Public Workers in Service of America

Frederick W. Gooding Jr. holds the Dr. Ronald E. Moore Professorship in Humanities in the John V. Roach Honors College and is an associate professor of African American studies at Texas Christian University. He is the author of American Dream Deferred: Black Federal Workers in Washington, D.C., 1941–1981. Eric S. Yellin is an associate professor of history and American studies at the University of Richmond. He is the author of Racism in the Nation's Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America.

Foreword Joseph A. McCartin Acknowledgments

A Note on Language

Introduction  Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin

Part I: The Politics of Public Work at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

1 Gender and Politics among Federal Indian Service Employees, 1880-1930  Cathleen D. Cahill

2 The Spoils as Reparations  Eric S. Yellin

Part II: Good Government Jobs for Whom?

3 Dead End Job? Black Public Workers Struggle to See Light of Day  Frederick W. Gooding Jr.

4 “We’re the Backbone of this City”: Women and Gender in Public Work  Katherine Turk

Part III: Organizing Public Workers

5 Police Unions and Public-Sector Labor Law and Policy  Joseph E. Slater

6 The Road to Memphis: Southern Sanitation Workers and the Transformation of Public Employee Unionism in the Postwar United States  William P. Jones

7 “They Won’t Work for a Cop of Any Kind”: The 1970 Sanitation Slowdown and the Struggle for Black Independent Politics in Philadelphia  Francis Ryan

Part IV: Public Workers in the Neoliberal Age

8 Sick Ins, Feed Ins, Heal Ins, and Strikes: Labor Organizing at Chicago’s Public Hospital in the 1960s and Its Legacy for the 1970s  Amy Zanoni

9 The Meaning of Teachers’ Labor in American Education: Change, Challenge, and Resistance  Jon Shelton

Afterword  Eileen Boris

Contributors

Index