Free Market Activism & the Eclipse of Labor-Liberalism
Channel: Havens Wright Center for Social Justice
Date: 2022-09-26

"'Compulsory Unionism’ in the Public Sector: Free Market Activism & the Eclipse of Labor-Liberalism" is the second of two lectures delivered by Jon Shelton on policy relating to public sector trade unionism. In this lecture, Shelton analyzes how the political right organized against labor, and public sector unionism in particular. How, he asks, did anti-labor narratives gain so much traction at a time when unions were successfully raising living standards for some of the poorest people in the country? He explores this by analyzing the National Right-to-Work committee, and a set of legal cases funded by the organization, which had dramatic consequences for organized labor.

This event was co-sponsored by Global Studies at UW-Madison.

Jon Shelton is Assistant Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where he teaches courses on modern American history, labor history, and the history of education.  He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2013, and his dissertation—Against the Public: Teacher Strikes and the Decline of Liberalism, 1968-81—recently won the Labor and Working Class History Association’s 2013 Herbert Gutman Award for Outstanding Dissertation.