The Military, AFGE, and the Bid for Unionization

At the moment AFGE made its bid, the military had just entered one of the most critical periods in its long history. Though the switch to an all-volunteer force had been in the works since the mid-1960s and all of the candidates in the 1968 presidential primaries came out against the draft, the several years of lead time provided little advantage, especially for the army, the largest branch of the services.Footnote ¹⁰ In the midst of a protracted and largely disastrous war in Vietnam, the army was “utterly dependent” on the draft and gloomily faced the prospect of struggling to attract sufficient numbers of soldiers.Footnote ¹¹ It barely met its recruiting goals in the 1970s, resorting to lowering educational and physical standards.Footnote ¹² It also struggled to retain essential career soldiers, soldiers it desperately needed to keep the institution running.Footnote ¹³ Just months after its birth, the volunteer force risked being declared a failure.

As military leaders struggled to make the volunteer force function, they ran headlong into the economic downturn of the 1970s. In 1973 the US economy declined into a deep recession that shrunk GDP, slowed growth, and instigated layoffs, plant closings, and bankruptcies. At the same time, rising inflation alarmed federal policy makers and threatened to rapidly and drastically increase the federal budget.Footnote ¹⁴ “There could not have been a more challenging time in recent history,” lamented Lieutenant General Harold Moore, deputy chief of staff for personnel of the army, “in which to develop a volunteer army.”Footnote ¹⁵ Under severe budget pressure, Congress began to scrutinize defense manpower spending. The figures in that category were staggering. Between 1964 and 1973, manpower costs grew from forty-two percent of the total Department of Defense budget to fifty-six percent, more than operations and maintenance, procurement, or research combined; and this occurred even as the size of the army shrunk by about one million soldiers.Footnote ¹⁶

Members of Congress circulated proposals to cut military benefits. Senator Les Aspin (D-WI), for example, aimed at military health care: “Essentially, the taxpayers are providing free insurance benefits for active-duty members,” who should “contribute to the insurance scheme through premiums, the way civilians do.”Footnote ¹⁷ Representative Paul Findlay (R-IL) wanted to “suspend cost-of-living increases for all military pensions.” Others proposed cutting the small federal subsidy that paid store clerks and baggers in the commissaries and PXs. Still others suggested military families make copayments for some select medical services through the military's health care insurance.Footnote ¹⁸

All the threats of cuts to military programs proved to be just that—threats. In fact, no substantial cuts took place, and overall, military benefits grew in the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁹ But for most military personnel and their families, whether the erosion actually occurred or not proved academic. The mere threat that erosion would occur generated fear and resentment. Army Times, the newspaper that served the army community, amplified the threat. The paper closely covered the proposals for cuts in Congress, placing the debate on its front page each week. Its extensive letters-to-the-editor section, which allowed anonymous and pseudonymous missives, also provided one of the sole outlets for soldiers and their families to voice their fears and anger about proposed cuts. The result was a powerful echo chamber. The editorial board explained how the suggestion of cuts became reality for military personnel. “We believe that the military community has been under assault for several years with proposals to eliminate commissary subsidies and alter the retirement system. . . . Our reading is that there is deep frustration among military people over the continual threat to what they see as their wellbeing.”Footnote ²⁰ No matter the truth, then, servicemen and women—and their families—believed in the erosion.

While military leaders and service personnel assumed a defensive crouch in the mid-1970s, AFGE flexed its muscle: “Between 1960 and 1970 . . . the number of federal employees with active memberships in the American Federation of Government Employees grew by 362 percent.”Footnote ²¹ By 1975, AFGE represented nearly 350,000 federal employees. Its rapid growth mirrored the remarkable expansion of all public sector unions. “Membership . . . grew tenfold between 1955 and 1975,” reaching four million by the time of AFGE's bid.Footnote ²²

Indeed, AFGE and other public unions stood at the height of their influence at the moment of the bid to unionize the armed forces. Joe McCartin reminds us that “government workers’ activism had created a ‘turbulent state’” in public sector employment.Footnote ²³ That turbulence had been building, marked by such milestones as the 1970 postal worker strike, the “first truly national federal strike.” “Around 200,000 postal workers had gone out from coast to coast.” That same year air traffic controllers conducted a sick-out over Easter that “affected the public and the airlines greatly.” With so many unions abandoning no-strike clauses in their constitutions, local teachers, firefighters, and nurses, among many other employees, walked off their jobs.Footnote ²⁴ In 1975, unions called 478 public sector strikes.Footnote ²⁵ Such activism catalyzed an aggressive legislative agenda to expand and improve the ability of public sector unions to organize and bargain collectively.Footnote ²⁶

Though the gains of public sector unions were real, serious hurdles emerged due to the budgetary challenges facing Congress in the dismal economy of the 1970s. Calls for cuts to or freezes in federal government spending eventually fell on federal employees’ pay and benefits, just as they had on military personnel. In 1976, Senator Aspin told Congress, “Everybody should get some fringe benefits, but there's a point at which they get out of hand. Federal benefits and . . . military benefits are way past that point.”Footnote ²⁷

