1. Cling, Edwin Layne. “Industrial Labor Relations Policies and Practices in Municipal Government–Milwaukee, Wisconsin”; 1957. Notes: Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University, 1957. 816 p. Discusses the management and labor positions regarding collective bargaining for public employees and then applies the analysis to the situation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the time of the writing of this dissertation (1957). For a fuller abstract, see Dissertation Abstracts International, 1958, 18/03, p. 1087.
  1. Gatewood, Lucien B. “Factfinding in Teacher Disputes: The Wisconsin Experience”. Monthly Labor Review. 1974; 97(10):47-51. Notes: ???
  1. Goulden, Joseph C. Jerry Wurf: Labor’s Last Angry Man. New York: Atheneum; 1982. 296 p. Notes: A biography of Jerry Wurf (1919-1981), the second president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), an international union founded in Madison, Wisconsin and for many years headquartered there. This biography covers in considerable detail how Wurf, who was from AFSCME’s District 37 in New York City, was able to wrest the leadership of the union from Arnold Zander, one of AFSCME’s original founders as well as its longtime, first president.
  1. Hellwig, Jason F. “Big Labor in a Small Town: The Hortonville Teachers’ Strike”. Voyageur: Northeast Wisconsin’s Historical Review. 2003 Winter-2004 Spring; 19(2):10-18, 21-26. Notes: Hortonville, Wisconsin, a community of 1,500 people located ten miles northwest of Appleton, Wisconsin, was the site of a 1974 teachers’ strike, a public employee labor dispute so polarizing that it still reverberates down through Wisconsin politics today. One must look at a myriad of social forces of the times to understand how this quiet farming community became such a focal point of controversary in Wisconsin’s history and the author explores the situation in as even-handed a way as possible. The parties to the dispute were the Hortonville School District and the district’s eighty-eight school teachers, who were represented by the Hortonville Education Association, an affilitate of the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC). Their negotiations had begun in Spring 1973 on the contract to cover the school year running from September 1973 through June 1974 , but no settlement had yet been reached when the school term began. In February 1974, when a tentative agreement was finally reached, the union indicated that it would not sign the agreement “unless negotiations were undertaken and completed on the next year’s contract as well” (p. 12). The school board refused to open more negotiations at this point and the teachers began informational picketing before and after school hours, as well as refusing to supervise after-school extracurricular activities. On the morning of March 18, 1974, giving “the board’s refusal to negotiate in good faith with the teachers as the primary reason” (p. 12), the union began a strike. Over April 1-3 the school board had scheduled a disciplinary hearing for each teacher, but teacher after teacher argued during their hearing that the school board could not serve as an impartial panel in such a matter and refused to participate, except for only two teachers who asked to be allowed to return to work. As public employee strikes were illegal in Wisconsin at the time, the school board could have applied for an injunction against the union to halt the strike, but that would have required a return to the bargaining table for both sides. Instead, on April 2, the school board fired all of the striking teachers and insisted that any interested in continuing employment had to re-apply for their job, but only one teacher did so. The school board then began to hire replacement teachers. The union immediately sought a legal injunction to stop the replacement hiring and also argued in their lawsuit that the striking teachers had been denied due process at their disciplinary hearings. On April 12, 1974 the Manitowoc County Circuit Court refused the request for the injunction against the replacement hiring. Mediation efforts followed and in May three teachers were re-hired for vacant teaching positions in the district, but there was no further movement on either side. In July the Manitowoc County Circuit Court ruled against the union regarding the due process of the firings by the school board. The case was then appealed in October to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which ruled for the teachers in February 1975. That April, however, the school board appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court which accepted the case and on June 17, 1976 issued a 6-3 decision against the teachers, finding that “the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not guarantee respondent teachers that the decision to terminate their employment would be made by a body other than the school board” (p. 15). In the end, very few of the striking teachers were able to return to teaching for the Hortonville School District. The Hortonville Education Association had received a great deal of support from its parent organization and other Wisconsin labor organizations, which devoted many resources to “a lengthy battle that directly challenged Wisconsin’s collective bargaining law and its lack of a binding arbitration provision” (p. 13).
  1. Hicks, Terry L. We Walk: A History of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 519. La Crosse, Wis.: s.n.;1994;92, [26] p. Notes: The story of the first eighty-five years of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 519, the local union established in 1909 by a strike for union recognition after employees had been locked out by the La Crosse City Railway Company, a public transit service. The development of the city’s early streetcar system into a modern motorized bus system is traced by the author.
  1. Houlihan, William C. “Interest Arbitration and Municipal Employee Bargaining: The Wisconsin Experience”. IN: Najita, Joyce M. and James L. Stern, editors. Collective Bargaining in the Public Sector: The Experience of Eight States. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.; 2001; pp. 69-105.
  1. Krause, Robert D. “The Short Troubled History of Wisconsin’s New Labor Law”. Public Administration Review. 1965; 25(4):302-307.
  1. Krinsky, Edward B. “Municipal Grievance Arbitration in Wisconsin”. Arbitration Journal. March 1973; 28(1):50-67. Notes: Cited as Item 189 in Coleman, Charles J., and Theodora T. Haynes, Labor Arbitration: An Annotated Bibliography (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 1994), p. 63.
  1. Rachleff, Peter. ” ‘Rebellion to Tyrants, Democracy for Workers’ : The Madison Uprising, Collective Bargaining, and the Future of the Labor Movement”. South Atlantic Quarterly. 2012 Winter; 111(1):[195]-204.
  2. Slater, Joseph E. Public Workers: Government Employee Unions, the Law, and the State, 1900-1962. Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press (Cornell University Press); 2004. 260 p. Notes: See Chapter 6, “Wisconsin’s Public Sector Labor Laws of 1959 and 1962” p. [158]-192, which details the struggle waged by the Wisconsin Council of County and Municipal Employees (WCCME) to win the nation’s first collective bargaining law to cover state employees.
  1. Wisconsin. Office of State Employment Relations. The History of the Wisconsin Civil Service, 1905-2005. Madison, Wis.: Wisconsin Office of State Employment Relations; [2005]. vi, 61 p. Notes: This is an official history prepared and published by the Wisconsin Office of State Employment Relations to mark the 2005 centennial of the creation of the Wisconsin state civil service system, tracing the development from June 17, 1905, when then governor Robert M. La Follette signed Wisconsin Statute Chapter 363 into law to create the state’s civil service system; the new civil service system was designed to ensure that ‘the best shall serve the state’ with hiring to be based on merit as determined through open and competitive examination. Following the U.S. federal government, New York, and Massachusetts, Wisconsin was the third state to abandon the patronage, or ‘spoils’ system, wherein government employees had been chosen based almost solely on the political affiliation of the job applicants.

