Public-sector labor laws in the United States underwent a major shift in 2011. Since the introduction of collective bargaining rights for public employees in the 1960s and 1970s, the landscape of labor rights had remained largely stable, with more than 30 states granting these rights to public employees. But in 2011, 15 of these states passed new laws that limited or eliminated public employees’ collective bargaining rights. From Collective Bargaining to Collective Begging: How Public Employees Win and Lose the Right to Bargain seeks to explain this shift. Why did public employees in most states gain collective bargaining rights in the twentieth century, why did they suddenly lose these rights recently, and what does this tell us about the future of public-sector labor relations in the United States? These are the questions that guide Dominic D. Wells’s ambitious book.

To answer these questions, Wells combines new datasets spanning the full history of state laws regulating public employees’ collective bargaining rights from 1959 to the present, quantitative analyses of the predictors of the introduction and retrenchment of these rights, and two detailed case studies of the process by which state-level politicians in 2011 succeeded (with Wisconsin Act 10) or failed (with Ohio Senate Bill 5) to limit public employees’ collective bargaining rights. Each of these analytical strategies—the quantitative analyses and the case studies—would have made for a compelling book on their own, but their combination makes this book all the more impressive. It is written in a balanced tone that is a refreshing departure from much of the literature on public-sector unions. Wells takes seriously a wide range of alternative arguments and lets the data adjudicate between them, resulting in a persuasive book.

The product of these efforts is a set of findings that advance our understanding of the politics of public-sector labor rights. Here, I highlight and discuss three main findings. The first concerns the relationship between fiscal health and public-sector collective bargaining rights. In 2011, Republicans seeking to limit these rights took advantage of the context of the Great Recession to frame collective bargaining as a major cause of strained state and local budgets and poor fiscal health (p. 56). The most common type of evidence used to back this claim is that states and cities that today engage in collective bargaining with public employees tend to spend more, pay higher salaries, and have higher debt (e.g., Daniel DiSalvo, Government against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences, 2015). Wells takes a different approach, looking at the relationship between collective bargaining rights and fiscal imbalance not just today but also historically. What his analysis reveals is that fiscal problems preceded collective bargaining with public employees. That is, states with a history of fiscal imbalance—measured as the proportion of state spending that cannot be funded by state revenues—were more likely to grant collective bargaining rights to public employees than states with a history of fiscal balance. This finding joins previous work documenting that states with a history of higher education spending were the ones that eventually gave collective bargaining rights to teachers (see my article, “Public-Sector Unions and the Size of Government,” American Journal of Political Science, 2019). Wells’s main contribution is to extend this finding to other public employees besides teachers, including police, firefighters, and other local and state employees.

A second important finding concerns the role that partisanship played in the adoption of collective bargaining rights in the 1960s and 1970s and in their restriction in 2011. In line with other recent studies (e.g., Sarah Anzia and Terry Moe, “Do Politicians Use Policy to Make Politics? The Case of Public-Sector Labor Laws,” American Political Science Review, 2016), Wells finds that both Democrats and Republicans supported the introduction of collective bargaining rights in the 1960s and 1970s, whereas support for the 2011 reforms came almost exclusively from Republicans. Where Wells goes beyond existing studies is in his analysis of Republican legislators’ behavior in 2011. He argues that in some cases, such as Wisconsin, Republicans were uniformly in favor of restricting collective bargaining rights, whereas in others, such as Ohio, there was greater division among Republicans. The book traces the roots of this varying behavior by Republican legislators to a key feature of the labor laws under discussion in 2011: in Wisconsin, the proposed reforms left intact the collective bargaining rights of police and firefighters, whereas in Ohio, they did not. This difference implied that in Ohio, but not in Wisconsin, labor unions constructed their defense of collective bargaining rights as an issue of public safety, a framing that helped garner support for the maintenance of public employees’ labor rights (pp. 119–20).

The third and most novel contribution of the book is its analysis of the narratives used by supporters and opponents of public-sector collective bargaining in Wisconsin and Ohio during 2011. Chapter 5 traces the events that led to the passage of Wisconsin Act 10 and the failure of Ohio Senate Bill 5 to withstand a referendum. Chapter 6 draws on 49 semistructured interviews with key stakeholders and an analysis of 447 newspapers articles from major newspapers in both states to understand how supporters and opponents of Act 10 and Senate Bill 5 defined the policy problem, the heroes, villains and victims, and the policy solution. What emerges from this analysis is not only the greater presence of safety arguments in Ohio than Wisconsin as discussed earlier, but also the clear predominance of economic arguments in both states’ debates about public-sector collective bargaining rights. This is an important finding because it underscores just how successful Republican politicians were in framing the terms of the 2011 debate as a debate about fiscal sustainability. As Wells shows, neither Democratic politicians nor public-sector unions—and certainly not the media—questioned Republicans’ claim that public-sector collective bargaining leads to increased public spending, despite growing evidence to the contrary (e.g., Michael Lovenheim, “The Effect of Teachers’ Unions on Education Production: Evidence from Union Election Certifications in Three Midwestern States,” Journal of Labor Economics, 2009; Agustina Paglayan, “Public-Sector Unions and the Size of Government,” American Journal of Political Science, 2019).

Important questions emerge from this book about the future of public-sector unions, an issue that is the subject of the final chapter. Wells suggests that unions are most likely to be successful “when they have bipartisan support and a unified coalition” (p. 133). Although the importance of bipartisan support stems clearly from the book’s analysis, the need for a unified coalition is less obvious. It is true that unions acted as a uniform bloc in Ohio but not in Wisconsin, but what is less clear is what helped Ohio unions most: this unified coalition or the framing of collective bargaining as a safety issue. As I was reading the book, I could not help but wonder whether there is a path for teacher unions to succeed in obtaining their preferred policies by framing policy debates around public safety, even in the absence of a coalition with police and firefighters. This is a question that could be tackled by future research that builds on this insightful and well-argued book.