Strike Back. Joe Burns
arbitrator makes the final decision of what is included in a contract. By providing a mechanism to settle contracts, interest arbitration reduced strike levels.
Furthermore, in response to the strike wave of the 1960s and 1970s, many states passed laws regulating bargaining by public workers. By 1999, thirty-four states had laws on the books providing for collective bargaining, while another six states authorized some form of representation.15 These laws varied widely in terms of which workers were covered, the subjects of bargaining that were permitted, and whether or not workers could strike or utilize binding arbitration. In general though, these laws helped regularize labor relations in the public sector. Whereas in the early days of collective bargaining, unions were free to bring forward matters of policy and issues of concern to the community such as classroom size, under the new framework, bargaining was often restricted to wages and other narrow working conditions. In addition, unlike the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, negotiations were often conducted behind closed doors with little membership participation. Bargaining became routine, and many unions embraced the concept of labor-management cooperation.
This seeming stability, however, masked increasing problems for public sector workers. Just as a segment of the right-wing never accepted bargaining in the private sector and worked for decades to gut the right to strike, similar opposition focused on undermining public sector bargaining. Spurred by libertarian law professor Sylvester Pestro and his anti-public employee Public Service Research Council, these anti-public employee union organizers merged with the tax revolt movement to help propel Ronald Reagan into office in 1980.16 Bashing public employee unions was very much part of their message.
This ascendant conservative movement attracted the support of powerful funders who over the course of the next two decades built up a network of right-wing foundations and think tanks. Years before he was propelled onto the national scene during the upsurge in Wisconsin, far-right billionaire David Koch was funding and building his own conservative empire. The son of one the founders of the far right-wing John Birch Society, Koch ran for vice president in 1980 on the Libertarian Party ticket. Over the next two decades, Koch would help create a web of right-wing organizations which increasingly targeted public employees.
By and large, public employee unions attempted to temper this conservative onslaught by moderating their demands and avoiding confrontation. Initially, this strategy of lying low and engaging in politics produced acceptable results, as public employee unions for the most missed the vicious anti-employer assault of the 1980s and 1990s. While the percentage of private sector workers covered by collective bargaining agreements dropped from 23.3 percent in 1977 to 7.3 percent in 2012, public employee levels remained fairly constant during the period, dropping only from 40.1 percent to 39.6 percent.18 And while most private sector unions have lost defined benefit pension plans and seen increased healthcare costs, public sector unions have largely maintained better retirement and healthcare benefits.
However, this period of seeming stability for public sector unions was, in reality, the calm before the storm. In 2003, Richard Hurd of Cornell University perceptively sounded the alarm in a series of articles about the coming crisis of public employee unionism, arguing that it would be a mistake “to conclude that public sector unions are strong, stable, and immune to the external and internal influences that have brought private sector unions to their knees.”19 In the decade since the publication of these articles, Hurd has proven to be correct and then some, as public sector unions have faced an all-out assault on multiple fronts, including attacks on their collective bargaining rights, wages and pensions.
The Future of Public Employee Militancy
The legislative attacks on public employee bargaining in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and elsewhere over the past few years have clearly demonstrated that the ideology of cooperation adopted by many public employee unions over the past thirty years does not work.
Joseph Slater, who has extensively studied the attacks on public employee unions, offers a sampling of the public employee bashing currently popular with many conservative pundits and politicians:
Thus, for example, a Wall Street Journal editorial last spring made the remarkable claim that ‘America’s most privileged class are public union workers.’ The New Republic titled an article, ‘Why Public Employees are the New Welfare Queens.’ Republican politicians began echoing these sentiments. ‘We have a new privileged class in America,’ said Indiana Governor, Mitch Daniels, who rescinded state workers’ collective bargaining power on his first day in office in 2006. ‘We used to think of government workers as underpaid public servants. Now they are better paid than the people who pay their salaries.’20
This rhetorical attack against public employee unions has been matched by a concerted legislative war on public employee bargaining, the most high-profile of which have been in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan. Despite the protests of tens of thousands of Badger State residents, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed a restrictive public employee bargaining law in 2011 eliminating bargaining rights for certain groups of public workers such as University of Wisconsin employees, barring interest arbitration, limiting bargaining to wages, limiting dues collection, and requiring union re-certification. In Ohio, similar legislation was signed into law, but rescinded by a referendum. Michigan passed a controversial law allowing emergency managers to be appointed and other statutes barring union dues collection and limiting the subjects of bargaining for school employees.
These were not the only states where public employees have faced restrictions on their bargaining rights. In Massachusetts—a “blue” state—legislators passed a law which “makes it easier for local government employers to make changes in health insurance”; Indiana legislation “limits the scope of bargaining for teachers to wages and benefits”; legislation in Illinois limits the subjects of bargaining for teachers and imposed onerous rules on teachers for strike votes; and Nebraska changed the rules on interest arbitration to be more favorable to employers.21 Public employees in Idaho, Nevada, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Tennessee also saw legislation weakening their bargaining rights. While these attacks have been primarily sponsored by Republican politicians, the attack on Illinois teacher bargaining rights and the Massachusetts legislation came from Democrat-controlled legislatures.
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