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The Covid-19 pandemic has made clear the central role of the workplace in public health. Workers and working families have been particularly impacted by a public health and economic crisis that has revealed both structural shortcomings and opportunities for future preparedness. In response to the pandemic, a group of scholars, labor and anti-poverty advocates, activists, union representatives, frontline workers, and public health professionals gathered to share observations and create a forum for information sharing and collaboration. Conversations evolved with the pandemic to include policy solutions aimed at addressing the pandemic's health and economic impacts. In this paper, we summarize key lessons from the “Covid-19 and Workers” calls and suggest that ongoing collaboration among labor activists and academic and public health advocates may help to prepare for new public health crises and protect the safety and health of workers and communities.

This article examines both the Bargaining for the Common Good (BCG) contract campaigns that have emerged among teachers unions in the years since the Great Recession and the #RedforEd strikes and mobilizations of 2018. It finds that although these efforts emerged in very different contexts and with quite different levels of planning and organization, they nonetheless evolved in similar directions. Both BCG campaigns and the #RedforEd mobilizations framed their efforts in broad terms as defenses of the common good; both were grounded in and dependent upon strong community alliances; and both achieved a significant increase in teacher militancy in large part because of these factors. Taken together, the BCG campaigns and #RedforEd mobilizations help illustrate our need to rethink collective bargaining in ways that allow us to confront the structural inequalities that are steadily undermining both our schools and our democracy.

In 1981, US President Ronald Reagan decisively broke the illegal strike of the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic controllers, which had been organized by their union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). Because of its timing, its notoriety, and its impact in encouraging private sector employers to follow Reagan’s example and break strikes, the PATCO debacle contributed significantly to the continuing decline of the labor movement in the decades following 1981. The breaking of PATCO took place at a crucial inflection point in US labor history. Changing political, ideological, and economic trends made unions vulnerable as the 1980s began. In this volatile context, the PATCO strike garnered unprecedented attention and enormous influence. The walkout, which started on August 3, 1981, took place in every US state and territory, and Americans watched it play out in real time on live television. They saw President Reagan warn strikers that since they were government workers their walkout was illegal, issuing an ultimatum that they would be fired in forty-eight hours if they did not return to work. Then they saw Reagan fire more than eleven thousand strikers who defied his order, replacing them with military controllers and hastily trained substitutes, all with strong public backing. This event shocked rank-and-file unionists, frightened union leaders, and encouraged private sector employers to emulate Reagan in their own dealings with unions. Thus, following the PATCO strike, numerous private sector employers took advantage of weak protections for strikers in US labor law to break strikes in their industries. Workers’ willingness to strike in order to advance or defend workplace standards plummeted thereafter. Declining labor militancy in turn exacerbated the continuous decline in union membership after 1981, leaving the union movement in a deepening crisis by the early 21st century.

In light of the current crisis afflicting the labor movement, historian Joseph McCartin revisits the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) eight decades after its passage and the Supreme Court ruling that upheld its constitutionality. That act constituted a “momentous shift in the nation’s jurisprudence,” but making it a living reality required American workers’ efforts on the ground. In this Up for Debate roundtable, McCartin poses critical questions: How should we evaluate the legacy of the Wagner Act? What did it mean in its time? How did it shape the course of US labor history? What significance does it hold for us in our present context? McCartin and three respondents—Craig Becker, Dorothy Sue Cobble, and Katherine Stone—address these questions and debate their responses, offering both historiographical assessments and historically informed suggestions about the labor movement’s path forward.

History suggests that law will not save a labor movement on the defensive. the passage of the Wagner Act itself was made possible by the strike wave of 1934 and workers' rising expectations that the New Deal ought to give them a voice over their working conditions. While we should not expect the imminent return of the sit-down strike, pockets of worker resistance and experimentation are even now helping identify potential pillars of of a twenty-first century Wagner Act.

On December 12, 2015, nearly 2,000 people crowded into the Minneapolis Convention Center for a remarkable event organized by Minnesotans for a Fair Economy, a statewide network of unions and community groups. “the People’s Congress,” as the event was called, convened activists from across the state in an effort to “establish a collective vision for social, racial and economic justice.” As their invitation explained, participants aimed to “dismantle systems of racial discrimination and oppression; reclaim our democracy; reclaim our economy; reclaim our government”; and “build the power of workers and workers’ organizations.”

This article features an extended interview with Ray Marshall, professor emeritus and Audre and Bernard Rapoport Centennial Chair in Economics and Public Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, and former secretary of labor to President Jimmy Carter (1977–81). An influential figure in the field of labor economics and the economics of discrimination, Marshall joined the Carter administration at a pivotal moment in postwar American history. In this interview, he reflects on his time as secretary of labor, his broader career in academia and politics, and the state and future of working America, addressing topics that include contemporary politics, economic and fiscal policy, labor law, education and immigration reform, and the role of organized labor in American society.

On 1 December 2011, Ruth Milkman, Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at the City University of New York, hosted a forum on ...

This article is a first step toward a more thorough history of the weakening of trade-unions in the U.S. Based both on the history of representations and political history, it first analyzes debates on the Employee Free Choice Act in 2008-09. Since the 1950s, conservatives have fought against the double legacy of the New Deal – democracy of the workplace and union freedoms – and have promoted another view of democracy at work. For businessmen, as well as conservative lawyers and economists, each employee should have a free access to jobs and working conditions should be the result of an individual bargaining without trade-union pressures. This ideological fight hides a fundamental political stake: the funding of elections.

