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The Absence of Public Employee Unionism from US History

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The Absence of Public Employee Unionism from US History LaborHistory, Vol. 43, No. 3, 2002 EssayReviews Where Are the OrganizedPublic Employees?The Absence of Public Employee Unionismfrom U.S. History Textbooks, andWhy It Matters ROBERTSHAFFER Whenmy 16-year-old sondecided to do a National History Day projecton the 1968 march onHarrisburg bythePennsylvania StateEducation Association that helpedwin collective bargaining rights for teachersand other public employeestwo years later, I didwhat any historian woulddo. I began toleaf through my U.S.history survey textbooks,in order toprovide him with background material onthe overall picture of thechanges in labor relations andthe union movement in the1960s and1970s. This background wouldserve as preparation for themore specialized secondaryliterature he wouldneed to look at onteacher unionism,and then for theprimary sourcematerials onthe March 4th demonstrationitself. As I surveyedthese textbooks I wasat rst surprised,and soon appalled, at theabsence in virtually all survey textbooks,as well as in textbooksof the recent (post-1945) U.S.,of any mentionof the upsurge in public employee unionismin the1960s and1970s. This silenceserves all ofour students poorly, andre ects a lack ofperspective about what has beenone of the more important legacies ofthe 1960s tocontemporary life. * Numbersmake thecase for thesigni cance of the rise ofpublic employee unions,in both absoluteterms and in their increasedproportion ofunion membership asa whole. In 1955 public employee unionshad about 400,000 members in total; that gure rose 10-fold, toover 4,000,000, in the1970s. 1 Of course,this wasduring aperiod when public employment itself wasgrowing quickly, buteven so the percentage increase of unionization among government workersrose from 13% in 1960 to39% in 1976. 2 There werequick spurtsof growth during the1960s: theAmerican Federation of GovernmentEmployees (AFGE) more than doubledits membership in justtwo years, from 1967, whenit had 196,000 members,to 1969, whenit had 482,000 members. 3 The American Federation ofState, County, and Municipal Employees(AFSCME) grew from being the19th largest AFL-CIO unionin 1960 tobeing thesixth largest only adecadelater, in 1970. 4 The American Federation ofTeachers (AFT) addedonly *SeeAppendix fora list ofU.S. history surveytextbooks reviewed for this study. 1Robert Zieger, American Workers,American Unions, 3rded. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1994), 163. 2SteveBabson, The Unnished Struggle: Turning Points in American Labor,1877– Present (Lanham: Rowman and Littleeld, 1999),162. 3James Green, The Worldof the Worker:Labor in Twentieth-century America (NewYork: Hill and Wang, 1980),233– 234. 4SterlingSpero and John Capozzola, The UrbanCommunity andIts Unionized Bureaucracies: Pressure Politics in Local Government LaborRelations (NewYork: DunellenPublishing, 1973),19. ISSN0023-656X print/ ISSN1469-9702 online/ 02/030315–20 Ó 2002Taylor & Francis Ltd onbehalfof The Tamiment Institute DOI: 10.1080/0023656022000001805 316 RobertShaffer 20,000 members during the1950s, toreach 59,000 in 1960, butthen more than tripled its membership toover 200,000 during the1960s, whenit engaged in several high- prole strikes.It reached550,000 members in 1980. The National EducationAssoci- ation (NEA),which transformeditself during the1960s from aprofessional organization toa unionengaged in collective bargaining, already had 700,000 members in 1960, butgrew 50% by theend of the decade. 5 In the eldof higher education,in 1966 fewerthan adozencolleges or universities had signedcollective bargaining agreements.In 1975 over 400 institutionsof higher educationhad suchunion contracts, the great majority covering public schools.By 1974, faculty unions,led by theNEA, the AFT, andthe American Associationof University Professors,had signedagreements representing about 91,000 college and university faculty, or one-fth ofall full-time faculty members. 6 Unionmembership in theU.S. continued to rise until theearly 1970s, andpublic employee unionsaccounted for mostof this growth in the1960s and1970s. 7 The opportunity for public employee unionsto arise wasrooted in major postwar transformations in American life. Thesechanges were at thecore of a dramatic increase in overall public sectoremployment. The numberof public employeesat all levels of government,5.5 million in 1946, more than doubledto 11.6 million in 1967. While onecan easily recognize that thegrowth ofsuch federal programs asSocial Security, Medicare,and interstate highway constructioncontributed to growth in employment, by far thelargest share in this growth wasat thestate and local levels,in education, health care,welfare, sanitation, parks, andother programs. 