Primarily a labor union for workers in the public sector, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) evolved from the Wisconsin State Administrative, Clerical, Fiscal, and Technical Employees Association, the first such statewide organization. Formed under the leadership of A. E. Garey in 1932 to lobby for civil service protection for public employees in Wisconsin, the union led the drive for a national union of public employees under the guidance of Arnold Zander, a Wisconsin state-personnel examiner. In December 1935 the Wisconsin Association combined with fourteen other public employee unions to become AFSCME and was organized as a department of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The following September, AFSCME was chartered as an independent union within the AFL, and Zander was elected as the international union's first president.
With 10,000 members by the end of 1936, AFSCME used its clout to lobby at the state level for better civil service laws to protect its members from arbitrary dismissals and ensure fair hiring practices in public agencies. By 1955, AFSCME's membership had climbed to more than 100,000 workers, and the union began to demand the right to collective bargaining over wages, benefits, and working conditions, a precedent that had no clear basis in existing labor law. By executive order in 1958, New York City Mayor Robert Wagner granted collective bargaining rights to unions representing city employees, the first such recognition by a government entity. AFSCME secured another key victory in 1962, when President John F. Kennedy recognized the right of federal employees to enter into collective bargaining. By 1965, AFSCME had more than 250,000 members.
In 1964 Jerry Wurf, director of New York City's powerful District Council 37, succeeded Zander as international president, a post he held until his death in 1981. Under Wurf's leadership, AFSCME continued to pressure government entities to grant collective bargaining rights and expanded its agenda to include civil rights issues. Tragically, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, he was in Memphis in support of an AFSCME garbage collectors' strike over union recognition and antidiscrimination employment policies. With a rising proportion of its membership drawn from diverse minority groups, AFSCME continued to take an active role in civil rights matters in succeeding years. The union also created one of the largest labor political-action committees in the United States to lobby for legislation and offer campaign support for political candidates, typically from the Democratic Party.
While industrial unions faced declining membership in the 1970s and 1980s, AFSCME continued to grow as it organized office and professional staffs along with hospital employees, custodians, drivers, and laborers at every level of government service. With AFSCME membership reaching 1.3 million in 2000, the union was active in opposing efforts to privatize government services, which it viewed as a significant threat to its members' job security, wages, and benefits. The union was also instrumental in securing a Supreme Court ruling in 1991 that recognized the right to organize workers at private hospitals. After Jerry Wurf's death in 1981, Gerald W. McEntee, only the third international president to lead the union, was elected AFSCME's top official.
Bibliography
Goulden, Joseph. Jerry Wurf: Labor's Last Angry Man. New York: Atheneum, 1982. Biography of AFSCME's longtime international president.
LeBeau, Josephine, and Kevin Lynch. "Successful Organizing at the Local Level: The Experience of AFSCME District Council 1707." In A New Labor Movement for the New Century. Edited by Gregory Mantsios. New York: Monthly Re-view Press, 1998. Summary of AFSCME's contemporary organizing strategies.
Stieber, Jack. Public Employee Unionism: Structure, Growth, Policy. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1973. Although dated, provides the best summary of AFSCME's bureaucratic structure.
—Timothy G. Borden
