Public-Safety Unions and the Development of Police and Fire Departments

• In Event: The Political Economy of Local Governments and Police Departments and Unions

Abstract

The early to mid-20th century was a period of growth in American cities, and with that growth came rapid developments in municipal police and fire departments—the two largest departments in most U.S. city governments. During these same decades, moreover, unions of firefighters and police officers formed in many cities across the United States in states ranging from Pennsylvania to Washington to Wyoming. This early and mid-century expansion in public-sector unions has largely been overlooked by social scientists; most research on the rise of public-sector unions focuses on teachers’ unions and the role state collective bargaining laws played in fueling the rise of public-sector unions in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In our recent research, however, we have shown that firefighters in many cities started organizing into unions half a century before this—and that the advocacy of firefighters’ unions contributed to the adoption of municipal civil service in the first decades of the 20th century (Anzia and Trounstine 2023). This raises a question: Did public-safety unions influence the development of police and fire departments beyond the adoption of civil service, and during the critical years of urban growth and private-sector labor strength in the mid-20th century?

In this paper, we first expand our existing dataset of pre-1940 locals of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) spanning over a thousand U.S. municipalities to include 1) the mid-century years up to 1970 as well as 2) city organizations of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) from 1943 to 1970. In addition to presenting a descriptive analysis of the expansion and growth of both IAFF and FOP during the middle decades of the 20th century, we combine these data on early public safety unions with data on the presence of private-sector unions in the same set of cities. In spite of the fact that private- and public-sector unions operated under very different legal arrangements at this time, with private-sector collective bargaining sanctioned by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act and public-sector collective bargaining still formally illegal, our preliminary evidence suggests that the early organization of public-safety unions was linked to the activity of private-sector unions in ways that have not yet been appreciated.

The second part of the analysis in this paper will examine the relationship between the unionization of a city’s police officers and firefighters and the development of city police and fire departments using data we have digitized from the annual yearbooks of the International City/County Management Association. As motivation, we note that historian Joseph Slater (2004) documents cases as early as the 1940s in which employee organizations in many cities managed to secure better wages and working conditions through informal negotiations and verbal agreements with government employers. That government employers sometimes made and upheld verbal agreements with them even when collective bargaining was illegal suggests that government employee organizations had considerable political clout in many cities well before the 1960s. We will use our new dataset of police and fire department statistics from over a thousand cities to assess whether cities with unionized police and fire employees had higher employment, less turnover, better compensation, and/or more advanced equipment than comparable cities without unionized police and fire employees. In addition, we will connect data on both the presence of public safety unions and these employment and equipment variables to data on city fire loss and crime. The results will therefore shed light on not only the extent of and reasons for early organization of municipal employees but also on how these early unions may have affected the development of city police and fire departments during this crucial period of development in American cities.

Authors

• Sarah F. Anzia, University of California-Berkeley

• Jessica Luce Trounstine, Vanderbilt University