The Inverse Ideational Development of Police and Teachers’ Unions

• In Event: Policing through the Lens of American Political Development

Abstract

Why are the politics of public safety unions (police, fire, corrections) so distinct from
other public-sector unions? While all unions negotiate labor contracts and represent workers’
interests, public safety unions are distinct. Unlike their counterparts, they are decidedly
conservative politically, their leaders employ overtly racist and otherwise discriminatory rhetoric,
and they openly antagonize both citizens and elected leaders to advance their political aims—the
exact opposite approach of other public-sector unions. What explains the difference? The extant
scholarship reductively analyzes public-sector collective bargaining campaigns as analogous. I
intervene in this paper to demonstrate that public-sector unions developed quite differently.
Using police and teachers’ unions as comparative case studies and analyzing their collective
bargaining campaigns from the end of World War I through the mid-1970s, I demonstrate that
their engagement with Progressive-era politics set them on inverse paths of ideological
development. Teachers’ unions initially presented their members as “professionals” with
specialized knowledge. However, as the profession became more racially diverse and engaged
with leftist and radical political movements, teachers’ unions eventually presented their members
as “workers” closely aligned with their industrial counterparts and demanding similar reforms.
Police unions, however, took the opposite approach, first aligning themselves with industrial
workers through the American Federation of Labor at the end of World War I, then adopting the
“professional” identity and creating independent fraternal societies after the failure of the Boston
Police Strike of 1919 and in reaction to urban demographic shifts and the political upheaval of
the mid-20th Century. This inverse ideational development led police and teachers’ unions to
develop different political rhetoric, tactics, and coalitions that persist until today.

Author

• Bryan Brentus Green, James Madison University