A Bibliography on Teacher Public Sector Unionism

This is the official bibliography for LAWCHA’s Teaching and Public Sector Unionism initiative. A full listing of our resources can be found on the Teaching Resources page. For an overview of teachers’ unions, see our featured article, “A Century of Teacher Organizing: What Can We Learn?”

Brief Bibliography

Alter, Tom. “‘It Felt Like Community’: Social Movement Unionism and the Chicago Teachers Union Strike of 2012.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 10:3 (Fall 2013), pp. 11-25.

Arneson, Eric, ed. Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-Class History. New York: Routledge, 2007. The entries below offer important, concise background information on their respective topics:

Leroux, Karen. “National Education Association.” 952-956.
Lyons, John F. “American Federation of Teachers.” 87-90.
Slater, Joseph E. “Public-Sector Unionism.” 1143-1149.

Lyons, John F. “Regional Variations in Union Activism of American Public Schoolteachers” in Education and the Great Depression: Lessons from a Global History, E. Thomas Ewing and David Hicks, eds. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.

McCartin, Joseph A. “‘A Wagner Act for Public Employees’: Labor’s Deferred Dream and the Rise of Conservatism, 1970-1976.” Journal of American History 95:1 (June 2008), pp. 123-148.

McCartin, Joseph. “Public Sector Unions and Worker Rights in Wisconsin” interview on “History for the Future.”

Murphy, Marjorie. Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900-1980. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.

_________. “Militancy in Many Forms: Teacher Strikes and Urban Insurrection, 1967-1974” in Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow, eds. Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below in the Long 1970s. London: Verso, 2010.

Podair, Jerald E. The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

Shaffer, Robert. “Where Are the Organized Public Employees? The Absence of Public Employee Unionism from U.S. History Textbooks, and Why It Matters.” Labor History 43:3 (2002), pp. 315-334.

Shelton, Jon. “Against the Public: The Pittsburgh Teachers Strike of 1975-1976 and the Crisis of the Labor-Liberal Coalition.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 10:2 (Summer 2013), pp. 55-75.

Urban, Wayne J. Why Teachers Organized. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982.

_________. Gender, Race, and the National Education Association: Professionalism and Its Limitations. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2000.

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