Even FDR Opposed Public Sector Unions

Don't look now but these public sector unions - along with Obama - would not have won the support of one of Obama's ideological presidential mentors - Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR had no problem with private sector unions doing whatever they thought was necessary to get what they wanted but when it came to the public sector, FDR had proverbial skin in the game. Consequently, he was outwardly and vehemently opposed to exactly what's going on in Wisconsin right now.

Via RCP:

"The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service," Roosevelt wrote in 1937 to the National Federation of Federal Employees. Yes, public workers may demand fair treatment, wrote Roosevelt. But, he wrote, "I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place" in the public sector. "A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government."

And if you're the kind of guy who capitalizes "government," woe betide such obstructionists.

Roosevelt wasn't alone. It was orthodoxy among Democrats through the '50s that unions didn't belong in government work. Things began changing when, in 1959, Wisconsin's then-Gov. Gaylord Nelson signed collective bargaining into law for state workers. Other states followed, and gradually, municipal workers and teachers were unionized, too.

Even as that happened, the future was visible. Frank Zeidler, Milwaukee's mayor in the 1950s and the last card-carrying Socialist to head a major U.S. city, supported labor. But in 1969, the progressive icon wrote that rise of unions in government work put a competing power in charge of public business next to elected officials. Government unions "can mean considerable loss of control over the budget, and hence over tax rates," he warned.

One thing is different today. Shutting down government is actually the better of two options when that might not have been the case in the 1950's.

Read it all.

h/t Weasel Zippers