Description:

Please join the American Politics Workshop as we host Sarah Anzia, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy & Political Science at UC Berkeley.

Abstract: With the passage of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the American labor movement cemented the right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. However, the NLRA explicitly excluded the public sector. Government employees did not achieve similar legal protections until decades later, and even then, the laws varied considerably by state. Because of this, scholars have argued that public- and private-sector unions developed along separate paths, and that before the 1960s, organizations of government employees remained small, weak, and ineffective. In this paper, we show that this characterization of the pre-1960 public-sector labor movement is woefully incomplete. Using a new dataset of municipal employee organizations, we show that throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, hundreds of cities had organized workers, including firefighters, police, and other public-sector workers (like those in the sanitation and roads departments). By the 1950s, numerous employee unions had engaged in strikes and had achieved written agreements with their city employers. We present evidence that the timing and location of public-sector organization during this period were closely linked to those of the private sector, and we propose that similar inspiration and energy likely animated both movements. Thus, despite very different legal contexts before 1960, we show that the development of public- and private-sector unions followed parallel paths, and that the building of the American labor movement was not as disjointed as is often claimed. During this era of state building and nationalization, our findings hint at the possibility that much of what we understand about national American politics actually started with politics in hundreds of local governments—and changed the course of history by spreading upward to state governments, to national effect.

Sarah Anzia studies American politics with a focus on state and local government, elections, interest groups, political parties, and public policy. She is the author of Local Interests: Politics, Policy, and Interest Groups in US City Governments (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which evaluates the political activity of interest groups in US local governments and how interest groups shape local public policies on housing, business tax incentives, policing, and public service provision more broadly. Her first book, Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups (University of Chicago Press, 2014), examines how the timing of elections can be manipulated to affect both voter turnout and the composition of the electorate, which, in turn, affects election outcomes and public policy. She has also written about the political activity and influence of public-sector unions, the politics of public pensions, policy feedback, women in politics, political parties, and the historical development of electoral institutions. Her work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and other scholarly journals. She has a PhD in political science from Stanford University and an MPP from the Harris School at the University of Chicago.

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