In fact, it was their shared fate in the face of the federal budget cuts that drew AFGE to the military. In early 1974, President Ford announced plans to resist the cost-of-living raises for federal employees, citing fears of fostering inflation.Footnote ²⁸ Clyde Webber led AFGE in the fight for the pay raise in Congress. Fearful of failure, AFGE appealed to uniformed servicemen and women—whose pay raises were linked by a 1967 law to those of federal workers—to write letters to Congress and the Ford administration in support of federal workers’ pay raise. Servicemen and women responded and “conducted a heavy letter-writing effort” on AFGE's—and their own—behalf. After that, Webber realized that “since it appeared that AFGE and armed forces personnel would have continuing mutual concern in pay adjustments in the future, I recommended to the AFGE National Executive Council . . . that we consider offering membership within AFGE to members of the uniformed military.”Footnote ²⁹ In fall 1976 at AFGE's national convention in Las Vegas, the union followed through, voting to change its constitution to allow organizing of soldiers, sailors, and airmen.Footnote ³⁰ Afterward, AFGE dotted its i's and crossed its t's, hiring a consultant to study the European countries whose militaries already had unions.Footnote ³¹ Positive results in hand, AFGE portrayed its gesture toward military unionization as aligned interests that passed the national security test. Yet it also fully acknowledged the usefulness of the union gambit as a political threat. “What is important to the government and to our own status within the labor movement,” said the national secretary, “is that we have this weapon in the holster.”Footnote ³²

AFGE increased its already considerable leverage because of its leadership's astute reading of the military atmosphere of the previous several years. AFGE correctly interpreted the switch to the volunteer force and the looming threats from Congress as deeply destabilizing for regular soldiers. AFGE leaders read back to soldiers their concerns about benefits and accusations against military and civilian leadership, validating their worry and anger. When called to testify, Kenneth Blaylock of AFGE told senators on the Armed Services Committee just that: “the Congress as well as the American people must share the blame . . . for the continuous attack on their [military personnel's] fright benefits.”Footnote ³³ “You can take the position that the idea [of benefits erosion] is ridiculous,” Blaylock warned the committee, “but I am telling you those military members out there don't think it is so ridiculous.”Footnote ³⁴

AFGE explained how the perceived benefits erosion pushed the career soldiers to consider unionization. AFGE's president, Clyde Webber, told Army Times, “We hear from military people toward the end of their career . . ., and they are just red hot. They talk about the loss of commissary privileges . . . about possible changes in health services, about the government [not] carrying out the promises made to them. . . . They want us to help them.”Footnote ³⁵

Career soldiers felt the union promised a possible solution. A retired solider described his trajectory toward embrace of the union:

Amid what they perceived as serious threats to their military benefits, then, many soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines proved willing to at least listen to AFGE's appeal. By mid-summer 1977, over ten thousand service personnel had contacted AFGE inquiring about joining the union. AFGE president Kenneth Blaylock recounted his own anecdotal experience meeting with an army unit in which “. . . as many as 800 people in one battalion . . . want us to come on in and sign them up.”Footnote ³⁷ Evidence from outside the union also corroborated soldier interest. Citizen Soldier, a pro-union advocacy group run by Todd Ensign in New York City, determined through a direct mail survey that fifty-two percent of the enlisted ranks of the military “favor immediate unionization.”Footnote ³⁸

Although the military services and Department of Defense declined to systematically survey the broad spectrum of servicemen and women, several small surveys by air force and army personnel, in addition to several studies by nonmilitary scholars, painted a portrait of significant interest in the union.Footnote ³⁹ In a service-wide survey of eight hundred enlisted personnel and eight hundred officers, air force researchers found that thirty-five percent of enlisted airmen favored joining a union. Another survey of randomly sampled army personnel at Fort Benjamin Harrison reported the startling result that fifty-four percent of enlisted soldiers “would join a military union,” and twenty-two percent of officers “indicated interest in union membership.”Footnote ⁴⁰

First-termers were initially considered to be those most open to the union bid since they were freshest from civilian life, least acculturated to the military, youngest, and at the bottom of the military hierarchy. But it was the “lifers”—career military men—who actually evinced the greatest interest in the union.Footnote ⁴¹ This surprised many in the military community, particularly the military personnel service organizations. “When we first heard of the issue of unionization,” said the national secretary of the Fleet Reserve Association, which represented enlisted seamen in the navy, coast guard, and marines, “we thought the first termer would be the one who would respond and join.” But they soon learned they were wrong.

