Public Sector Unions

PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS. During the 1960s and 1970s government unions gained collective-bargaining rights for a majority of city, state, and federal workers. This remarkable turnaround in public-sector unionism was based in part on Left-influenced precursor unions of the 1930s. Since the 1970s public sector union membership has grown and offsets some of the decline in private sector membership. By 2019 nearly one-half of all US labor union members were in the public sector, and about one-third of public sector workers belonged to a union, five times the membership rate in the private sector. Public sector unions became some of the largest US unions, including the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

The origin of public sector unions lies in the Great Depression when, with the assistance of organizers from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), many with ties to the Communist Party, government workers joined unions in unprecedented numbers. The largest was the State, County, and Municipal Workers of America (SCMWA; not to be confused with its American Federation of Labor (AFL) rival, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME). Headed by Abram Flaxer, SCMWA was strongest among New York City welfare workers, hospital workers, and laborers. Elsewhere Communist Party-influenced unions signed up other disfranchised groups, including Blacks in the Panama Canal Zone, part-time mail deliverers (in the Postal Workers of America), temporary teachers (in the Teachers Union), and New Deal federal workers (in the United Federal Workers of America). SCMWA and the United Federal Workers combined in 1946 to form the United Public Workers (UPW), claiming more than 100,000 members.

Yet, unlike steel, auto, and rubber-worker unions, none of the CIO public-sector unions gained collective-bargaining rights. Only the Transit Workers Union (TWU) of New York City, organized on the then privately-owned transit system, later signed contracts for public employees after the bus and subway lines were purchased by the city. Communists and other Left sympathizers, who were instrumental in forming the union, were excluded from union leadership as part of the 1948 recognition agreement between TWU president Michael Quill and New York City mayor William O’Dwyer.

In a few isolated cases, strong CIO organizing drives forced city managements to recognize AFL unions as preferable alternatives. In Philadelphia, a 1939 strike was ended by calling in an AFSCME local not involved in the strike to negotiate its conclusion. Thereafter, AFSCME was the sole representative for most Philadelphia employees. In New York City, when a 1941 TWU-financed SCMWA organizing drive succeeded in signing up 25 percent of the sanitation department, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia ignored calls for a representation election. Instead he pointed out SCMWA’s Communist ties and recognized an AFSCME local specifically created for the purpose. Following a similar pattern, Cincinnati officials granted exclusive bargaining rights to an AFSCME district council in 1960 to preempt a potentially powerful United Mine Worker organizing drive.

Otherwise, public-sector unions generally, and the UPW in particular, collapsed during the early 1950s. One reason was new state legislation forcing public unions to disavow the right to strike. In doing so, the UPW found it difficult to differentiate its approach from less militant AFL rivals.

Anticommunism finally destroyed the UPW. Coordinated efforts by government officials and CIO leaders caused thousands of accused Communists to lose their jobs. In 1950 the UPW was expelled from the CIO. And in 1951 Flaxer was sentenced to prison for refusing to turn over membership lists to the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (the verdict was overturned seven years later by the Supreme Court). By 1952 the UPW was out of business.

During the 1950s UPW organizers were hired by AFSCME split-offs now affiliated with the Teamsters. The New York City AFSCME locals, led by Jerry Wurf, a Norman Thomas-influenced socialist, protested these appointments. A more successful strategy for Wurf, one that eventually defeated the Teamsters in key elections and enabled Wurf to take over the national union, was affiliation with the civil rights movement. James Farmer and other Black leaders worked as District Council 37 organizers in New York, helping to link AFSCME with the growing civil rights movement as well as with historically strong Black unions. In 1969 AFSCME signed the first citywide contract, significantly improving pay and in-service upgrading opportunities for its primarily Black and female membership. These organizing successes were repeated in other cities; the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was in Memphis to support an AFSCME sanitation strike when he was assassinated in 1968.

The most important independent Left union during the 1960s was New York City’s Social Service Employees Union (SSEU). Founded by former UPW members in 1961, SSEU displaced AFSCME as the representative for social workers in 1964. Strong rank-and-file participation and cooperation with the welfare rights movement enabled the union to win unprecedented pay increases, improved caseloads, and, most controversially, higher grants for welfare recipients. SSEU became less effective after 1967, when collective-bargaining rules undercut the power of independent unions. Consequently, in 1971 SSEU rejoined AFSCME.

SSEU served as a model for the Chicago Independent Union of Public Aid Employees (IUPAE), a split-off from the Building Service International Union. Even though IUPAE won sole bargaining rights after a 1966 strike, the union was unable to gain support from welfare recipients and failed to win contract approval by the Cook County Board of Commissioners.

In New York City, SSEU success prompted Left factions in other unions to press for strikes; by 1971, transit workers, teachers, sanitation workers, firefighters, police, and, on the federal level, postal workers, had struck, often serving as a model for militancy in other cities. However, racial conflict (in particular the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school board dispute) and the 1975 fiscal crisis diminished the influence of Left caucuses within New York’s public-sector unions.

On the national level, public-sector unions remained on the left wing of the labor movement. AFSCME, in particular, had a strong democratic socialist influence among its staff. The union was an early opponent of the Vietnam War and had been in the forefront of the struggle for civil rights and comparable worth pay for women.

Beginning in the 1980s public sector unions faced strong and increasingly successful opposition from federal and state governments. In 1981 President Reagan fired striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), ending the controller’s demands for a more reasonable workload and eventually causing the union’s demise. Anti-union fee laws (called “right to work” laws by union detractors) in Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia reduced public sector union membership to 33% in 2019, down from about 40% in preceding years.

Funding and legal advice from rightwing foundations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) supported these efforts, most notably in Wisconsin where governor Scott Walker spearheaded an effort to reduce bargaining rights for public employees. On the federal level, the 2018 Janus v. AFSCME 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling preventing unions from collecting agency fees from public employees. As a result, free rider workers could benefit from collective bargaining and union protection without paying their fair share, jeopardizing union finances—precisely the goal of the conservative foundations that pushed for the ruling.

At the same time that public unions lost these legislative and judicial rulings, grass roots pressure secured other public union victories. Most notably teachers, comprising over 40 percent of public sector union members, threatened or went on strike. These strikes took place in what previously had been conservative states without a recent strong union presence including Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Arizona (all in 2018) as well as in union strongholds such as Chicago (2012 and 2019) and Los Angeles (2019). The Black Lives Matter movement gained support from many public sector unions, putting them in opposition to most police unions. As of 2020, the International Union of Police Associations remained in the AFL-CIO despite some calls for its expulsion.

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Greenhouse, Steven. How Police Unions Enable and Conceal Abuses of Power. The New Yorker June 18, 2020.

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