LER435:

Overview and Objectives

Overview

This lesson will (1) examine the historical development of the public sector labor relations system in the United States. However, to understand how and why this system evolved as it has, it is necessary to understand two important factors that shaped this system: private sector labor relations and public (i.e., government) policy toward collective bargaining. In addition, this lesson will also consider recent social, political, and strategic factors which have greatly influenced private sector and public sector unionism.  It will also (2) present an overview of contemporary public sector unions. Public sector unionism will be compared and contrasted with unionism in the private sector. The most prominent forms of public sector labor organizations—including associations, function-specific unions, and general-purpose unions—will be defined and described. Finally, short-term prospects for growth or decline of public sector employee unions will be briefly discussed.

Instructional Objectives

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

• Summarize briefly the history of private and public sector collective bargaining in the United States.
• Describe the major factors that have lead to the decline of unionism in the private sector.
• Describe three principal historic differences between collective bargaining in the public and the private sectors.
• Identify the statute that regulates collective bargaining in the federal government.
• Define and describe associations, general-purpose unions, and function-specific unions.
• Discuss union density levels in the private and public sector.
• Describe the principal challenges facing unions today in the public sector.

Activities

Reading Assignment: Chapters 1 and 2 in the text.

Written Assignment (Due Sunday evening by 11:50 P.M.): 

In this assignment I would like to learn more about your views on unions, in general, as well as your personal experience with unions.  Develop an essay that reveals your thoughts about unions, in general, and your thoughts about union membership.  I expect that your essay will deal with the following points:

• Are your beliefs more closely aligned with an HR perspective, management’s perspective or a union perspective.  Explain how you developed this perspective.
• What personal experiences have you had with a union?
• Are you currently a union member?  If so, which one?

Please create your assignment in Microsoft Word and save the file to your computer before you use the form below to upload your assignment.

Quiz: Due by Sunday evening at 11:50 P.M.

 

Adversarial Relationships between Unions and Employers

Students who have little knowledge of unions wonder why these organizations sometimes take a combative, adversarial stance toward employers. Would not unions better serve their members by working cooperatively with management to increase productivity and thereby increase profits so that employers could spend more money on employee wages and benefits?

Two historical factors may explain why unions often take the adversarial approach they do. First, the only reason that employees are permitted to collectively bargain with employers through unions is that employees and union leaders fought long and hard against employers, and often against contrary government and court actions as well, to win the right to negotiate over wages, hours, and working conditions. Employers have, in this regard, traditionally been the “enemy” of organized employees. Moreover, while the days of employers hiring goons and thugs to literally engage in “union busting” are hopefully past, many employers still actively oppose unions at their workplaces by whatever legal (and sometimes illegal) means are available. Thus, the historical relationship between unions and employers has been characterized more by confrontation than cooperation.

Second, it is significant that the legal framework for collective bargaining has actually encouraged adversarial, rather than cooperative, relationships between unions and employers. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is the primary statute that governs collective bargaining in the private sector (it is also the model upon which most public sector collective bargaining statutes are based). The only mechanism the NLRA provides for the resolution of union-management bargaining disputes is the strike, in which the parties essentially engage in economic warfare against one another, with the stronger party emerging triumphant. In addition, if unions work too cooperatively with managers, they may be charged with violating provisions of the Act which prohibit “employer-dominated” labor organizations.

Both the resistance of unions and the nature of the NLRA have influenced the system of union-management relations that has developed in the public sector.

 

Union Growth and Collective Bargaining Legislation

At the individual level, support for unionization is likely to be strongest where the employee is dissatisfied with one or more significant aspects of his or her job, and believes that having union representation will bring about positive change. On a much larger scale, though, the factor which has historically brought about the most rapid growth in unionization has been the passage of legislation granting unions the right to engage in collective bargaining with employers.

In the private sector, unions experienced their most rapid growth following the enactment of the NLRA by Congress in 1935. In the public sector, unions similarly experienced rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s following the issuance of Executive Order 10988 in 1962—which granted federal government employees limited rights to organize unions and bargaining collectively—and the subsequent passage of legislation legalizing public sector collective bargaining in many states.

