Chapter 11. “Compulsory Unionism”: Sylvester Petro and the Career of an Anti-Union Idea, 1957–1987

The Politics of Austerity and the Conservative Offensive against US Public Sector Unions, 2008-2012

“…The legislative attack on public sector unionism that gave rise to a political firestorm in Wisconsin and other union strongholds since the election of 2010 was not just a reaction to the contemporary economic difficulties faced by the government. Rather, it was the result of a longstanding political hostility of the USA's modern conservative movement to unionism and collective bargaining per se (Lichtenstein and Shermer, 2012;McCartin and Vinel, 2012), and of a series of political-economic developments which galvanized the efforts of conservative Republicans to turn back the clock to public sector's "pre-collective bargaining era"-viz. the era prior to "the battles for [,] and eventual passage of [,] the first state statute permitting collective bargaining in the public sector in Wisconsin in 1959" (Slater, 2004: 9).…”

“…Indeed, the GOP has declared war on even the most prosaic forms of private sector collective bargaining", whilst its "rightward lurch" has also been manifest in the way "the libertarian assault on government itself has transformed and hardened their opposition to unionism in the public sector" (Lichtenstein, 2012: 31). Whereas for decades the main conservative critique of public sector unionism had arisen out of the presumptive challenge of public-sector unionism and "compulsory public-sector bargaining" to the sovereignty of the state (McCartin and Vinel, 2012;Petro, 1974), over the past three decades or so "this charge has been turned on its head. Today, the argument goes, public sector unions are too powerful because they sustain a 1977 1979 1981 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 strong and intrusive state, not because they subvert it" (Lichtenstein, 2012: 31).…”