[1] In general, Costa Rican unions support government regulation of the banking, medical, and education fields, as well as improved wages and working conditions.
[5] Legislative Assembly president Henry Mora Jiménez, also supported the law, as do the public sector unions.
[6] Labor unions generally bypassed government employees because they were controlled mostly by the patronage system used by the political parties before the arrival of civil service.
Merger discussions dragged on for years, until finally the NFPOC, UNMAPOC and others merged in 1961 as the United Federation of Postal Clerks.
Historian Joseph Slater, says, "Unfortunately for public sector unions, the most searing and enduring image of their history in the first half of the twentieth century was the Boston police strike.
In suburbs and small cities, the National Education Association (NEA) became active, but it insisted it was not a labor union but a professional organization.
In 1958 New York mayor Robert Wagner, Jr. issued an executive order, called "the little Wagner Act," giving city employees certain bargaining rights, and gave their unions with exclusive representation (that is, the unions alone were legally authorized to speak for all city workers, regardless of whether or not some workers were members.)
Public sector unions came under heavy attack especially in Wisconsin, as well as Indiana, New Jersey and Ohio from conservative Republican legislatures.
Conservatives argued that public unions were too powerful since they helped elect their bosses, and that overly generous pension systems were too heavy a drain on state budgets.