The relationship between the passage of laws enabling collective bargaining and the growth of unions is not surprising. The opportunity to allow workers to influence their wages, hours, and working conditions through collective bargaining is undoubtedly the most significant benefit that unions can offer to their members. On the other side of the coin, the inability of unions in recent years to gain more favorable collective bargaining legislation at either the federal or state levels appears to have been a major factor in the decline of union membership in the private sector and the stagnation of union growth in the public sector.

Historical Differences in the Development of Unions in the Public versus the Private Sectors

While there are similarities between how unionism developed in the private and public sectors in terms of the adversarial nature of union-management relations and the role of collective bargaining legislation, there are also significant differences. Three of these differences are (1) the manner in which collective bargaining is regulated in the two sectors, (2) the “scope” of collective bargaining, and (3) the level of employer opposition to unionization and collective bargaining. The effects of these differences are evident in today’s labor-management environment.

1.  Statutory Differences in Collective Bargaining Rights

The first significant difference between private and public sector labor relations is the legal framework that governs the processes. In the private sector, the vast majority of collective bargaining relationships are regulated by a single federal statute, the NLRA (a second law, the Railway Labor Act, regulates collective bargaining in the railway and airline industries). Thus, the rules and standards governing private sector labor relations are the same for most employees and employers across the country, regardless of geographic location or industrial sector.

In the public sector, on the other hand, collective bargaining is regulated by a variety of statutes which have established an array of collective bargaining systems that, in some cases, differ widely from one another. Collective bargaining for most federal employees is governed by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, with the exception of employees of the U.S. Postal Service who fall under the Postal Reorganization Act. The rights of state and local government (county, city, township, school district, etc.) employees to organize, bargain, or strike are determined by separate state laws, administrative orders, or court decisions in force in the states in which their employer is located. This absence of a unitary system has led to great inconsistencies in the collective bargaining rights enjoyed by public sector employees, depending on which branch of government they work for and where that government/employer is located.

2. Differences in the Permissible Scope of Collective Bargaining

Due to the variety of laws regulating collective bargaining at the federal, state, and local levels, the collective bargaining rights of public sector employees in some locales are broader than those accorded to private sector employees, and in some cases far more restricted. Generally speaking, however, the scope of subjects over which public sector employees are permitted to bargain is more limited than that of employees in the private sector.

Under the NLRA, unions representing private sector employees essentially have the right to bargain with employers concerning all aspects of wages, hours, and working conditions. However, federal government employees, with the exception of postal workers, are not permitted to bargain over compensation or employee disciplinary actions or discharges. At the state and local levels, some states place similar restrictions on the scope of bargaining while other states allow employees covered by their statutes to bargain over a range of issues similar to private sector employees. What are the reasons for these significant differences?

Two historical factors have played an important role in limiting public sector collective bargaining rights compared to those in the private sector—the principle of sovereignty and the existence of civil service systems in the public sector. Sovereignty is the idea that in a representative democracy such as the United States, the people, as represented by their elected government officials, are the highest power. Thus, if the government officials allow their decisions concerning their employees to be altered by bargaining with the employees, they will have illegally, or at least improperly, delegated some of the peoples’ power to the employees’ unions. The exclusion of wages, fringe benefits, and disciplinary decisions from the list of subjects upon which federal unions can bargain most probably reflects the federal government’s desire to preserve the “sovereign” right of the people, through their elected officials, to determine these aspects of the federal workplace without restrictions resulting from collective bargaining.

The historical presence of civil service systems governing employment in many federal, state, and local government entities prior to the enactment of laws permitting public sector collective bargaining may also have caused Congress and certain state legislatures to limit the scope of bargaining for many public sector employers. Civil service systems were established by many government employers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s to help ensure that most government employees are selected for, and retained in, their government positions based on competence and merit factors, rather than political sympathies, nepotism, or personal favoritism. These systems generally included legal protection for employees from being discharged or disciplined without just cause, and sometimes established pay scales intended to ensure that compensation for different jobs within the government organization was fair across the board. The presence of civil service systems in the public sector has served to limit the scope of collective bargaining because some legislative bodies have concluded that matters regulated by civil service systems should remain governed by those systems rather than be subject to collective bargaining.

