On February 14, 2011, Governor Scott Walker introduced his self-proclaimed “bud get repair” bill in the Wisconsin state legislature that would strip most public sector employees of their collective bargaining rights. Opposition to the bill represented one of the largest, most sustained protests since the Vietnam War. For more than three weeks from February to March 2011, protestors peacefully occupied the Wisconsin State Capitol, sleeping on the hard marble floors for days on end to oppose the bill. The state house occupiers had traveled from across the country, and supporters nationwide called local Madison restaurants to arrange for pizza and...

To understand labor’s comparative weakness and the distinct paths of public and private sector unions in the United States, we must begin with the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Also known as the Wagner Act, the NLRA was a cornerstone of New Deal legislation and the foundation for modern-day private sector labor law. The Wagner Act provided federal protections to private sector workers’ efforts to unionize, outlined anti-union practices employers could no longer utilize, and put in place the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to oversee union representation elections, adjudicate complaints, and interpret the Act in subsequent cases.

The...

The years immediately after passage of the Wagner Act vividly illustrate how the law served as a crucial turning point for organized labor. For private sector unions, the late 1930s and 1940s were a period of tremendous growth and development facilitated by the Act. As one union leader explained at the time, the law was “a terrific spur to the workers” because “to the vigor of the organizing drive, to the encouragement of victories, of strides taken, to the prestige of the C.I.O., is now added the sanction of law, the often effective support of the Labor Relations Board, the...

While private sector labor law reached an impasse following Taft-Hartley, after decades of effort, major changes were creating a window of opportunity for public sector laws to pass at the state and local levels (Kingdon 1984). Public sector employees drove the change by pressing for recognition of their grievances and defiantly organizing and joining unions regardless of legal provisions, forcing policymakers to take notice. During and after World War II, public sector employment increased as the New Deal expanded the size and scope of local, state, and federal government. The number of state employees rose from 804,000 in 1946 to...

When Scott Walker introduced his “bud get repair bill” in 2011 to strip many public sector workers in Wisconsin of their collective bargaining rights, he privately alluded at the time that he was specifically targeting government employees rather than all union members as part of a “divide and conquer” strategy (Stein and Marley 2013, 47). Walker was so confident in his strategy and the lack of genuine solidarity within the labor movement that he did not expect that private sector unions would mobilize on behalf of their public sector brethren to challenge the bill (51). Although Walker’s intuition about private...

By the close of the 1970s and into the early 1980s, the possibility of an expanding, transformative public/private sector labor movement was coming to an end. Just as economic changes like deindustrialization and expanding global markets were putting increased pressure on unionized workplaces, the legal environment was making it difficult for organized labor to adapt to changing circumstances. The next several decades were marked by a labor movement struggling to adapt and survive in the face of mounting difficulties and a constrained legal/institutional regime. The legal framework established in 1935 put in place the foundation for the challenges the labor...

The 2011 battle over Act 10 in Wisconsin was the most public struggle over public sector collective bargaining rights in decades, but it was not unique. Act 10 was part of a surge of legislation proposed across the country seeking to scale back government employees’ collective bargaining rights in the 2010s. The preceding decades had seen moments of expanded public sector rights—state workers gained collective bargaining rights in Indiana in 1989 and Washington in 2002, for instance—but also retrenchment—New Mexico’s Public Employee Labor Relations Act renewal was vetoed by the governor in 1999,¹ and Indiana’s state workers’...

In October 1953, the “Trade Union and Collective Bargaining Rights of Public Employees” conference was held in Munich, Germany. The conference brought together public sector labor leaders from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia, and the United States. In his opening remarks at the conference, General Secretary M. C. Bolle of the International Federation of Unions of Employees in Public and Civil Services commented on the state of trade union rights around the world. He noted that in his travels he had discovered that many countries in Asia and Latin America that were...