executive Order 10988 has not received attention from historians. To date, most have credited Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg with shaping the order. But the evidence clearly indicates that it was the Defense Department which got the ball rolling within the administration, in large part because it feared that a more pro-union order might get the President's signature if it did not take proactive steps to pre-empt that possibility. For a view that emphasizes that the order was ‘Goldberg's initiative,’ and which does not mention the role of Vance or the Department of Defense, see Stebenne, Arthur J. Goldberg, 313. [20] Toledano, Let Our Cities Burn, 25. [21] Billings and Greenya, Power to the Public Worker, Chapter 7; Goulden, Jerry Wurf, 103. [22] Ross, ‘Those Newly Militant Government Workers,’ 107. [23] Government Employee Relations Report, 15 January 1973, B9–B11. [24] Government Employee Relations Report, 25 August 1975, A8–A9. [25] The phrase comes from Davis Prisoners of the American Dream. The ham-handedness of Davis's treatment of the political history of organized labor in the postwar era has not been widely adopted by other historians. Nonetheless, the essential view that organized labor got little to nothing from its political allies exists to varying a extent in much of the better literature on labor and politics in the postwar era. On Davis's views, see also Davis, ‘The Lesser Evil?’ [26] Slater, Public Worker, 179. [27] Hart, Collective Bargaining, 7–8. [28] For an account of how these tensions played out in New York, see Bellush and Bellush, Union Power. [29] See for example Moody, An Injury to All. [30] Lubell, Future of American Politics, 174–76. [31] Public Service Research Council, Public Sector Bargaining, 6. [32] Burpo, Police Labor Movement, 31; Kearney, Labor Relations, 207. [33] Ross, ‘Those Newly Militant Government Workers,’ 7. [34] See Tomlins, The State and the Unions, Part 3. For a similarly pessimistic interpretation of labor law, see Atleson, Values and Assumptions. [35] For a survey of public sector labor law in the early postwar period, see Slater, Public Workers, Chapter 3. [36] Murphy and Sackman, Crisis in Public Employee Relations, 71. [37] For a discussion of trends in this period, see Lewin et al., Public Sector Labor Relations. [38] Kirkland quoted in Government Employee Relations Report, 3 November 1975, A8. [39] Teachers’ strike figures from Government Union Critique, 30 July 1982, 1. [40] An influential statement of the argument regarding labor and race can be found in Korstad and Lichtenstein, ‘Opportunities Found and Lost.’ A persuasive argument concerning labor's failure to ally itself with feminism can be found in Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement. [41] Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 110. [42] On women in government employment, see Bell, ‘Unionized Women,’ 281. [43] Zieger, American Workers, 164. [44] Moody, An Injury to All, 82. [45] Johnston, Success While Others Fail, 55–86. [46] ‘The History and Structure of the United Federal Workers of America, CIO’ (typescript, [1946], in the collection of the Library of Congress), 5. [47] A clear example of a public sector union struggle that produced racial tension was the 1968 Ocean Hill—Brownville teachers strike. For the best account of this conflict, see Podair, Strike that Changed New York. [48] In this respect, the degree of success that public sector unions had in organizing minorities helps explain why African Americans were more likely than whites to be union members at the end of the twentieth century. By 2004 union density among black workers was 15.1 percent, while among whites it was only 12.2 percent. See Bureau of Labor Statistics, ‘Union Members in 2004,’ news release, 27 January 2005 (accessed 27 June 2005). [49] Foner, Give Me Liberty!, 1009–15. [50] Stanley, ‘Effect of Unions,’ 48. [51] Toledano, ‘America's Biggest Growth Industry,’ 150. [52] Government Employee Relations Report, 30 October 1978, 9. [53] On San Francisco, see Boehm and Heldman, Public Employees; on Atlanta, see Reed, Stirrings in the Jug, Chapter 4; on New York, see Freeman, Working-Class New York; Maier, City Unions; and Spear, ‘Crisis in Urban Liberalism.’ [54] On the suburban origins of the backlash, see McGirr, Suburban Warriors; Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven. Neither book considers whether labor conflict may have been entwined in the backlash phenomenon as it took shape. For a representative right-wing critique of public sector unionism which stresses its role as a force promoting statism and high levels of taxation, see Troy, New Unionism. Troy argues that the goal of public sector unionism ‘is to redistribute income from the private to the public sector of the economy, with government redistributing—socializing—income’ (104). [55] See Bureau of Labor Statistics figures: (accessed 1 July 2005). The dropoff in strike activity has not been confined to the United States. Since 1981 there has been a dramatic decline in strike action in the world's 14 most industrialized nations, excluding the United States. In 1981 a combined total of 70 million total workdays were lost to strikes in those countries. By 1996 the figure had dropped to less than 5 million. See Piazza, ‘Globalizing Quiescence.’ [56] Timothy Minchin, who has documented the use of replacement workers most carefully, has cited the influence of the PATCO strike in each of his case studies. See Minchin, ‘Broken Spirits;’ ‘Permanent Replacements;’ ‘Torn Apart;’ ‘“Labor's Empty Gun”.’ [57] See my full argument on this in McCartin, ‘“Fire the Hell out of Them”.’ [58] Major contributions to the literature on American exceptionalism make no effort to compare the experience of government workers and unions in the US with those of other nations. See, for example, Lipset, American Exceptionalism; Halpern and Morris, American Exceptionalism? Lipset's book largely reaffirms American exceptionalism, whereas the Halpern and Morris book contains essays that cast doubt on the notion that American working-class experience was exceptional. Neither volume looks at public sector workers or unions. Zolberg's argument is laid out in his essay ‘How Many Exceptionalisms?’ [59] For comparative data on union formation, strike militancy, and rights enjoyed by public sector workers, see Treu et al., Public Service Labor Relations. For a rare historical study that has made public sector workers the basis of a comparative analysis, see McGuire, ‘Disciplining the State.’ [60] James P. Hoffa quoted in Washington Post, 26 July 2005. On conflicts between AFSCME and SEIU over the organization of home care workers, see Barnes, ‘Labor's Raider's.’ Among the dissident unions, only SEIU had a membership that included more than 10 percent of public sector workers. The 1.8-million-member Teamster union claimed a public service membership of roughly 170,000. See . [61] Among the best recent unpublished works on public sector union history are: Spear, ‘Crisis in Urban Liberalism;’ Ryan, ‘Everyone Royalty;’ Green, ‘Battling the Plantation Mentality;’ Brenner, ‘Rank-and-File Rebellion.’
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