But at the same time, America was redefining the role of government. Big government programs were the preferred solutions to social problems. It became clear to union officials that lasting power lay not in representing working people at their workplace, but in amassing political power to influence government decisions. However, it is noteworthy that union leaders tended to exempt the public sector from union organizing. George Meany and the AFL-CIO Executive Committee were on record in the 1950s that there was no right to unionism or collective bargaining in public employment.
Most scholars agree that unionism peaked sometime around the end of the Korean War.
Leo Troy, a professor of economics at Rutgers University and one of the nation's foremost authorities on labor unions, says that unionism peaked in 1955, the year of the AFL-CIO merger. This is difficult to verify, however, because in the 1950s official government figures on the number of union members depended on voluntary union submissions, and voting strength at conventions of the union federations was based on membership. Union officials could easily have claimed more members than they actually had in order to bolster their strength at federation conventions. They needed only to pay to the federation the required per capita dues for each member to the federation. In any event, we do know that almost 40 percent of all employees in the private sector of the economy and about 10 percent of government workers were union members.