Paper reviewing opinions and developments in the relationship of civil servant collective bargaining to the long-established civil service or merit system in the USA at the national level and local level of government - examines the impact of increasing trade unionization of civil servants, the right to strike, freedom of association, etc., and comments on relevant labour legislation. References.

This book offers an extensive survey and synthesis of the economic literature on trade unions and collective bargaining and their impact on micro-and macro-economic outcomes. The authors demonstrate the effects of collective bargaining in different country settings and time periods. A comprehensive reference, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of labor policy as well as to policy makers and anyone with an interest in the economic consequences of unionism.

From the dawn of the twentieth century to the early 1960s, public-sector unions generally had no legal right to strike, bargain, or arbitrate, and government workers could be fired simply for joining a union. Public Workers is the first book to analyze why public-sector labor law evolved as it did, separate from and much more restrictive than private-sector labor law, and what effect this law had on public-sector unions, organized labor as a whole, and by extension all of American politics. Joseph E. Slater shows how public-sector unions survived, represented their members, and set the stage for the most remarkable growth of worker organization in American history. Slater examines the battles of public-sector unions in the workplace, courts, and political arena, from the infamous Boston police strike of 1919, to teachers in Seattle fighting a yellow-dog rule, to the BSEIU in the 1930s representing public-sector janitors, to the fate of the powerful Transit Workers Union after New York City purchased the subways, to the long struggle by AFSCME that produced the nation's first public-sector labor law in Wisconsin in 1959. Slater introduces readers to a determined and often-ignored segment of the union movement and expands our knowledge of working men and women, the institutions they formed, and the organizational obstacles they faced.

The chapters in this anthology deal with many of these all-encompassing constraints and how the various participants seek to deal with them. Model agreements, negotiating levers, the balance of power between managers and government employees, contracting-out versus producing in-house, the impact of bargaining unit structure on productivity, the relationship of municipal budget making to collective bargaining, public employee union growth and organizing trends, and many other topics are dealt with in this volume. These issues are discussed in the context of several specific types of public employees such as: municipal protection employees, mass transit workers, health professionals in relation to government service, and, the armed forces and civilian federal employees.