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In 1975–76, New York City declared a fiscal crisis when the large financial institutions refused to extend their usual short-term loans to the city government unless the political establishment and the public unions agreed to severe budget reductions. The unions and the Democratic mayor, Abraham Be…

[...] New York’s other unions, some of them among the largest and most powerful in the country, were mostly indifferent to public employees and particularly unsympathetic to teacher unionism: teachers were college-educated and their collective profile did not fit into a labor movement of more than …

The labor movement has always advanced when workers were willing to risk their jobs to make gains—and even, on occasion, willing to risk their lives. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many who fought capital were virtually exiled from their homes and communities, especially in one-…

I am a member of a large (1.4 million-member) national union, the American Federation of Teachers, that offers high-interest credit cards, average-price auto insurance, long-term care insurance, and low-priced periodical subscriptions. It also spends a portion of my dues to support Democratic congr…

The conclusion one might draw from the dismal record of the last thirty years of union concessions is that collective bargaining, once an effective, although two-edged, weapon in labor’s struggle, has reached a watershed. Today, collective bargaining in production, service, and public sectors is mo…