    Created in 1905, the Wisconsin Civil Service Commission was re-organized in 1929, during the governorship of Walter Kohler, Sr., as an independent agency known as the state Bureau of Personnel under the direction of a three-member Personnel Board. In 1959, the state Bureau of Personnel became a bureau within the Department of Administration, where it stayed until 1977, when new legislation changed the bureau into the Department of Employment Relations (DER), along with a separate Personnel Commission to handle review of appeals of personnel decisions. Then, in 1978, the state Department of Employment Relations was given cabinet-level status and remained so until 2003, when the Department of Employment Relations was re-created as the Office of State Employment Relations (OSER) and was attached to the Department of Administration for administrative purposes, where it remains today.

    Two chapters of special interest are Chapter V, “Wisconsin State Employee Labor History” (p. 35-41) and Chapter VI, “Wisconsin Affirmative Action History” (p. 43-51).

    The published version of this history should be available at any of the many public and university libraries which are part of Wisconsin Depository Libraries program–see there under the following Wisconsin Documents Number: WI ADM. 2: C 53/ 2005.

    A digital version (in PDF) of this history may be found at a website created in observation of the Wisconsin Civil Service Centennial–see the following URL: http://www.civilservicecentennial.wi.gov section_detail_archived.asp?linkcatid=873&linkid=266&locid=54.