Across more than half a century of declining US union density, labor scholars and practitioners have argued about how to revitalize the labor movement. Some suggest stronger labor laws and enforcement can bring unions back, while others claim that organizing methods and militant leadership are more determinative of union success. But this debate’s focus on union decline has led it to neglect the principal pattern of broader US union growth: periodic upsurges when significant numbers of workers mobilize to improve their lives by building organizations and winning formal collective bargaining rights. How upsurges come to be — whether caused by crises, a favorable state opportunity structure, or factors more endogenous to unions and workers — is also not well understood. I therefore investigate:
- what conditions give rise to upsurges and shape their development, and
- how unions and workers can influence these conditions.
My dissertation answers these questions through a study of the public sector union upsurge of the 1960s. My scope begins with attempts at public sector unionism in the preceding decades, in part through unions with high-ranking Black leaders like the United Public Workers. I interrogate the influence of the repressive configuration of power which followed the post-WWII strike wave, and examine how public sector unions learned from the successes and defeats of this era. I then turn to the sequencing of the upsurge, charting how public sector union density doubled in the span of a decade, and focusing on the case of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). I create an original dataset of AFSCME’s state-by-state growth and closely compare its divergent pathways in two states, New York and Tennessee. At all levels of analysis, I highlight the role of Black workers and union leaders and the upsurge’s interwovenness with the Black freedom struggle.
