Public workers : government employee unions, the law, and the state, 1900-1962 / Joseph E. Slater.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-252) and index.

The Boston police strike of 1919 -- Yellow-dog contracts and Seattle teachers, 1928-1931 -- Public sector labor law before legalized collective bargaining -- Ground-floor politics and the BSEIU in the 1930s -- The New York City TWU in the early 1940s -- Wisconsin's public sector labor laws of 1959 and 1962.

Description based on print version record.

From the dawn of the twentieth century to the early 1960s, public-sector unions generally had no legal right to strike, bargain, or arbitrate, and government workers could be fired simply for joining a union. Public Workers is the first book to analyze why public-sector labor law evolved as it did, separate from and much more restrictive than private-sector labor law, and what effect this law had on public-sector unions, organized labor as a whole, and by extension all of American politics. Joseph E. Slater shows how public-sector unions survived, represented their members, and set the stage for the most remarkable growth of worker organization in American history. Slater examines the battles of public-sector unions in the workplace, courts, and political arena, from the infamous Boston police strike of 1919, to teachers in Seattle fighting a yellow-dog rule, to the BSEIU in the 1930s representing public-sector janitors, to the fate of the powerful Transit Workers Union after New York City purchased the subways, to the long struggle by AFSCME that produced the nation's first public-sector labor law in Wisconsin in 1959. Slater introduces readers to a determined and often-ignored segment of the union movement and expands our knowledge of working men and women, the institutions they formed, and the organizational obstacles they faced.

In English.

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