"There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, at any time," declared Massachusetts' Governor Calvin Coolidge when he broke the Boston police strike in 1919. "A strike of public employees is unthinkable and intolerable," added President Roosevelt in 1937. On pain of one year's imprisonment, federal employees are forbidden even to belong to a union that advocates strikes; other bans against public-employee strikes are on the books in eleven states, ranging from New York to Hawaii. And even without specific laws, the country's courts have almost universally upheld Government authority and enjoined public-employees' strikes throughout U.S. history.
Despite all these precedents, New York City last week was paralyzed by a massive strike of public-transit workers (see THE NATION). As in other recent New York strikes involving teachers and welfare workers, no official dared invoke the Condon-Wadlin Act, the nation's toughest state antistrike statute. The law requires that all striking public employees be fired, forbids those that are rehired from getting pay raises for three years, and puts them on probation for five years. Since all this virtually guarantees that strikers will never go back to work, the law has rarely been invoked since it was passed in 1947. Meanwhile, the state has suffered more than 22 public-employees' strikes.
Political Pressures. Clearly, New York needs far more savvy in handling public employees; but so does the entire U.S. The country's 10.2 million civilian Government workers (24% of them federal) now comprise the largest single segment of the U.S. labor force. With state and local governments slated to hire 50% more workers, the public sector's share of the labor force will hit an estimated 20% by 1970. Meanwhile, having lost members in private industry, U.S. unions now regard public employees as a prime target—and already represent about 34% of them.
Some labor-law experts would allow strikes by "nonessential" public employees, such as Government clerks, while retaining the strike ban for such essential employees as policemen, firemen and public-transit workers. Indeed, Puerto Rico permits that distinction in its commonwealth constitution. One potential effect, of course, is that strikes might eventually be banned for private "essential" employees, such as defense workers.
Pioneering Steps. The consensus remains: public employees simply cannot strike. All this raises a new problem in labor law—how to bargain effectively with workers who cannot be allowed to walk off the job even though the very nature of public employment tends to spur strikes. In contrast to private industry, public employees deal with administrators who lack full power of the purse, and a strike may be the only way to impress those who control the money—mayors, governors, legislators. When the public employees happen to be vitally needed nurses, teachers, transit workers and the like, they have an unmistakable power to rouse public opinion against a public employer whose inability to settle a dispute casts him in a poor political light—or, conversely, to rouse public opinion against themselves.