The union bid and its not-unwelcome reception among career military personnel generated alarm in many quarters, including the military service associations like the Fleet Reserve Association, the American Legion, the Association of the US Army, the Air Force Sergeant Association, and the Reserve Officers Association, among others. Military service associations arose largely in the early part of the twentieth century as professional-cum-fraternal organizations that over time came to advocate for their military members before Congress, the Defense Department, and the various services. The union's bid for representation posed an obvious threat to their existence. As Colonel William Taylor Jr. put it, “To the extent that unions gain control in representing the interests of military personnel, the nongovernmental lobbying organizations lose their membership, dues, and raison d'etre.”Footnote ⁴³ Association leaders explained that unions were unnecessary, since “day in and day out we seek to resolve problems for our members.” Moreover, whereas the military personnel associations advocated “within the system,” unions moved military representation outside of traditional military lines of command, threatening discipline and morale.Footnote ⁴⁴ “It is unthinkable,” summed up the American Legion's leader, “that any influence should be allowed to interrupt the military chain of command.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Most members of Congress who spoke on the issue also portrayed a unionized military as a threat to military discipline, and further, to national security. In hearings called by Senator John Stennis (D-MS), chair of the Armed Services Committee, senators waited their turn to decry unionization of the military. “It will be a disastrous day for this Nation,” Senator John Tower (R-TX) proclaimed.Footnote ⁴⁶ Similar sentiments prevailed in the House, as Congressman Sonny Montgomery (D-GA) charged: “If the time came when military commander's decision was subject to a union vote, you might as well not even have armed forces.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John C. Stennis (D-MS) warned, “Unless we meet this [unionization] with firm legislation, [the volunteer force] is going to go downhill fast and prove to be a failure.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) led the drive for legislation. A decorated veteran of the army who participated in the invasion of Normandy during the Second World War, he stood as a powerful advocate for the military in Congress. He also functioned as a committed foe of organized labor, defending the South against union encroachment.Footnote ⁴⁹ He denounced the union as “a real and imminent threat” to the military, insisting “unionization of the American armed services would cause the enemies of freedom to rejoice all over the world.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In late 1975, he sponsored a bill to ban military unions outright. Most of the Hill agreed with him; his initial bill had thirty-seven cosponsors.Footnote ⁵¹ At least eighteen other members of Congress introduced similar bills outlawing unions in the military.Footnote ⁵²

Newspaper editorials roundly rejected the notion of a unionized military. “Idiotic,” insisted the Richmond Times-Dispatch; “makes no sense,” said U.S. News and World Report; unionization would produce, according to the Spartanburg, SC Herald, “a paralysis of America's armed forces in a moment of grave peril.” “Short of full-scale nuclear attack or devastating plague,” Charlotte, North Carolina's WBTV news editorial intoned, “hardly anything could be so disastrous to this country as for its armed forces to go on strike.”Footnote ⁵³ The unionized military provided excellent fodder for political cartoonists. In a Kansas City Star cartoon, a staff sergeant bellowed, “Soldier—Peel them spuds—that's an ORDER,” and the private, clutching his “Union Facts” booklet, replied, “Sorry, Sir—the K.P. Local has Jurisdiction.”Footnote ⁵⁴ An Army Times cartoon featured a soldier calling out in the middle of pitched battle, “Quitting time, Sarge—or else we go time and a half overtime.”Footnote ⁵⁵ A Chicago Tribune cartoon depicted the famed marines of Iwo Jima lifting the flag of “Local 151, Brotherhood of Amalgamated Grunts and GIs.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The public also seemed opposed to the notion of blue-collar soldiers. A national survey conducted by the antiunion Public Service Research Foundation found, for example, that eighty-two percent of Americans opposed military unions. If this research proved suspect to union supporters, a Gallup Poll in mid-1977 confirmed nearly the same results. Of those polled, seventy-four percent were “against the introduction of unions into the military, with only thirteen percent in favor.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Uniformed military leaders voiced grave concerns about unionized armed forces. Marine Corps Brigadier General William Flemming told senators: “[I]t would be chaos. . . . You cannot run a combat unit by committee.” General George Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee, “unionization and the operation of the military forces are totally incompatible.”Footnote ⁵⁸ General Bernard Rogers, army chief of staff, said that the unionization of the army would prove “disastrous.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Another army general at the Pentagon expressed “sheer horror” at the thought of a unionized military.Footnote ⁶⁰ Influential retired military weighed in against the union, too. Retired Navy Admiral John S. McCain Jr. argued that the union would doom the United States and “would lead to defeat of our way of life.”Footnote ⁶¹ Former chief of staff of the army, General William Westmoreland, insisted, “the Congress and President Carter have a duty to wipe out any prospect of military unionism.”Footnote ⁶²

