Why Public Sector Union Members Support Their Unions: Survey and Experimental Evidence

Despite their decline, unions, and especially public sector unions, remain important civic and economic associations. Yet, we lack an understanding of why public sector union members voluntarily support unions. We report on a field experiment conducted during a 2017 Iowa teachers union recertification election. We randomly assigned union members to receive emails describing union benefits and measured effects on turnout effort (N = 10,461). Members were more likely to try to vote when reminded of the unions’ professional benefits and community—but not legal protections or political representation. A follow-up survey identified the specific aspects of professional identity and benefits that members most valued and why. In a context where union membership and support is voluntary among professionalized workers, our findings emphasize the possibility of training for fostering shared identities and encouraging support for public sector unions. Our results have broader implications for understanding the public sector labor movement in a context of legal retrenchment.

Unionism in a Right-to-Work Environment: United Faculty of Florida from Stagnation to Crisis Mobilization to Power Building

The Janus vs. AFSCME District 31 legal decision forced all U.S. public-sector unions to operate under “right-to-work” conditions: any union fees for those covered by a union contract are now optional. Past experiences of successful public-sector unions operating in right-to-work states should offer lessons to all public-sector unions on how to succeed. This article examines the history and recent success of the United Faculty of Florida, a statewide higher education public-sector union. Critical turning points, crises, and lessons from that history are included.

Blue Endorsements Matter: How the Fraternal Order of Police Contributed to Donald Trump’s Victory

ABSTRACTConventional accounts of Donald Trump’s unexpected electoral victory stress idiosyncratic events and media celebrity because most observers assume this unusual candidate won without much organized support. However, considerable evidence suggests that the support of conservative organizational networks, including police unions such as the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), propelled Trump to victory. The FOP is both a public-sector union and a conservative, mass-membership fraternal association that was courted by the Trump campaign at a time of politically charged debates about policing. Four years before, the FOP had refused to endorse Republican candidate Mitt Romney because he opposed public-sector unionism, which provided fruitful and rare variation in interest-group behavior across electoral cycles. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I find that FOP lodge density contributed to a significant swing in vote share from Romney to Trump. Moreover, survey evidence indicates that police officers reported increased political engagement in 2016 versus 2012. Belying the notion that Trump lacked a “ground game,” this research suggests that he tapped into existing organizational networks, showing their enduring importance in electoral politics.

Public-sector Unions and Government Policy

Recent events, including the failed recall of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the Chicago teachers strike, have shed light on the relationship between state fiscal policy and public-sector union power. While a literature has developed focusing on various aspects of the link between public-sector unions and government policy, scholars have yet to reach consensus. In most cases, public-sector unions have multiple tools they can use to influence policy. We find that union political contributions and collective bargaining are associated with higher incomes for state and local employees and with higher public employment, both across state and local governments overall as well as within the education sector. We also find relatively little evidence that union activity influences total spending.

The Changing Face of Unions and White Labor Support for the Democratic Party

This manuscript examines the political behavior of White union members, with a focus on the differences between private sector and public sector union members. In the last several decades, private sector union membership has drastically declined, but public sector union membership has greatly increased. This has transformed the White unionized workforce from a group composed primarily of non-professional men with no college education to one that is much more female, college educated, and professional. We test the proposition that White public sector union members have greater incentives to support the Democratic Party than their private sector counterparts. The method employed is an examination of the presidential vote among both unionized and non-unionized Whites during the 1950s and the 2000s, using data from the American National Election Studies. Support among unionized Whites for Democratic presidential candidates in the 2000s came primarily from college educated and professional White union members, which represents a reversal of the pattern found during the 1950s. These results provide evidence that the White union members currently voting for Democratic candidates belong mainly to public sector unions.

“The Duty to Act Fairly”: Ethics, Legal Anthropology, and Labor Justice in the Manual Workers Union of Botswana

This paper analyses the significance of the Botswana High Court and Court of Appeal judgments of a case in which the Manual Worker Union, a blue-collar public sector union, challenged the Botswana Government to reinstate dismissed workers with all their past benefits. I examine the role of public ethics and morality in Botswana as reflected in key notions used by High Court judges, such as “the duty to act fairly” and “legitimate expectations,” and argue that legal anthropologists have neglected such ideas, despite their having become a bedrock of contemporary judicial reasoning. While anthropology has shown a renewed interest in ethics, issues of public ethics and morality remain relatively unexplored in contemporary legal anthropological debates. One has to go back to the work of Max Gluckman on reasonableness in judicial decision-making among the Barotse to find foundational anthropological insights into the morality and ethics of law in non-Western societies. In the legally plural context of Botswana, notions of equity and fairness, this paper argues, “permeate” the legal landscape.