The Montana Federation of Public Employees (MFPE) is a Montana labor union. Its 23,000 members make it the largest union in the state. MFPE is a public employee union with a diverse membership embracing public school teachers and classified personnel, higher education faculty and support personnel, law enforcement, and health care workers. MFPE is NOT a teacher union. Half of MFPE's members serve public education, the rest work across state, county, and city governments. MFPE is, for example, the largest law enforcement union in the state representing correctional officers, highway patrol, probation and parole officers, deputy county attorneys, deputy county sheriffs, and city police. History MFPE is a union of public employees working in every Montana community in public elementary and secondary schools, public higher education, state, county, and city governments. MFPE, however, will and has organized a relatively small number of private sector workers. MFPE was formed in 2018 by the merger of Montana's two largest labor unions: MEA-MFT and the Montana Public Employees Association (MPEA). Counting 23,000 dues paying members, MFPE is the largest affiliate of the Montana State AFL-CIO, and is one of five merged state affiliates of the National Education Association(NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Before merger with MPEA, MEA-MFT (that was its name, not an acronym) was the result of the merger of the Montana Education Association (MEA) and the Montana Federation of Teachers (MFT) in 2000. In 1882, seven years before statehood, Montana frontier parents and teachers formed what ultimately became MEA. From the beginning, MEA was a union of public school educators, especially teachers, and until the middle 1970s and the adoption of the Montana collective bargaining act, public school administrators. The 1975 Montana collective bargaining act identified school administrators as management. As management school administrators were no longer eligible for MEA membership much less union representation. From that point forward MEA evolved from a so-called professional association to a union of public school teachers and in time public school classified employees determined to bargain collectively for salary, fringe benefits, and working conditions. From 1975 to 2002 a number of MEA local affiliates (and a smaller number of MFT local affiliates) exercised their lawful right to strike in communities across Montana, twice in Great Falls and Billings. The Billings Education Association conducted the last major Montana school employee strike in 2002. MFT first emerged in 1917 when a small group of