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies, by Judith Stein, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-300-11818-6 Judith Stein, Professor of Hist...

Whether the United States can emerge from the Great Recession to confront this massive long-range failure of the private sector to generate good jobs, reliable benefits, and rising incomes for the many will depend greatly on how well public sector unions are able to weather this perilous moment. With less than 7 percent of nongovernmental workers unionized, private sector unions no longer have the leverage to improve wages and benefits for those beyond their ranks. Thus, by default, public sector unions have become the single most effective social force capable of speaking out for a just economy that lifts the standards of all workers, public and private. To preserve their credibility and their ability to fight effectively for both their members and a fairer economy for all, the unions would be wise at this moment to show that they are prepared to make sacrifices where necessary, appropriate, and fair. In turn, all who seek a fairer economy have a stake in coming together to resist the radical effort to roll back public sector unionism that is now gaining ground.

First, I would like to offer my thanks to Lance Compa, Richard McIntyre, and Gay Seidman for their thoughtful responses to my essay. One could not find three more accomplished scholars with whom to engage in this discussion. Each in their own way has sharpened our thinking about the relationship of labor rights to human rights—Compa through a lifetime of inspiring organizing and writing, Seidman through her eloquent defense of human rights-based labor activism, Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights and Transnational Activism, and McIntyre through his sharp interrogation of this activism in Are Worker Rights Human Rights? Not only do they bring well-honed critiques to bear in discussing my argument, they are generous and fair-minded. I'm grateful to them for prodding me to clarify my thinking.

In the August 8, 2008, edition of the Wall Street Journal, an editorial denounced the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), organized labor's most recent effort to reform US labor law, as a measure that would lead to worker intimidation and the end of free and fair workplace representation elections. That the nation's leading business journal carried an editorial outlining the familiar EFCA opponent's trope of worker intimidation by unions was not surprising. That the author's identity was former South Dakota senator George McGovern—that aging icon of American liberalism and a self-described “longtime friend of labor unions”—foreshadowed the uphill battle and ultimate defeat labor and its allies would face in enacting the measure.

The explosive rise of public sector unions in the United States in the 1960s and the early 1970s resembled in many ways the breakthrough of industrial unionism in the 1930s. The unionization of teachers, police officers, fire fighters, secretaries, sanitation work ers, and other government employees was every bit as sudden and unexpected as the depression-era industrial union upsurge had been. Membership in public sector unions grew tenfold between 1955 and 1975, topping four million by the early 1970s. Moreover, newly organized government workers behaved just as militantly as did auto and steel workers a generation earlier. In 1958 there were a mere 15 public sector strikes recorded in the United States; in 1975 the number hit 478.l It is little wonder then that so many observers compared public sector unionism to the rise decades before of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (cio). Describing a scene reminiscent of a famous history of the 1930s by Irving Bernstein, the journalist Irwin Ross suggested in 1968 that the upsurge in government workers' activism had created a "turbulent state" by the late 1960s. Ralph J. Flynn, a lobbyist for the fastest growing public sector union, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (afscme), also used a depression-era bench mark. Surveying afscme's prospects in 1974 he concluded that "today is 1934 in the public sector." And, when a Pennsylvania state official tried to understand the unioniza tion of state workers, he also drew on history: "We went through this in the '30s in the private sector," he explained. "Now we are going through it in the public."2

One cannot begin to grasp David J. O'Brien's rich legacy or his enormous importance as an American Catholic historian without considering this trinity of simple, yet in many ways quite loaded descriptors: "American," "Catholic," and "historian." These three words define O'Brien in a deep and profoundly intercon nected way. During more than forty years of prolific scholarship, activism, and inspir ing teaching, O'Brien's career has been characterized by his steadfast fidelity to this trinity of commitments: fealty to his national community, his Catholic faith, and his craft. To have maintained these commitments over the last forty years was no doubt at times a challenge, for developments within the Church, America, and the historical pro fession alike complicated the relationship among O'Brien's trinity. In the end, no single one of his many prodigiously researched, thought-provoking books is likely to prove as important in defining his legacy as his example of fidelity. Not only did O'Brien keep faith with his commitments when developments compli cated that effort, he did so with grace, humility, and good humor, ever attentive to the changes taking place around (and within) him, ever open to the voices of those who did not share his views. In short, he modeled a union of faith and intellect that was matched by few scholars of his time?in any field. To appreciate O'Brien's fidelity, consider both the changes that he witnessed over the course of his career and his reaction to those changes. When he graduated from Notre Dame in 1960, he and his generation believed they stood at "the center of American Catholicism." In those days, he later recalled, "you could be and I could be, as enthusiastically as one can be, Catholic and American." In the Cold War era, "it seemed that at last Catholicism and Americanism had become one and the same."1

This article argues that the unsuccessful 1981 strike of federal air traffic controllers was the most significant single event in accelerating the decline of organized labor in the United States in the late 20th century. Like the failed Homestead steel strike of 1892, the PATCO strike cast a long shadow over US labor relations for many years after the event itself. Among the effects of the strike was the role it played in legitimizing the use of permanent replacement workers during strikes. This article draws lessons from the PATCO debacle that are worth considering 25 years later.

This article considers the reasons why labor historians have continued to neglect the history of workers and unions in the US public sector. It argues that the most compelling explanation for historians’ failure to examine the history of public sector unions is that conducting such an examination would challenge a number of deeply rooted preconceptions regarding the history of American labor since World War II. The article goes on to suggest what we might learn if US labor historians began to probe the experience of public sector workers more fully.