Labor: Parity with Their Peers

All the outlanders love to laugh about how fouled up New York City is, — and rarely has the laughter been louder than during last January's transit strike. Since then a lot of cities across the nation have discovered that strikes by public employees—which Franklin D. Roosevelt once described as "unthinkable and intolerable"—are no laughing matter.

Demanding that their in-station hours be cut from 56 to 50 a week, 278 of Kansas City's firemen last month got around state laws by playing sick for four days; in so doing they defied a court injunction and created a wrangle so bitter...