Even the leadership of AFGE's parent organization, the AFL-CIO, seemed to agree with Westmoreland. President George Meany, a committed cold warrior and defense hawk, had earlier rejected the notion of unionizing the military during the Vietnam War-era GI movement. One of Meany's aides, when asked about AFGE's bid, answered skeptically, “I don't see how you could have the shop steward intervene when a sergeant says, ‘Over the top.’”Footnote ⁶³ Other AFL-CIO union leaders chided the notion, too, with Teamsters president Frank E. Fitzsimmons, saying, “I personally believe that unionization of the armed forces would neither be desirable nor feasible.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Employment, Unions, and the Meaning of Military Service

The discussion that ensued after AFGE's bid hit the press included the voices of those who had staked out positions on the issue: the union; soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and their families; uniformed military; department of defense; politicians; anti-union activists; and members of the press. They argued details of legislation banning unions as well as suspected cuts to military benefits. But deeper questions about military service loomed and shaped the union debate: Would accepting unionization mean accepting the employment-based model of a volunteer force? What did such a model imply about the meaning of military service?

Of course, from the union's perspective, the answers to such questions were clear: Military service was a job. AFGE president Kenneth Blaylock referred to soldiers as “employees” and the armed services as “employers.” He predicted successful unionization of the military because “history shows that if any work force has serious enough problems it will organize.”Footnote ⁶⁵

But for most of the other participants in the debate, particularly members of the uniformed military, the answer was not so simple. Deciding whether the military could be unionized meant evaluating the nature of military service in comparison to civilian employment and required value judgments about each. Uniformed military leaders answered with a decisive no to the question of the military as a job. So did many regular military personnel. And while significant numbers of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines were sympathetic to the union, they nevertheless registered deep ambivalence about whether joining a union meant turning their military service into just another occupation. Anti-union politicians and activists, for their part, took the occasion not merely to differentiate between military service and employment, but also to elevate military service and, in some cases, to denigrate unions representing civilian public employees.

The union debate took on added intensity and depth because the actors had already been primed for it. Although AFGE's bid to unionize the military provided the clearest expression of the “occupationalization” of the volunteer military, the union was not the first to suggest that the military had drifted toward an employment model. The unionization debate simply provided the most dramatic venue for debating it. The issue was first raised several years earlier by economists on the President's Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Forces in 1968, commonly referred to as the Gates Commission. Nixon's committee was charged with crafting a blueprint for the volunteer armed forces, and the free market economists who dominated the commission did not cloak their employment-based model for the new force; they advocated for a purely economic, free-labor-market model of a volunteer force in which “income incentives” would provide the motivation for individuals to enlist.Footnote ⁶⁶

Shortly thereafter, longtime scholars of the military also observed that the volunteer force seemed to be shifting to an employment model. In the early 1970s, respected military sociologist Charles Moskos explained that the small, pre-World War Two army had always been seen by its career cadre as a “calling,” a vocation, and that this sentiment lived on. But, he argued, the volunteer army challenged that. Its emphasis on recruiting soldiers based on their consumer desires or their hope for upward mobility presented a new model of military as occupation. After all, the military hired Madison Avenue firms for hundreds of millions of dollars in advertisements; military recruiters spoke to potential recruits about the perquisites of travel, the Post Exchanges (PXs), and family health care; and leaders of manpower programs touted the practical uses of military training and occupational specialties for the civilian labor market.Footnote ⁶⁷ Practically overnight, Moskos's occupationalization thesis became the common wisdom about the effect of the volunteer force on military service, cited by the press, politicians, and uniformed military worried about the transition to a volunteer force.Footnote ⁶⁸

The question about whether the military had turned into an employer also arose in the context of calculating military pay. In 1967, the Rivers Amendment pegged military pay to that of civilians employed by the federal government. Civil service pay raises, in turn, were based on an elaborate “comparability” process in which certain occupations in the private sector were surveyed and then compared to the salaries of federal employees in the General Schedule. Based on that comparison, federal pay—and hence military pay—was raised in order to ensure comparability. The Rivers Amendment was repealed in 1974 amid spiraling rises in wage and retirement costs. But the principle of comparability still stood as the major guidepost in setting military compensation fairly and competitively.Footnote ⁶⁹

Many in the military viewed the technical process of comparability positively because it guaranteed regular raises without subjecting each annual pay raise to congressional debate and the legislative process.Footnote ⁷⁰ But the issue of pay comparability took on a different cast when it bled from technical discussion of pay into a wider discussion of the meaning and value of military service and its relationship to other jobs. References to comparability often referred not to the technical process associated with the General Schedule and the Rivers Amendment but to a much less precise notion of “general comparability.”Footnote ⁷¹ Within this general notion of comparability lay the implication that soldiering was “comparable” to other jobs, whether private sector clerks, communications workers, or police officers.

