was controlled by school administrators.
The watershed event came in 1961, when the AFT won a representation election in New York City. This victory set off an aggressive AFT campaign to organize teachers in other cities, forcing the NEA to compete as a union or risk losing its constituency. The early years of NEA-AFT competition brought thousands of districts under union control, with the NEA winning the lion’s share and maintaining its position of leadership-but now as a union rather than a professional association.
By the early 1980s, dramatic increases in union membership began to level off at a new equilibrium. As of 2001, this equilibrium still prevails and is quite stable, with the vast majority of teachers (outside the South) covered by collective bargaining. The NEA, which claimed a membership of 766,000 in 1961, now claims to have some 2.5 million members, about 2 million of whom are K-12 teachers. It has affiliates in all 50 states and is politically active throughout the country. The AFT has expanded by its own count from 70,821 members in 1961 to roughly one million members today, although only about half are teachers. As in the past, the AFT’s strength is in big cities.
Any effort to understand why the teacher unions succeeded as they did must begin by recognizing that their emergence was not an isolated development in the American labor movement. It happened during a time of spectacular growth among public-employee unions generally.
Several factors were responsible for this phenomenon, but a critical one is simply that the laws changed. Before the 1960s, states did not authorize public employees to engage in collective bargaining. In 1959, Wisconsin became the first state to enact a collective-bargaining law for public-sector workers, and over the next two decades most states followed suit. These laws created rights, duties, and procedures that made it easier for unions to organize and bargain. By the early 1980s, the percentage of unionized workers in government had skyrocketed from trivial levels two decades earlier to a robust 37 percent-where, as with teachers, it stabilized at a new equilibrium.
At the very time unions were succeeding dramatically in the public sector, they were stumbling badly in the private sector, in what was nothing short of a catastrophe for the labor movement. Why did teacher unions and other public sector unions do so well when private-sector unions-which had long benefited from union-promoting legal frameworks-fared so poorly?
There seem to be various causes at work. In the private sector, most employers know they will lose business to competitors if their costs increase, and this prompts them to resist unionization. Similarly, unions cannot make costly demands without losing jobs to nonunion firms, and this too limits their ability to organize and bargain. As a general matter, competition breeds trouble for unions; and over the past few decades, the private sector has become much more competitive.
The government environment is very different. Public agencies usually have no competition and are not threatened by loss of business if their costs go up, while unions know they are not putting jobs at risk by pressuring for all they can get. Government decisions on labor matters, moreover, are heavily influenced by politics rather than simple efficiency. In jurisdictions where unions are powerful, therefore, many public officials have incentives to submit to union demands even if they know the result will be higher costs and inefficiencies.
Given the lack of competition, and given the dominance of politics over efficiency, unions simply find it much easier to prosper in the public sector. It is no accident that the American labor movement has been kept afloat by the success of public-sector unions-and that the largest, most powerful union in the country is not the Teamsters or the United Auto Workers, but the National Education Association.
When it comes to the fundamentals of organization, the teacher unions are like all other unions: collective bargaining is their core function a