The United States has one of the most anti-union minded courts in history today, according to a University of Wisconsin-Green Bay professor who highlighted the evolution of public sector unionization in a two-part lecture at Madison this week.
Jon Shelton, assistant professor of democracy and justice studies at UW-Green Bay, came to Madison to speak about the theme “Against the Public: Teachers, Unions and the Decline of Unionism in the 1970s.”
Part one of Shelton’s lecture is entitled “Teacher Strikes, the Public Interest and the Neoliberal Turn of the 1970s.”
Shelton started his discussion with an explanation of the events leading up to teacher strikes in the 1970s. After the Great Depression, labor wages were cut, hurting government workers, including teachers. Unionization was an opportunity to offer teachers higher wages and better working conditions, Shelton said.
“By the early 1970s, teachers in Philly had seen an increase of wages, as a result of unionization, in addition to better working conditions,” Shelton said.
In the 1970s, Philadelphia was on the verge shutting down all of their public schools. Today, Philadelphia public schools almost had to start school a month late due to a lack of funding. In addition, students in Philadelphia can expect to not have guidance counselors or school nurses this academic year.
Pennsylvania was one of the first states to give teachers the right to strike and unionize in the early 1970s.
“It was one of the most far-reaching labor laws in the United States,” Shelton said. “Interestingly, this law, which gave public sector workers the right to collectively bargain the right to strike … The act actually hoped to make strikes less frequent by giving public sector workers the right to strike.”
Part two of Shelton’s lecture, “Compulsory Unionism’ in the Public Sector: The Eclipse of Labor-Liberalism,” looked at the other side Unionism. Shelton began his second lecture with a discussion about the Supreme Court and their role in Unions.
He discussed the case Harris v. Quinn in which a mother from Illinois, Pamela Harris, cared for her mentally disabled son at home while receiving government benefits. The government made her and other homecare workers unionize, and the homecare workers fought against the new law through the Service Employees International Union. Ultimately, SEIU lost the case.
“The most interesting thing to me about this is the way that she frames the union,” Shelton said. “She objects to having ‘Unionism in my home’ and argues that it ‘intrudes in our family.’ That’s really fascinating to me because she’s certainly not worried about the government intruding when it provides Medicaid funds.”
The lecture concludes with a comparison of today’s issues of unionization. Almost 40 percent of public sector workers are involved with unions in comparison to less than 7 percent of private sector workers, Shelton said.
Today, the United States has one of the most anti-union courts in history, Shelton said. This correlates with the shift of the Supreme Court’s political views from Democratic to Republican, he said.
“Unionization is fine, as long as no one is forced to join or forced to pay anything,” Shelton said.