In each of these settings, military leaders resisted the proposition that the volunteer force ought to be, or was becoming, “just a job.” To the free-marketers on the Gates Commission, they answered that market-oriented income incentives were wholly inappropriate. “The Army,” insisted the army's deputy chief of staff for personnel, General Harold Moore, “is a service—not a job—it cannot buy soldiers. . . . They do not stay in the Army to acquire wealth or luxury.” Rather, he argued, “The Army is . . . a way of life[.]”Footnote ⁷² The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General George S. Brown, in a speech before the Retired Officers Association in 1976, similarly enumerated the “special costs of military life” with which most of his audience was familiar: frequent moves, family separations, personal risk. “When these freely given contributions are considered, it is obvious that there's more to military service than employment[.]”Footnote ⁷³

Military leaders also rebuked notions that military service was in any general sense “comparable” to civilian employment. The army's chief of staff, General Bernard Rogers, insisted, “people should stop talking about the comparability of pay between military and civilians. I want to insure that it is recognized that a soldier is different from a civilian. I don't see a civilian counterpart, because there is no counterpart to a soldier.”Footnote ⁷⁴ His predecessor had said much the same thing: “I wonder if the pay of the marines who were wounded, and who died in the Mayaguez incident is comparable to a young worker's pay in industry? Or even broader than that, is there any comparable pay to that of any of our soldiers?”Footnote ⁷⁵ When the Defense Department reported its Third Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation in late 1976, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld discussed both the AFGE bid and the issue of comparability, observing that military personnel did not countenance any notion that civilian jobs were comparable to military service. “[C]an a combat infantryman possibly be compared with a computer programmer? . . . It is insulting and demeaning to compare a combat soldier, on duty call for 24 hours a day and potentially subject to death or injury with a ‘9 to 5’ civilian.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Imbued with this sharp differentiation between employment and military service, military leaders resisted the union bid.

Enlisted military personnel and officers were inclined to accept and even accentuate the division between military service and employment. A few ventured that “Federal employees unionize to protect themselves. Are we so very different?” But most generally did not abide suggestions that they “worked” for the government.Footnote ⁷⁷ Military personnel and families commonly emphasized the sacrifices and difficulties of servicemen and women as they challenged comparability measures:

Often, they expressed the view that being a soldier, sailor, airman, or marine was far more difficult: “who,” demanded a master sergeant, “would like to take our places?”Footnote ⁷⁹ The implicit assumption was that few, if any, civilians would accept the challenge. As Army Times summed up the views of soldiers, “Service members need no reminding that the conditions of life are different for the military community” than from civilian employment.Footnote ⁸⁰ The arduousness of military life was self-evident.

Disputing the equation of service with employment necessitated not only comparisons to civilian employment, but also value judgments about the worth of each. As servicemen and women demarcated the elements that made military service different, they sometimes denigrated civilian employment. Army Lieutenant Colonel Dennis J. Morrissey wrote to Army Times about comparability and articulated his judgment in an unusually sharp manner: “It is really rather simple: either soldiering is honorable, useful work with wages commensurate with the effort and working conditions the government requires, or it is soft work like shuffling paper in the U.S., eight hours per day and the current clerical wages will do.”Footnote ⁸¹ The unequal contrast was clear: Soldiering was difficult and noble while other employment was easy and insignificant.

Military leaders also contributed to the impression that soldiering was more valuable than civilian employment. After all, their use of words like “service” and “contribution” carried moral overtones. When General Harold Moore explained that the army was not a job but “a way of life,” he elaborated that in the military, “dedication and commitment are necessary,” suggesting that those qualities might not be necessary in civilian employment. Often, emphasis on the uniqueness of military life functioned as a judgment of worth. Secretary Martin Hoffman told the El Paso, Texas, chapter of the Association of the US Army that “the ideal that military duty is a unique public service and that national defense is more than an eight-hour-a-day job must be reinforced.”Footnote ⁸² What else could he mean except that the eight-hour-a-day job was “less”?

The debate about military service and employment clearly separated and elevated military service to a category of its own, while the verdict on employment remained unclear. “Employment” functioned essentially as a negative contrast to military service rather than as a topic of full-fledged debate on its own. Yet it was clear that employment emerged the lesser of the two categories. To the degree that unionization implied an employment model of military service, it threatened to degrade or at least dislocate the vaunted model of military service. The unionization bid thus became a proxy for determining the value of military service.

As military leadership and regular military personnel made the case against an employment model of military service, others made a case directly against public unions. While military leaders were careful never to denigrate unions or union members in their comments—indeed, they often began their stated objections to unions with a preamble about the general good unions had done in US history—those outside the military who opposed military unionization used AFGE's bid to attack public sector unions.Footnote ⁸³ In the course of the debate, they portrayed them as greedy, self-interested, and even threatening. Though this attack seemed quite narrowly focused on the perfidy of public sector unions, it nevertheless bled back into the debates about military service versus employment. The negative stereotypes of unions that dominated this discussion, given the context of the debate, stood as implicit or explicit opposites of military service. And public sector unions emerged as a kind of nightmare scenario resulting from the encroachment of the employment model into the military context.

