Strike Back. Joe Burns
as Ronald Reagan’s firing of striking air traffic controllers in 1981. “The aftermath of the Boston strike significantly restrained the movement for public sector unions,” writes Joseph Slater. “All police locals affiliated with the AFL were soon destroyed.”15 Other public employee unions reacted by adopting no-strike clauses in their constitutions. As a consequence, the tremendous growth of public worker unions stalled, with the rate of unionization holding at barely eight percent throughout the 1920s.
In the decades that followed, the failure of the Boston police strike was used to combat public employee unionism. As Joseph Slater summarizes, “Beyond the numbers, memories of the Boston strike inhibited the growth of public sector unions for decades; it became too easy to equate any form of public sector unionism with the calamitous confrontation.”16 Even today, opponents of public employee unionism still dredge up the Boston police strike. For example, conservative columnist Cal Thomas commenced a diatribe against the Chicago Teachers Union strike in 2012 by citing Coolidge’s famous quote during the Boston police strike: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.”17
From the 1920s through the 1950s, public employee unionism and strike levels continued to languish. As one scholar noted,
Collective bargaining was not generally considered applicable to public employment until the late 1950s. The doctrine of state sovereignty, the domination of state legislatures by rural and anti-labor interests, unqualified acceptance of the prohibition against strikes by public employees, and the weakness of unions in public employment all contributed to the view that it was not a viable approach to improving the economic status of civil servants. The labor movement generally shared this view.18
Private sector unionization levels, however, skyrocketed during this time, as workers in key industries such as auto and steel forced employers to recognize their unions. Employing such tactics as mass picketing and sit-down strikes, private sector workers won major increases in real wages, employer-provided health care, and retirement plans. Public employees were for the most part left out of this upsurge, with public employee union density still stuck at 9 percent in the late 1950s. Part of the reason for this was that, until the late 1940s, “courts in all regions of the country imposed greater restrictions on unions in the public sector than on their counterparts in the private sector.”19
That’s not to say that public workers did not strike at all during this period. Notable exceptions included teacher strikes over non-payment of wages during the Great Depression. However, these were short strikes over specific grievances, and did not result in union recognition. Most public employee strikes during the 1930s were concentrated among workers at the Work Projects Administration (WPA). From the start of the WPA in August 1935 through the end of 1937, “it did not have a single strike less month. In that period of two years and one-half it had at least 571 strikes.”20 WPA workers struck over a wide range of issues, including a living wage, establishing the union rate for skilled craft workers, and working conditions such as free transport to distant job locations. Strikers used a variety of tactics from picketing to takeovers of legislative meetings to sit-down strikes.21 Inspirational as these examples were, they paled in comparison to the dramatic upsurge of private sector workers. Public employees for the most part sat out the strike wave of the 1930s. As a result, an entire generation of public workers missed out on the benefits of unionization.
The Beginnings of the Public Employee Upsurge
In the years immediately following World War II, a significant number of public workers struck as part of a massive strike wave of private sector workers. Many of the strikers were teachers, driven by “the post-war inflation” which was “creating a desperate situation for American teachers…. The average pay for a teacher was $37 compared with $41 for a meat packer and $53 for a car worker.”22 As one study of teacher unionism noted, “during the war years, the average real income of industrial workers rose 80 percent while teachers’ real income fell 20 percent. By 1945, the pent-up frustration of teachers burst forth in a brief but notable wave of strikes.”23 Despite opposition from their national organizations—both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association opposed strikes—“there were successful strikes over pay in many communities,” including Norwalk, Connecticut, Rankin, Pennsylvania, and Patterson, New Jersey. There were also significant strikes in St. Paul, Minnesota—with 1,160 teachers striking for over a month—and in Buffalo, New York, “where in February 1947, 2400 teachers walked out, closing eighty schools.”24
Teachers were not the only group of public sector workers caught up in the excitement of the great post-World War II strike wave. In 1946, nearly 500 city workers in Rochester, New York “were fired for forming a chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).” The city workers only got their jobs back when “30,000 private-sector workers quit work to rally in support of them in downtown Rochester.”25
Legislators responded aggressively to these rumblings of public employee unionism, passing a flurry of anti-strike legislation “which explicitly covered public sector unions, but…were designed chiefly to provide draconian penalties for government workers who struck.”26 These laws were inspired by the burst of labor militancy in 1946, which “were a product of the era that produced the anti-union Taft Hartley Act.”27 For example, New York State’s Condon-Wadlin Act, passed in response to the strike by teachers in Buffalo in 1947, required the automatic dismissal of any striker and required that any striking teacher who was rehired get no pay increases for three years and serve a five-year probationary period.28
As a result of these anti-public employee measures, the postwar strike wave soon subsided, and public employee strike activity remained low during the 1950s, with public employee unions of this period favoring backroom deals over militancy. In addition, the red scares of the 1950s further dampened public employee militancy. At the same time, private sector unions were at the peak of their influence. Private sector workers struck repeatedly during the 1950s, averaging 350 strikes of over 1000 workers per year during the decade.29 In 1953, private sector union density peaked, with 35 percent of workers belonging to unions. In contrast, public workers rarely struck during this time, and when they did, their strikes were “illegal, small, and short.”30 In 1958, for example, there were only fifteen public employee strikes of any size in the entire nation.31
Lacking a strike or other mechanisms to resolve disputes, bargaining for public workers during the 1950s was little more than “collective begging.” Unions lobbied government agencies for pay increases and were often unable to produce meaningful gains for their members. As Joseph Slater writes, “Absent statutes granting institutional rights, employers—mayors, school boards, and heads of departments—issued regulation that controlled labor relations. Not surprisingly, these policies were typically quite restrictive, often prohibiting affiliation with labor or organizing at all.”32
The Public Employee Strike Wave
While the situation for public workers looked bleak at the conclusion of the 1950s, in reality, it was the calm before the storm. In a great strike wave that would span the next two decades, public workers across the nation would force obstructionist public employers to finally recognize public employee unions. Rejecting the backroom lobbying favored by the old guard, aggressive young public employee leaders demanded real collective bargaining, backed up with the right to strike. As a result of this surge, “Public sector strike activity increased dramatically during the 1960s and 1970s, despite the fact that such strikes were illegal in most states. Furthermore, public sector work stoppages increased to record levels at a time when strike activity was decreasing in the economy as a whole.”33
Far and away the most militant group of public workers during this period were teachers. Teacher activism would reach its high point in the late 1970s, amounting to “nearly 44 percent of all work stoppages by local government employees during the 1974-1980 period . . . the largest percentage of work stoppages in public employment.”34 Following the example of teachers, sanitation workers, air traffic controllers, and social workers all embraced workplace militancy. From 1958 through 1970, the number of strikes of