FDR was a friend of labor. The only president to serve more than eight years (he served more than twelve, having been elected four times) he forged the lasting alliance between the Democratic Party and private sector unions. He believed that the power of Big Business had to be balanced by power of Big Labor, which was the spirit of the Wagner Act, enacted early in his tenure.

But he also understood that civil service is fundamentally different. Public sector employees are not subject to the vagaries of supply and demand, nor the discipline of the marketplace. Instead, they serve at the behest of the people in deference to the will of the people. Democracy requires government service but democracy contemplates that government supplicate before the taxpayers. This, FDR knew.

And FDR realized that private sector workers were constrained by competitive forces that do not exist for their public brethren. If a private employer is driven out-of-business by the excessive demands of a union, the goose is lost along with the golden egg. No such risk attends union demands on a public employer.

And so a social contract was generally understood: Job security, enshrined in Civil Service laws since 1871, displaced the high-risk/high-reward environment of private sector employment. Policemen, social workers and school teachers served employers not in search of highest profits, but rather administering essential public services according to the will of the public.

The essential nature of public sector work was not to be a bargaining lever. If an army refused to go to war until they got a raise, then it is not an army. FDR took us into and then through World War II and he understood that public service was a high calling. Service of the common good does not allow unfettered collective bargaining.

This understanding was reflected in a letter FDR wrote to the president of the National Federation of Federal Employees on August 16, 1937. The 4th and 5th paragraphs of that 6-paragraph letter read:

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.

Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government."

When the teachers of Lake Forest High School conducted a strike against the taxpayers of Lake Forest High School, they violated trust. They are entitled to be fairly paid and reasonably treated but they are not entitled to make demands. Indeed, the Illinois case Harris v. Quinn decided on the last day of June, 2014 by the Supreme Court of the United States may transform all fifty states into right-to-work states.

The LFEA, as it has presented itself in recent years, has no right to exist.