An increasingly influential movement against public sector unions fed the attacks on AFGE and the notion of military unions. In 1973 David Denholm, a conservative and a member of the National Right to Work Committee, founded the Public Service Research Council, an organization devoted to fighting public sector unionization as a threat not only to the free market and individual “right to work,” but also to democracy itself. The very activism that buoyed public sector unions and proved a boon to AFGE also fueled this backlash, in which Denholm and his allies attacked public sectors unions as fundamentally opposed to “the public interest,” “the people,” and “popular sovereignty.” The many strikes by public employees fed into critiques of unions as irresponsible and dangerous. One popular antiunion tract accused public sector unions of being “arsonists” and “let[ting] our cities burn.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Though Denholm's antiunion movement grew with the patronage of influential Republican politicians like Senators Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Strom Thurmond (R-SC), even Democratic politicians evinced anger at the unions who struck just as the economic slowdown choked state and local budgets.Footnote ⁸⁵

During the military union debate in Congress, opponents highlighted the greed and self-interest of unions, qualities deemed anathema to military service. The secretary of the Fleet Reserve Association, the military association representing sailors and marines, told Congress that the union was trying to swindle servicemen and women. “I think they are looking after the enlisted man's dues and muscle of his number to increase their effectiveness, but I fear it is going to increase their effectiveness for their civilian employees and not the military man. I think it is a rip-off of the military man.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Worse, the ripoff occurred for little more than the self-aggrandizement of the unions. The unions, he elaborated, “would pick up their [sailors’] grievances. . . . They would make a great to-do with things that we go ahead and do, and yet we don't publish it in newspapers or make great issues. . . . That doesn't serve the union's purposes. They need all the publicity they can get, and that is why I think it would be a bad thing[.]”Footnote ⁸⁷

Senator Thurmond, the loudest congressional critic of the unions, also accused union “bosses” of self-interest, in contrast to the public interest that characterized soldiers. He chided AFGE president Kenneth Blaylock for admitting that the union sought “to get a piece of the pie” before “other unions might attempt to organize the military.” “Mr. Blaylock's ‘pie,’” he scolded, “consists of the 2 million members of the uniformed military.”Footnote ⁸⁸ An editorial in the Indianapolis News explained how offensive Thurmond and others found the frank talk. “That remark [“get a piece of the pie”] illustrates much of what is wrong with unions in both the private and public sectors—a tendency to view workers and the public they serve as a piece of the pie to be divided up.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Yet service personnel were particularly vulnerable to precisely this selfish union maneuvering at the moment, lamented Thurmond: “Frustrated and disillusioned, they [servicemen] have become susceptible to the wiles of self-interested union advocates, such as the leaders of AFGE.”Footnote ⁹⁰

The union threat lay not only in the greed and selfishness of public sector unions, but also in their undisciplined and even potentially illegal actions, which according to critics, were actions no military leader would ever take. Critics linked AFGE to other public sector unions whose activism in recent years they regarded as illegal. Senator Jake Garn (R-UT) had previously worked as vice president of the National League of Cities and recounted his battle with the firefighting union, whose strikes and threatened strikes in the early to mid-1970s generated much publicity. “My trouble and the reasons I am bitter,” he explained, “. . . is because I dealt with the firefighter's union that did not have any concept of following the law[.] . . . That makes me very skeptical that a military union would be any different than any of the municipal unions I saw.”Footnote ⁹¹ Other critics likened AFGE's leaders to supposedly radical public sector union leaders such as Jerry Wurf, the president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which had “shut down police, fire, sanitation and transit services in numerous cities over the last few years.” “That union militancy of this kind might become a part of the Federal labor relations,” one newspaper editorial explained, “is disturbing. The possibility that it might be extended to the military is down right alarming.”Footnote ⁹²

The views of military personnel on unions proved less extreme than antiunion activists’. But they were still ambiguous. Though a majority acknowledged “that a union would be effective in representing their interests,” some held opinions that made them conflicted about unionization, if not opposed to it. Footnote ⁹³ At the most basic level, political affiliation bred reluctance to accede to unionization. As a West Point colonel and scholar of military unionization put it, “Senior non-commissioned officers, commissioned officers, and retired military personnel . . . represent rather traditional and conservative views, generally at odds with the basic philosophical tenets and operational approaches of unions.”Footnote ⁹⁴

Sometimes military personnel portrayed unions in terms echoing anti-union organizations and politicians. A telling cartoon in Army Times, for example, reflected a host of negative union stereotypes. It featured the union as a four-armed, lantern-jawed behemoth with a dunce cap perched on his head, grabbing at soldiers’ benefits.Footnote ⁹⁵ Slow-witted but powerful and greedy, union bosses took advantage of servicemen and women. With such images in mind, soldiers often qualified their support of a military union. “I am not talking of a union that would rip off soldiers . . .,” wrote one soldier about his support of a union, “but a strict military union that would be comprised of military people.”Footnote ⁹⁶ This distinction not only revealed beliefs about pervasive union corruption but also suggested the natural “strictness” and uprightness of military personnel. The Fleet Reserve Association used similar negative assumptions about unions to distinguish between “bad” unions and “good” sailors who nevertheless expressed support for unions. Comparing the natural composure and integrity of sailors to union members, they implicitly tarnished unions by saying that the enlisted personnel who spoke in favor of a union were “not abrasive or radical. Their sincere, straightforward manner reflected their . . . perception that no one in Washington, DC, was looking out for their interests.”Footnote ⁹⁷ If they had not been abandoned, sailors would not have been forced to consider the dangerous union.

