Federal troops escort a train through fist-shaking workmen in Chicago in this drawing of the 1894 Pullman strike. As American as anti-union tactics

Thousands of teachers, nurses and other public employees have made camp in Madison, Wis. They are holding out against the efforts of Scott Walker, the new conservative governor, to strip public-sector workers of their collective-bargaining rights as part of a bill to balance the budget.

The public employees have agreed to cuts in wages and benefits. But Walker won’t budge on the anti-union provisions.


What the Madison protesters fear is that Walker is driven by an ideology that is hostile to unions. And that the dismantling of the public-sector unions in Wisconsin may have fatal consequences for labor rights across America.

They have reason to fear. Walker, a tea party Republican who is backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, follows in America’s militant conservative tradition. There is a long history, dating to the 19th century, of powerful business and political leaders, who never reconciled to the idea that unions have a place in American society.

Over the past 30 years, a combination of corporate campaigns and conservative political attacks has undermined collective bargaining. Through varied efforts, U.S. leaders in business and politics have been able to strip a growing number of employees, both in the public and private sector, of the right to form associations of their choosing.

With less than 7 percent of the private sector organized, public employee unions stand as a bulwark of the U.S. labor movement. That bulwark is now under siege in Ohio, Indiana and other states. Defeat in the old union stronghold of Wisconsin would be a major blow.

Wisconsin is the latest chapter in a long history of conservative American militancy against the organizing rights of working people.

In the 1880s, during the last Gilded Age, U.S. railway employees, coal miners and other workers built some of the world’s most powerful labor organizations. But corporate leaders would have none of it.

Private armies of labor spies, Pinkerton private investigators and gun thugs hunted labor activists. Blacklists drove union supporters out of workplaces — and out of town. Corporate-friendly courts and legislatures criminalized strikes and other labor activities. For decades, the right of association — and, with it, basic First Amendment rights — was a dead letter in industrial places across America.

The Great Depression changed all this. The Wagner Act of 1935 put workers’ rights to association into federal law, opening the legal door to join unions. Workers marched through that door by the millions.

But the Wagner Act also left many workers outside its protections. Farm and domestic labor were exempted. This was done partly at the insistence of white supremacists, who objected to union rights in these job categories worked by large numbers of people of color. Despite the efforts of Cesar Chavez, farm workers are still exempt.

The Wagner Act also excluded public-sector workers. In 1959, Wisconsin led the way as the first state to recognize public employees’ right to collective bargaining. In a close alliance with the civil rights movement, public-sector unions soon spread from coast to coast. But they met stiff resistance — especially in the South.

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, while helping African-American sanitation workers gain collective-bargaining rights. Today, Tennessee has outlawed those rights.

In the late 1930s, conservatives vilified the Wagner Act as socialistic and un-American. Unions had no place in their corporate visions of a free society.

With the Cold War, conservatives such as Sens. Robert Taft (R-Ohio) and Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) seized on fears of communism to break the union movement.

The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, known by its critics as the “slave labor act,” imposed sharp restrictions on what labor could and could not do. It endorsed right-to-work laws in mainly Southern states, which prohibited contracts requiring employees in a given workplace to join unions. It also provided harsh sanctions on pickets, solidarity strikes, boycotts and other labor activities that had given unions strength in the first place.

In 1981, soon after President Ronald Reagan took office, the full weight of Taft-Hartley was clear. One of Reagan’s first acts of domestic policy, and perhaps the most consequential, was his decision to break PATCO, the union of the air traffic controllers.

By firing and permanently replacing the PATCO members, Reagan threw open the door for a corporate crusade against labor. From Phelps-Dodge Copper in Arizona to International Paper in Maine, corporations across the country copied Reagan’s playbook: refusing to bargain with unions and then filling the jobs of striking workers with permanent replacements.

Meanwhile, the Taft-Hartley rules tied workers in knots with arrests, fines and injunctions. Within a generation, the strength of private-sector unions had been cut in half.

Unions did plenty to hurt their own cause. Bureaucratic inertia, factionalism, corruption and poor political choices all took a toll. Would more responsive and democratic unions be in better shape?

Perhaps. But what we do know is that the conservative movement and many corporate leaders saw unions as antithetical to their ideological notions of free-market capitalism.

Since the 1930s, unions served as the main counterbalance to corporate power. They provided much needed security for millions of working families. Even for those not in unions, many employers kept up wages and offered other benefits to keep unions at bay.

Unions also helped make America a more equitable society. They fought to give workers a weekend and the 40-hour week. They demanded that the rich pay their fair share of taxes. And they put a check on the high pay of corporate executives.

The post-PATCO dismantling of unions has made life less secure and less equitable. In a recent New York Times op-ed, columnist Charles Blow presented a chart indicating that, by several measures of well-being, the United States ranks among the “worst of the worst.” Of the 33 “advanced economies,” the United States suffers, for example, the highest rate of food insecurity. Only Hong Kong and Singapore have greater income inequality.

There is no single explanation for how the U.S. landed in this place. But the sorry state of the American union movement is surely part of the answer.

But why are unions in such dire straits? The usual explanations have to do with economic changes. Unions were labeled as dinosaurs with the passing of the smokestack industries. Now, with public-sector unions, we hear that collective bargaining is incompatible with the new realities of tight budgets.

Changes in the economy can explain only so much, however. The economies of Canada, Australia and much of Europe share much with that of the U.S. And the labor movement in those countries has also struggled. But only 12 percent of the U.S. work force is covered by collective bargaining. In Canada, it is more than 30 percent. Finland, with its vaunted high-tech economy, has 95 percent of its work force under collective-bargaining agreements.

Today’s assault on public-sector unions could have even less to do with new fiscal realities. Europe also has had its share of tight budgets. But in Europe, public employees’ right of association is considered a fundamental right

Laws and policies that violate the rights of workers and employees are another index that could rank the U.S. among the “worst of the worst.” Among countries that call themselves democracies, only the United States allows corporations to fire and permanently replace workers in labor disputes. Only in America does the law apply tough sanctions against solidarity strikes and other union activities.

Walker and his Koch brother friends are giving us a good picture of the ambitions of the conservative movement. And the determined Madison protests of thousands of public employees and their allies are giving us a lesson in how to respond.

Charles Postel is an associate professor of history at San Francisco State University. He won the Bancroft Prize for “The Populist Vision.”