 

Three Types of Organizations

It is useful to recognize that there are three basic types of organizations that generally represent public sector employees: associations, general-purpose unions, and function-specific unions.

Associations are organizations of government employees which were not originally intended to function as unions, but rather as professional organizations. Associations were founded to promote certain professions and to provide services and benefits to their employee members outside of the direct employer-employee relationship. Often these profession-based associations included supervisory and managerial employees, as well as non-supervisory workers, within a profession. With the rise of collective bargaining in the public sector, many of these employee associations began to engage in collective bargaining. In some cases they were motivated to do this to prevent their memberships from being eroded by traditional unions. Prominent examples of associations which have adopted collective bargaining as an important part of the services they provide to members are the National Education Association (NEA), which represents teachers, and the American Nursing Association (ANA).

General-purpose unions are traditional unions, in the sense that their principal reason for being is to collectively bargain with employers on behalf of employees whom they represent. These unions in the public sector are equivalent to “industrial” unions in the private sector—that is, general-purpose unions represent groups of employees in a variety of different jobs and professions, bound only by the fact that they work in the same sector or industry (in this case the public or government sector). Prominent examples of general-purpose unions in the public sector include the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT).

Finally, function-specific unions are unions which only represent individuals who are employed in a particular profession or occupation. In this sense, they are equivalent to “craft” unions in the private sector. Examples of prominent function-specific unions in the public sector include the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

Whether a group of employees is represented by an association, a general-purpose union, or a function-specific union may have ramifications for union-management relations. Historically, associations tended to be less aggressive than unions in their approach to collective bargaining. However, this difference has faded over time. Function-specific unions, more so than general-purpose unions, may bring a great deal of specialized expertise and experience in representing employees in their profession or occupation to the bargaining table. There is some evidence that general-purpose unions are more inclined than function-specific unions to attempt to impose statewide or national collective bargaining goals—such as uniform safety practices or fringe-benefit packages—on smaller-scale bargaining units, such as the employees of a particular city or town government. General-purpose unions probably have a more difficult task representing groups of employees, as they often represent employees in a variety of jobs with widely varying interests. AFSCME, for example, represents groups of workers ranging from prison guards to highway workers to engineers and scientists. This may make it difficult for the union’s leadership to reach an agreement with management that will satisfy the varying needs of the different employee groups in that bargaining unit.

Public Sector Unions Today: The Challenge

The ability of public sector unions to organize a comparatively large segment of their workforce and to maintain their membership levels compared to the declining density and membership levels in the private sector, has greatly increased the relative influence of public sector unions in the American labor movement. In the 1950s and 1960s, unions that largely drew their membership from the private sector, such as the Teamsters, United Auto Workers, United Steelworkers, and the Carpenters Union, were the largest and most influential labor organizations in the United States. The most influential labor leaders of that period (e.g. George Meany, the first president of the AFL-CIO, came from the Plumbers Union; Walter Reuther was president of the Autoworkers; Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters) represented private sector unions.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

In 2014, the union membetship rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions--was 11.1 percent, down 0.2 percentage points from 2013, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.  The number of wage and salary workers belonging to union, at 14.6 million, was little different from 2013.  In 1983, the first year for which comparable union date are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 union workers.

Public sector unions have also become one of the most powerful players on the American political scene, especially when we consider the resources they contribute to politics and the impact they have on elections.

Public sector unions today appear to be in a very similar position to private sector unions in the 1950s and 1960s. The rapid membership growth that government unions enjoyed in recent decades appears to be slowing, and prospects for enactment of additional legislation favorable to public sector bargaining—the key factor that spurred past union growth—are not great. Moreover, there appears to be considerable public support for cutting taxes and transferring significant government functions to the private sector, both of which would weaken public sector unions.