Because of such views, even the pro-union sentiments of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines displayed deep ambivalence. Some portrayed unionization as a sad inevitability. A committee member of the White Hats Pay Panel of the Fleet Reserve Association summed up this perspective of military personnel: “He's personally opposed to the idea of unions for military people—but he is convinced that they will come into the military picture within the next few years if the present ‘whittling away’ of service benefits continues.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Another career military man echoed this view:

Others suggested not so much that they felt resigned to unionization, but that events had pushed their backs to the wall and left the union as the only path to safety. “I am opposed to the military becoming unionized” said army captain Daniel Shaw. “But on the other hand, I am also concerned about the erosions of our benefits.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Army sergeant first class Henry Jennings felt similarly stuck with the union option: “. . .the Secretary of Defense, Congress, and others. All these people speaking out on stopping service people from joining or forming their own union. . . . Well where were they when commissary subsidies were in trouble? Where were they when they put a five percent cap on our pay raise last year? Where were they when they cut back on Champus (the military's medical program)? . . . I would really hate to see the services in a union, but I don't like being a second-class citizen.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ For these soldiers, the union was a last, desperate resort.

No matter which angle the debate took, unions came out looking bad while military service came out looking good. Military service emerged in a more powerful, vaunted position through its definition as something different from and more significant than “a job.” And unions emerged in the despised position in part because acceding to a military union was characterized as compromising the special status due military service. For if occupationalization was seen by most observers and participants in the debate as debasing military service, then unionization, especially under the auspices of greedy, self-interested public sector unions, would be the ultimate degradation.

Divergent Fates: Military Benefits and Public Sector Unions

In the end, servicemen and women were never forced to make the final choice about the union. Just as the antimilitary-union rhetoric reached its peak in the spring and summer of 1977, the unionization bid abruptly ended. As political and public opposition to military unionization mounted from 1975 through 1977, AFGE's leaders broke. Since they began the effort to unionize the military as part of a political strategy to increase their power, they began to fear a significant political backlash. Rather than abandon the campaign, they saved face by deferring the decision about military unionization to a referendum by its members.Footnote ¹⁰² At the end of the summer of 1977, the results were in. The AFL-CIO News Service reported, “AFGE locals decisively rejected a proposal to expand the union's jurisdiction and organizing efforts to the armed forces.”Footnote ¹⁰³ For their part, the hundreds of thousands of AFGE members said they overwhelmingly wished to focus on “organizing a larger percentage of the federal civilian workforce,” less than half of which were actual dues-paying AFGE members.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ But they, like their leaders, had no doubt come to fear risking their status by delving into controversial territory of military unionization.

The union's quick retreat might well have been seized upon by antiunion activists as evidence of the essential opportunism of AFGE's bid to unionize the military. But though the union had thrown in the towel, none of the anti-unionization members of Congress commented on it. In fact, the opposite occurred. The House Armed Services Committee dragged AFGE's and other union leaders to the Hill to testify, even though they had no intention of going forward with unionization of the military.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Nearly one full year after AFGE had voted against unionizing the military, bills outlawing military unions were still working their way through Congress, accompanied by heated rhetoric.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The truth was that the union had become a useful political tool. The effort to defeat the union allowed military personnel, military leaders, and political leaders to distinguish military service as something unique, something fundamentally different from employment, and thus something in need of unique consideration in the matter of benefits and the federal budget.

For soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, the union threat gave them the leverage to force Congress to increase spending on military benefits and protect them in the future. Even as they had told their stories of abandonment and reluctant embrace of the union, they had usually offered up an alternative to the union: The military and Congress should fulfill their paternalistic duty to take care of their own by protecting and enlarging military benefits. “If the Army was really taking care of its own,” one soldier wrote to Army Times, “I believe soldiers would not feel that a union would do a better job of hearing grievances and protecting their interests.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Another insisted, “the only reason, and the moving reason, why we in the active military are being forced to not just consider unions but to move toward them is the virtual abandonment of use by our traditional ‘father’ in Washington.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ As they presented it, the solution was simple: We will drop the union idea if you guarantee the growth of our benefits.

