Divided ANC undermines Ramaphosa’s capacity to govern

Significance These challenges are interlinked, and all threaten Ramaphosa’s standing over the medium term. They also influence Ramaphosa’s ability to manage an intensely divided ANC, with dissident factions repeatedly attempting to undermine his authority. Impacts Fraught negotiations with public-sector unions will test Ramaphosa’s ability to keep COSATU as a key backer. A rocky vaccine roll-out schedule, coupled with new COVID-19 ‘waves’, would hurt Ramaphosa’s public popularity. A steady drip of corruption allegations against ANC officials could hurt the party at local polls scheduled between August and November.

South African budget plans may prove too ambitious

Significance However, the MTBPS relies even more heavily on getting powerful public-sector unions to agree to unprecedented wage freezes over the next three years, putting its credibility in doubt at a time when Pretoria urgently needs to win back the confidence of investors. Impacts The risk is rising that the country could be forced to go to the IMF for a full structural adjustment programme within a couple of years. Funds for South African Airways (SAA)'s rescue will not cover the cost of creating a new carrier, which depends on strategic investment. The spending cuts could weigh further on poor-quality delivery of public services and may also dampen an economic recovery.

South Africa's SAA points to wider reform headaches

Significance Uncertainty persists over SAA’s turnaround strategy, as well as that for other ailing SOEs including arms manufacturer Denel and the Land Bank. Operational problems at troubled power utility Eskom have resulted in renewed ‘load shedding’ (power outages), hampering economic activity. Impacts More state funding for SAA could embolden public-sector unions in their ongoing pay dispute with government and undermine a recent IMF loan. The rumoured bolstering of the public enterprises minister's powers over SOE boards will raise fears of renewed political interference. SAA's retrenchment packages and related add-ons will set the bar high for other potential SOE retrenchment processes, most notably Eskom.

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.

Racial Pay Parity in the Public Sector: The Overlooked Role of Employee Mobilization

Rising economic inequality has aggravated long-standing labor market disparities, with one exception: government employment. This article considers the puzzle of black-white wage parity in the American public sector. African Americans are more likely to work in the public than in the private sector, and their wages are higher there. The article builds on prior work emphasizing institutional factors conditioning this outcome to argue that employee mobilization can motor it. As public sector unions gained political influence postwar, their large constituencies of black, blue-collar workers, drawing on both militant and nonviolent tactics of the urbanizing civil rights movement, advocated for improved working conditions. Archival sources confirm this pattern at the federal level. The employment and activism of African Americans in low-skilled federal jobs pivoted union attention to blue-collar issues and directly contributed to the enactment of a transparent, universal wage schedule for the blue-collar federal workforce (the Federal Wage System). The result was greater pay parity for African Americans, as well as for other disadvantaged groups.

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.

Spontaneity, Coalition Structure, and Strategic Choice

Following the Great Recession, austerity programs and restrictions on the public sector were introduced worldwide. In this article, I ask how and why labor coalitions in two states used differing organizational structures to respond to “shock politics” that severely restricted public-sector unions in 2011. I find the availability or lack of a citizen-initiated veto referendum shaped but did not completely explain differences in strategic choices between unions in Wisconsin and Ohio. Rather, tensions among allies and lack of time for strategic planning also contributed to a nonhierarchical coalition in Wisconsin, while Ohio unions had ample time to create a bureaucratic coalition and plan a successful veto referendum campaign. I argue that given sufficient time to respond to political threats, hierarchical organizations can promote efficient, effective deployment of some political tactics.

Do Teachers Want Democracy? Deliberative Culture and Teachers’ Evaluations of Schools

Teachers have become important actors in national, state, and, especially, local politics. Most research on the political behavior of teachers focuses on their relationship with public-sector unions. While extremely useful, little is known about how teachers form the evaluations of schools and districts that motivate their political behavior. I propose and test a new theory of how teachers form evaluations of school satisfaction that centers on deliberative democracy. I argue that, in addition to student performance, teachers factor in how “deliberative” school districts are when expressing satisfaction. Using two separate survey analyses, this article finds that teachers of districts with a stronger deliberative culture are significantly more likely to feel satisfied with the schools in their districts. Moreover, in districts with a stronger deliberative culture, teachers and students are more likely to be included in decision-making at the school level. This latter relationship holds true even for teachers in districts with high levels of student poverty.

The Recent Evolution of Wisconsin Public Worker Unionism since Act 10

This paper examines the experience of four major public sector unions in Wisconsin since the passage of Wisconsin Act 10 in 2011. The four unions are the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT-Wisconsin), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), an affiliate of the National Education Association. Wisconsin’s prior legal framework for public sector collective bargaining is explained and compared to the new highly restrictive framework established by Act 10. That new framework, established by state legislation, is analyzed, as are its impacts on the membership, revenues, structures, and practices of the four unions. In general, we find the impacts to have been very dramatic, with a loss of active union membership averaging approximately 70 percent overall, and concomitant dramatic losses in union revenues and power. These shocks have engendered the restructuring of two of the unions examined, the downsizing of the third, and the de facto exiting from the state’s public sector in another. There have also been significant changes in representation practices in one union, but less so in the others. We conclude by discussing best union practices based on this experience, as well as considering what the recent public sector union history in Wisconsin may portend for public worker union membership nationwide, since the issuing of the Janus Decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.