Public employee union organizing originated in the nineteenth century. But these unions, unsupported by national or state collective bargaining laws, tended to represent workers in one local agency, such as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, where the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 18 had been in place since before 1900. DWP workers had even gone on strike in 1944. The ability of these unions to advocate for their members depended on relationships with their agency administrators and local elected officials. This meant that collective bargaining remained inherently unstable.
Public sector workers had made several sustained efforts to form unions between World War I and World War II. Veterans reentering the workforce from the battlefield brought with them a no-nonsense attitude; they had sacrificed for their country, were not going to stand for public administrators denying their rights, and felt they desereved to be treated and paid well for their work.
But a cluster of public employee strikes in 1919 created a backlash against unionization. In particular, a well-publicized walkout of Boston police against low pay and unhealthy conditions, which unleashed a brief crime wave, gave anti-labor politicians the opportunity to pass laws forbidding public sector organizing and collective bargaining across the country. These laws had a chilling effect on workers, and on the American Federation of Labor, which, for the most part, ignored public sector workers for the next fifteen years.
In 1935 the federation granted a charter to the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The CIO (Congress of Industral Organizations, which had split from the AFL and become a competing union federation) chartered two public employee unions in 1937, the United Federal Workers of America, and the State, County and Municipal Workers of America. These small left-led unions relied on direct action mobilization and connections with larger CIO unions to advocate for their members, but achieved only scattered successes.
Following World War II, public workers attempted to organize again, and many participated in the strike wave of 1945-46. Teachers in St. Paul, Minnesota walked off their jobs protesting low pay and won substantial improvements. Among the half dozen city-wide general strikes in 1946 was one centering on public employees in Rochester, New York, who had invited AFSCME to organize them.
The CIO, hoping to take advantage of the post-war militant mood, merged its two public employee unions into the United Public Workers of America, also in 1946. At its peak it claimed a hundred thousand members. Los Angeles was one stronghold of this union, which organized large numbers of minority blue collar workers in public hospitals, sanitation, and the post office. But the CIO expelled the UPWA in 1950, and helped to destroy it with raiding and red baiting. The national union turned in its charter in 1952. A number of the UPWA’s locals survived for a time as stand-alone unions, but more often the remnants were absorbed by other unions, and occasionally by public employee associations.
The associations did not collectively bargain, and ranged in attitude toward unionism from indifferent to fiercely opposed. They gave members an organizational structure for pressuring state and local governments in other ways. Three of the oldest and largest of the statewide public employee associations were the California Teachers Association (CTA), which descended through predecessor groups back to 1863; the California School Employees Association (CSEA), founded in 1926, to represent the interests of non-teaching or classified school workers; and the California State Employees Association (also CSEA), established in 1931. The associations advocated for their members around personnel policies and retirement issues, and provided a number of low-cost services, including group insurance, legal representation, credit unions, and discount purchases.
A growing sentiment for unionization
By the 1960s many public employee associations harbored a growing sentiment for unionization. The people who shared these feelings were greatly encouraged by President Kennedy’s signature in 1962 on Executive Order 10988, establishing the right of federal workers to engage in collective bargaining.
Firefighters were the first group of California public employees to gain a law, in 1959, officially allowing them to organize, through the efforts of their union, the California Federation of Fire Fighters, affiliated with the International Association of Fire Fighters. But the law was silent on collective bargaining, and in line with national IAFF policy, the Fire Fighters Act prohibited strikes.
Minimal organizing and representation rights came with the George Brown Act in 1961, after pro-union forces within the California State Employees Association pushed for the law. The Brown Act did not mandate elections to represent units of workers, nor collective bargaining; it was not a “little NLRA,” as some public union militants hoped to see.
George Brown had run for the Assembly after working as a civil engineer in the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, where he had been a member of one of the city’s oldest employee organizations, the Engineers and Architects Association, and served for a time as its business agent. IBEW Local 18’s leadership supported his candidacy on the condition that he carry a bill enabling organizing and collective bargaining for public employees.
But not all unions were on board this bill. In fact, what kept the Brown Act from creating a California public sector NLRA was not conservative legislative opposition, but fierce lobbying from the Building Services Employees Union, AFL (later SEIU). George Hardy and other BSEU leaders were not opposed to public employee collective bargaining. They just believed that they were not yet strong enough to win representation elections against the employee associations.
The Brown Act demonstrated a new willingness by legislators to consider broadened rights for public employees, and revealed the spectrum of public employees' opinions regarding unions. In some cases, existing associations were resistant to change, and their members formed new organizations to challenge them. In others pro-union workers were able to take over leadership and begin to transform the old associations into unions from within. These various paths eventually led public employees through direct action and unionization to advocacy for the creation of collective bargaining laws.
For more on California’s labor history, you can buy Fred Glass’s From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement (University of California Press) here.
Fred Glass is the author of From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement (UC Press, 2016), a retired City College of San Francisco Labor Studies instructor, and a former member of the State Committee of California DSA.