Military leaders welcomed this solution to both the union problem and the issue of benefits. It played perfectly into their argument against the union and against equating military service with employment on the one hand, and their argument for the essential uniqueness of military service on the other hand. The chief of staff of the army, General Fred Weyand, told Congress, “The Army is a way of life, based on service to our Nation, not just a working place.” He linked this unique “way of life” directly to the need for robust, assured benefits: “The soldier often faces duty that is dangerous, distant or dirty. It is not an easy or a certain way of life, and its compensation should not be measured by the standards of civilian life—normally just pay alone. There must be more; we take pride in saying that the Army takes care of its own, and by reaching out to help the families of those who serve . . . and to assist our men and women in other ways, we try to live up to that standard. . . . I hope you [Congress] see fit to grant us the resources to take care of our men and women.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Congress acceded. As Strom Thurmond put it, “While the obligation of the Congress to prohibit unions in the military is clear, there is an equal obligation to address and settle the issues which have brought this matter to a head.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ That meant admitting that soldiering was unique, not comparable to any other job. And it meant recognizing that the benefits had to be fully supported recognition of this unique military life.

And they were. From 1978 through 1980, military personnel experienced a reversal of fortune. Though military benefits had never actually been cut back—and had in fact grown—the rhetoric of austerity evaporated in the final years of the 1970s. Few on the Hill spoke of overly generous military benefits; none suggested cuts. Nor did they publicly discuss the comparability of military service to civilian jobs. Even longtime critics of military spending and excessive military benefits such as Senators Proxmire and Aspin supported extending benefits and creating new ones. Aspin, for example, led a successful campaign to extend to junior enlisted personnel many of the benefits, special pays, and privileges given only to senior enlisted personnel and officers.Footnote ¹¹¹ By 1979, three pieces of legislation offering substantial improvement in military benefits—nearly twenty new or improved benefits and allowances—made their way through Congress.Footnote ¹¹² The highlights of the new laws included 11.7 percent increases in pay targeted at the career force—the senior enlisted personnel so frustrated by “benefits erosion” and so tempted by the prospect of unionization. They also established the Variable Housing Allowance, increased substantially the reimbursement rate for military personnel's costs for PCS (permanent change of station) moves, increased TDY (temporary duty) per diem reimbursement, and raised the reenlistment the bonus from $15,000 to $20,000.Footnote ¹¹³

The sentiment behind this generous support of military service grew directly out of the discussions and debates of the union debacle. Emphasizing the unique nature of military service, President Jimmy Carter, who signed the bills into law, proclaimed, “I fully support the military pay and benefits authorized by this bill for I share with the Congress its concern for assuming a level of compensation for our service men and women commensurate with their considerable contribution and sacrifice.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Carter's statements adopted nearly verbatim the lines that the uniformed military and soldiers had developed in the several years during and after the union threat, emphasizing the ultimate sacrifice that the “military way of life” required.

While military benefits fared well in the wake of the unionization effort, public sector unions suffered. AFGE's threat to bring soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines into the union fold drew overwhelming opposition from most Americans. Moreover, it inflicted damage to the image of the unions. They came out looking poorly when politicians, military leaders, and military personnel debated whether military service constituted employment. As the standard bearer for the “employment model” of military service, they rightly or not took on the role of debasing military service, which was consistently construed as more arduous, loftier, less self-centered, and less economically motivated than civilian employment. And even worse, the unions endured nearly two years of mocking editorials, political cartoons, and speeches in which the very worst union stereotypes played and replayed for public consumption.

There were also political effects. The move to unionize the military proved a boon to longtime antiunionization activists, bringing together a conservative disdain for unions with an equally powerful affection for the military. The specter of a unionized military helped David Denholm and his colleagues raise funds used in the broader campaign against public unions.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Denholm's Public Service Research Council coupled with Senator Jesse Helms to raise funds for fighting public sector unions with a new spinoff organization called Americans Against Union Control of Government.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Its direct mail fundraising campaign latched onto the military unionization bid and used charged language to frighten recipients into donations. Footnote ¹¹⁷

The military unionization scare thus enlarged the forces arrayed against public sector unions and helped stall public sector unions’ momentum from early in the decade. While public unions had been growing throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, their “share of government workers organized never crested 50 percent, and by the 1980s it had begun to sink below 40 percent.” Though the reasons for the failure reached far beyond the military unionization effort, that effort was most assuredly a cause of the “the sudden shift in political currents” for public sector unions.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The divergent fates of military benefits for service personnel and public sector unions were made strikingly apparent in 1981 upon the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency. When air traffic controllers of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) struck that year, Reagan used the opportunity to try to break federal public unions, firing and replacing all the striking workers. Denholm's Public Service Research Council led the “campaign for public support” of Reagan's efforts.Footnote ¹¹⁹ That same month, Reagan took very different action for military benefits for soldiers. Following through on a pledge he made to soldiers in a West Point graduation speech, he signed a bill giving servicemen and women a 14.3 percent raise and increased further their benefits.Footnote ¹²⁰