8 LyndonJohnson’ s Great Societyprograms funneledmoney through local governments,helping facilitate therise ofthe AFSCME, in particular. 9 The baby boom,and growth ofthe numbers of high-school graduates andcollege studentsin the1950s and1960s, required far more teachersin thepublic schoolsand then in thepublic universities.Primary school enrollment soared50% between1950 and1960, from 20 million to30 million. Accordingto one account, in 1950 therewere 1 million college students,but 4 million adecadelater, and8 million in 1970, with mostof the increase in thepublic colleges anduniversities. 10 5MarjorieMurphy, BlackboardUnions: The AFTand the NEA, 1900–1980 (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press,1990), 277. 6Joseph Garbarino, Faculty Bargaining: Change andCon ict (NewYork: McGraw-Hill,1975), 4, 87; Faculty Bargaining in the Seventies ,ed. TerenceTice (Ann Arbor: Instituteof Continuing LegalEducation, 1973),243– 246; Frank Kemererand J.VictoryBaldridge, Unions on Campus (San Francisco:Jossey-Bass, 1975),1– 3; G.GregoryLozier and KennethMortimer, Anatomy ofa Collective Bargaining Election in Pennsylvania’s State-owned Colleges (UniversityPark: Centerfor the Study ofHigher Education, 1974), 33–38. For recentstudies of faculty unionism, seeGordon Arnold, The Politics ofFaculty Unionization: The Experience ofThree New England Universities (Westport: Berginand Garvey,2000) and Philo Hutcheson, AProfessional Professoriate:Unionization, Bureaucratization, andthe AAUP (Nashville: VanderbiltUniversity Press, 2000). 7Jack Barbash, “Unionsand Rights in the Space Age,”in The U.S.Department ofLabor “ History ofthe American Worker”, ed. Richard Morris(Washington: U.S. GovernmentPrinting Of ce, 1976),248– 269, at 261. 8These guresare from Zieger, American Workers,American Unions, 164,and aresimilar to those in IrvingBernstein, PromisesKept: John F.Kennedy’s New Frontier (NewYork: OxfordUniversity Press, 1991),208, though Bernsteinuses slightly differentbeginning and endingdates for his comparison. 9Freemanet al., WhoBuilt America?, vol. 2, 598. 10Paul Boyeret al., The Enduring Vision: AHistory ofthe American People, 1sted. (Lexington:D. C.Heath, 1990),1027, 1081, 1087. Faragher et al., Out of Many,825,gives different gureson collegeenrollment, but the trendis clear:2.6 million in 1950,3.2 million in 1960,and 7.5million in 1970.On the signicance Essay Reviews 317 Public employee unionsmaintained increasedmembership evenas rates in private sectorunions declined sharply after 1976. Unionmembership in manufacturing declinedfrom 27% in 1983 to18% adecadelater, with similar declinesin construction, transportation, andmining. Meanwhile,unionization rates in government remained at about 38% during this difcult decade for theU.S. labor movement,as compared to about 10% in theprivate sectoras a whole. 11 Putanother way,at thetime ofthe AFL-CIO merger in 1955, public employee unionsmade up only about 3% ofthe membership ofthe union federation. In 1991, by contrast,public employee unions comprisedover 20% ofAFL-CIO membership, approximately 2.9 million outof 14 million.12 By the1990s theNEA, which remained outsideof the AFL-CIO, had becomethe largest unionin theU.S., with about 2million members—600,000 more members than thenext largest union,the Teamsters. 13 The consequencesof this rise in public employee unionismfor theU.S. labor movementgo beyondsimple numbers,however. Much of the increase in themember- ship,and leadership, ofwomen and of African Americans in trade unionshas occurred through public employee unions.Younger, independent, and innovative leadership in unionshas oftencome in themost recently organized sectors.In this way several public employee unionsin thelast 30 years have ledthe way in challenging businessas usual in theAFL-CIO. 14 In thehistoric 1995 defeatof the “ oldguard” AFL-CIO leadership, it wasthe growing numbersand power of the AFSCME and the Service Employees International Union(SEIU), which by the1990s weretwo of only fourAFL-CIO unionswith more than amillion members each,in combination with liberal industrial unionssuch as the Autoworkers and the Machinists, that allowed theelection of John Sweeneyover LaneKirkland. 15 Thus,knowledge of the growth in public employee unionismin the1960s is essentialto understanding trends in theunion movement since that time. Footnote 10 continued ofthe growthof public institutions ofhigher education in the 1960sto facultyunionism, seeGarbarino, Faculty Bargaining, 1–4. 11Daniel Nelson, Shifting Fortunes: The Rise andDecline ofAmerican Labor,from the 1820sto the Present (Chicago: Ivan Dee,1997), 150– 151. 12Thesepercentages were derived from the gureson individual union membership and overall AFL-CIO membership provided in CourtneyGifford, Directory ofU.S. Labor Organizations, 1992–93 Edition (Washington: Bureauof National Affairs,1992), 57– 59. The guresfor public employeeunions includemainly
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