Joseph A. McCartin: Public Unions: What's the Big Deal?

Joseph A. McCartin teaches history at Georgetown University and is the author of "Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America."

On Jan. 17, 1962, President Kennedy signed Executive Order 10988, bringing collective bargaining rights to most federal workers for the first time. Kennedy's order might be the least known of the string of significant events that made the 1960s such crucial years in American history. At the time Kennedy acted, very few workers at any level of government had won the right to bargain collectively with their employers. Federal action helped inspire many states and localities to follow suit, allowing their own workers to organize. This triggered a huge wave of unionization in the public sector that saw firefighters, teachers, sanitation workers, social workers and many others form unions in the 1960s and '70s.

For 20 years after Kennedy's order, public sector union rights were not controversial. To the contrary, they enjoyed bipartisan support — even from conservatism's leading light, Ronald Reagan. Reagan, as governor of California, presided over the extension of collective bargaining rights to state and local workers in 1968.

Over the course of the last 30 years, however, bipartisan support for public sector bargaining has eroded. And it was Reagan's breaking of the 1981 strike by PATCO, the union of air traffic controllers, that contributed to this shift. More recently, Gov. Scott Walker in 2011 cited that action as an inspiration for his effort to strip government workers of bargaining rights in Wisconsin. Yet in his day Reagan never went as far as Walker. In the PATCO case (and in other negotiations), he never challenged government workers' rights to bargain, only their right to strike illegally....