MOAR DISPATCHES! MOAR DISSERTATIONIZING! ZOMG!

Well, I'm sort of stuck.  I need to figure out why the 1942 and 1943-4 University of Minnesota nonacademic worker strikes weren't illegal - or if they were, why no one seemed to care.  Minnesota labor law, unlike NY, permits strikes by "nonessential" government employees after a 10-day cooling off period and, in some cases, an arbitration process.  But the Minnesota Public Employee Labor Relations Act only dates back to the 1970s, and a morning and a half's worth of searching has yielded little help as to what the status of public employee strikes was in the period i'm looking at.  Labor historian and lawyer Joseph E. Slater's Public Workers: Government Employee Unions, The Law, and The State 1900-1962 suggests that strikes by public school janitors were very much illegal in the 1930s, yet strike votes recur into at least 1940, and the objections Slater recounts of BSEIU brass to the proposed job actions hinge more on public perception than perceived illegality.  I'm debating submitting a query to H-labor or something.  The point is that neither state labor law nor the WLB - one would think one or the other would have gotten involved - seem to have been pressuring the local against a strike, at least until the governor intervened to end the 1942 strike on the promise of some form of continuing mediation.  Minnesota Governor Howard Stassen's intervention isn't surprising given the role the university was playing in housing and training armed services personnel in the middle of world war II.  Nor is it entirely suprising that the international leadership of the BSEIU, an AFL craft union with historical links to organized crime, also opposed the strike, even if the Minneapolis Central Labor Union supported it.  What's odd is the lack of evidence I've found that anyone was seriously pressuring the union against striking prior to picket lines going up around campus.  Or maybe I am just not looking in the right places, relying too heavily on press clippings, not looking at a wider span of archival press coverage from before the strike.  The Minneapolis Labor Review makes no reference to any such pressure before the strike, and none of the other press coverage of the actual October '42 strike lists any such concerns or any state response to the strike save Governor Stassen's attempt to convince the workers to go back by promising to mediate.

Anyway, If you, dear reader, have ideas about how I might figure out the answers to some of these questions,  I would be in your debt.