The Supreme Court’s Union Decision

by Tom Haughey

I’m old enough to remember a time when public sector unions played a very limited roll in American life. The postal workers were successful in organizing in the late 1800s, but that was pretty much it. In 1919 a police union was formed in Boston and went on strike. That resulted in widespread looting, several deaths, and the National Guard being called in to restore order. That strike had a chilling effect on further union organizing. FDR was adamantly opposed to unionizing government workers because government employers were the voting public themselves who established laws to govern everybody. Then in the late 1950s the first state allowed collective bargaining.

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