Professional Affiliation

Associate Professor of History, Georgetown University

Expert Bio

Since receiving my Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Binghamton, I have been interested in examining the intersection of labor relations, politics, and government policy. My first book, Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations examined this intersection at a formative moment in American industrial relations, during the years surrounding World War I. That book located the origins of New Deal-era patterns and structures of labor relations in the struggle of trade unionists, reformers, government officials, and private employers to shape the contours of "industrial democracy" both in workplaces and federal policymaking. Since publishing that book I have been concerned with exploring the history of labor relations in the post-New Deal era. This has led me to focus on an understudied area of U.S. labor history, the rise of public sector labor unionism since 1960. My current project examines the interaction between government and public sector unions, focusing on the federal sector. I argue that the rise of public sector labor unions in the years since 1960 deeply complicated patterns of labor relations in the United States. On the one hand, the growth of public sector unions compensated for union membership losses in the private sector and provided organized labor a new source of political influence during an era when private sector patterns of labor relations had begun to break down. On the other hand, public sector unions often became a lightning rod for anti-union sentiment and raised a number of difficult political issues such as the extent to which government workers ought to have the right to strike. I contend that to fully understand recent U.S. labor history we must appreciate the extent to which developments in the public and private sector influenced each other. And I seek to examine the ways in which this interaction in turn has influenced issues of governance. I see my current project as a way to combine my longstanding interests in historical scholarship and contemporary issues of public policy, the interests that inform my teaching at Georgetown University.

 

Education

B.A., College of the Holy Cross; M.A. and Ph.D., State University of New York at Binghamton

 

Experience

Lecturer, University of Rhode Island

Assistant Professor/Associate Professor, State University of New York College at Geneseo

Associate Professor, Georgetown University



 

Expertise

20th Century U.S. labor and political history, public employee unions

Wilson Center Project

"Unions of the State: Collective Bargaining and the Politics of Governance, 1960-2002"

Project Summary

This project will examine public sector labor relations since 1960, focusing on the federal sector. It will trace the history of federal government collective bargaining from President Kennedy's Executive Order 10988 through the aftermath of September 11, 2001, examining the conflicts that repeatedly flared over the scope of bargaining and the proper place of unions in federal agencies and showing how federal policies shaped governance at the national level and influenced state and local patterns. It will closely examine the causes and results of the 1981 air traffic controller strike and analyze how federal actions in events like this affected both state and local government practices and private sector labor relations.

Major Publications

• Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-21, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997);
• Co-editor with Melvyn Dubofsky. American Labor: A Documentary History (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004);
• Co-editor with Michael Kazin. Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006)