Public Workers in Service of America: A Reader

How much do we know about the history of public sector workers, and how important are they to the future of the labor movement? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States has roughly the same number of public and private sector unionized workers, even though the private sector employs about 85 percent of all workers. Black workers are also more likely to be unionized than whites in both sectors, but especially in public service.Public Workers in Service of America: A Reader is a much-needed historical survey of public service workers from the late 1800s to the present. Public service (or government) worker literature has accelerated over the last two decades, as Joseph McCartin points out in the foreword, and this book reflects that trend. Editors Frederick Gooding Jr. and Eric Yellin announce, “Our definition of public worker is also rooted in a recognition that public work is inherently and uniquely political” (5). They further argue, “Our aim here is unique: no other volume has sought to make connections across the history of American public work” (7).Public Workers is organized thematically and roughly chronologically. The chapters are organized into four parts, delving into topics likely both familiar and revelatory to readers. The essays by leading labor historians include extensive discussions on gender and labor, and most have a strong focus on workers of color. As Eileen Boris puts it in the afterword, “Race and gender, what I have named ‘racialized gender,’ informs class experiences” (234). Discussions of state, local, and federal workplaces provide a well-balanced overview of major issues in public sector labor.Part I examines “the politics of public work” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It begins with Cathleen Cahill's essay on the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) and its “unusual” practice for a federal agency as “an early employer of women”—42 percent, in fact, by 1898 (18). But those jobs were mainly reserved for white women, while the OIA hired Native women as “a cheap source of labor” to run OIA schools. Native women activists, including OIA workers, “founded the Society of American Indians in 1911” and debated working for the OIA as an oppressive institution (26). Next, Eric Yellin extends his previous work on Black federal workers, arguing that “public jobs obtained by a crucial combination of political loyalty and professional merit . . . have frequently been African Americans’ best means of seeking reparations, some compensation, for the financial thievery of American racism” (38).Part II takes up the promise and betrayals of “good government jobs” for African Americans and women from the early twentieth century to the present. Frederick Gooding Jr. extends his own work on both the significance and frustration in federal jobs that African Americans found in Washington, DC, against the constant barriers of discrimination. Katherine Turk then analyzes contradictions in women's employment in that same period (e.g., white women replacing Black men in the federal bureaucracy in the 1910s but encountering gender discrimination in the 1930s). Turk notes that in the fight for comparable worth, “public workers’ distinct points of leverage—the nature of their work and having the state as their employer—positioned them to attack structured inequalities across the labor force toward the end of the twentieth century” (86).Part III, on “organizing public workers,” begins with Joseph Slater's updated examination of the failed 1919 Boston police strike that “inhibited the growth of public sector unions for decades” as opponents predicted catastrophe if any public workers were allowed to organize (114). “Without collective bargaining rights, public sector unions used various tactics to represent their members,” Slater observes, while also calling for “nuance” in the contemporary police reform debate over restricting police union rights (116, 124). William Jones follows by uncovering forgotten struggles by Black sanitation workers in the South between 1938 and 1960 as part of a long backstory to the pivotal 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike. All of these strikes saw Black workers pushing the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) to represent them. Francis Ryan wraps up this section by combining those two themes in his study of Black sanitation workers in Philadelphia slowing down trash pickup in 1970 for twenty-three days in a successful protest against the hiring of a police inspector as their new boss.Part IV looks at workers’ response to neoliberalism in a pair of essays on topics a few decades apart yet still quite related. Amy Zanoni shows us the campaigns at Cook County Hospital in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s where employees resisted chronic cutbacks in patient care as part of their struggle for workplace justice. Her work is followed by Jon Shelton's study of teacher activism in the 2010s culminating in the spring 2018 “massive statewide strikes” in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona (209). Shelton contextualizes the long struggle of teachers not just for collective bargaining rights but also over “the very purpose of education,” adding that today teachers “have increasingly advanced an organizing vision that places the needs of the community in which they teach alongside their working conditions” (211, 223).The editors note that all essays in this collection focus on public worker agency. This makes their decision to only occasionally include postal workers all the more curious. The 1970 nationwide postal wildcat strike represented one of the most successful and consequential of that era's rank-and-file uprisings against both employers and union leadership. It drew on past public worker strikes in New York City, where that eight-day wildcat would begin, in turn inspiring other federal worker organizing efforts. The post office's long history itself is instructive, revealing how postal workers—especially African Americans—have navigated, reoriented, and struggled to make their workplace and unions more responsive to the public good.But this is a minor complaint. Public Workers in Service of America is a welcome addition to the ever-expanding literature of the American labor movement and is especially useful for labor history classes as well as general readers. Here's hoping that in 2024 and beyond we see even more studies on public workers, their unions, and their rank-and-file movements.