By Jim Cline
F
or those of our readers who would like a deeper understanding of the context and background of collective-bargaining rights, especially those public sector and public-safety employees, Toledo Law Professor Joseph Slater has published a very readable and condensed history of United States public-sector collective bargaining law. While Slater’s article is entitled “The Strangely Unsettled State of Public-Sector Labor in the past 30 Years,” he actually takes events back, nearly 100 years ago to the Boston Police Strike of 1919. His focus on the 30-years, marks the departure point for which he believes public-sector collective-bargaining rights issues became more partisan and less stable.
Some of the key highlights and observations in Slater’s article include:
- 1919 Boston police strike setoff rampant crime and was ultimately crushed by the intervention of the hired state guards, followed by the irrevocable termination of all 1147 strikers. Slater views the crushed Boston police strike as an event which set back public-sector collective-bargaining rights for 40 years, not just for police unions but for all public-sector unions at a time that public-sector collective-bargaining rights were being recognized in Europe.
- The revival of public-sector collective-bargaining laws began in Wisconsin in 1950s. After 8 years of political lobbying and organizing the Wisconsin statute was adopted in 1959.
- Two years later, a voluntary “nonbinding” fact-finding provision was added to the Wisconsin statute, but these voluntary provisions were soon replaced by binding interest arbitration.
- Federal government employees acquired the right to collective bargaining in 1962.
- In the 1960s and 70s, state collective-bargaining laws were being adopted throughout the country. (Washington’s collective-bargaining law was enacted in 1975.)
- Court rulings in the 1960s began to recognize certain constitutional concerning collective bargaining, at least a constitutional right not to be retaliated against for exercising collective-bargaining rights.
- A number of the states adopted Wisconsin’s binding interest arbitration clause, which was then viewed as a successful impasse resolution method.
- The PATCO strike of 1981 was crushed and followed by the irrevocable termination of the strikers and, in Slater’s view, increase political polarization on the topic of collective-bargaining rights.
Slater then discusses efforts since the 1981 PATCO strike to roll back state collective-bargaining laws. He takes this through the most recent years where efforts were made in Ohio and other states to repeal collective-bargaining laws including a successful effort in the first state with collective-bargaining rights — Wisconsin. Slater also notes with some irony, that the original Wisconsin collective-bargaining law was written to provide the right to collectively-bargain for all public employees, except police and fire fighters, and the repealed statute left collective-bargaining rights intact only for those public safety providers.
Slater ends by predicting continued strife over collective-bargaining laws, but does not believe that collective-bargaining rights in the public sector are going to go away. He points out that even where state legislatures have repealed such laws, the unions are certain to continue to fight to get the laws back on the books. Slater ends him with the observation:
The challenge, however, will be to avoid using the rights of public employees and their representatives as a partisan football. Too often, in the past 2 years, the attacks on public-sector collective-bargaining rights — and on the public employees themselves — had seemed to have been motivated in large part by the desire of one political party to cripple a major supporter of the other political party.
And it would be a shame if this continued into the next 30. The right to working people and their representatives, and the desire for effective, efficient government, should be bipartisan concerns.
