RELATIONS between management and organized labor in the private sector of the U.S. economy have been maturing for decades. Out of negotiation, intermittent conflict, legislation and court decision, there has emerged a generally workable system that breaks down on some spectacular occasions but in the main serves the cause of both sides as well as the public good. Not so in the crucially important and rapidly expanding public sector, which embraces everyone who works for government at any level—federal, state, county and municipal—and embodies every conceivable skill, from schoolteaching to garbage disposal. In that area, labor relations are in a primitive stage.
Some 12 million Americans, one-sixth of the national labor force, now work in the public service. In the next seven years, this figure is expected to reach 15 million. Until relatively recent years, the widely held public point of view was that these government employees—whatever their number and whatever their classification—had no right to organize, let alone a right to strike. In 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt called public strikes "unthinkable and intolerable." United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther said in 1966 that "society cannot tolerate strikes that endanger the very survival of society," and proposed finding a new "mechanism by which workers in public service can secure their equity without the need of resorting to strike action." Half of the 50 states have laws prohibiting strikes by government employees, and in all of the others the mood is clearly against them. Yet, with increasing truculence, public employees are striking.
Last week the first statewide public-employee strike in the U.S. closed one-third of Florida's 1,800 public schools (see EDUCATION). The stench of January's illegal strike by New York City's sanitation men, which heaped 100,000 tons of garbage on the streets, offended the nation's nostrils—and was quickly followed by another strike of trash haulers in Memphis, Tenn. Detroit's summer epidemic of "blue flu," in which 700 policemen reported sick, deprived that city of 30% of its on-duty law-enforcement force. A 1967 walkout of firemen in Youngstown, Ohio, emptied all but one of 15 fire stations. In fact, Ohio, which has a tough law calling for the firing of every public employee who goes on strike, has had at least 30 strikes—involving police, nurses, city service employees, teachers and other government workers—in the past year.
There is every indication that the situation is growing progressively worse. The 142 work stoppages called by public employees in 1966 exceeded the total for the four previous years combined; informed estimates of the 1967 figure place it at upwards of 250. Dr. Sam M. Lambert, executive secretary of the National Education Association, which represents one million teachers and administrators, has predicted 250 strikes by teachers alone next year. Says Pennsylvania University Industry Professor George W. Taylor, principal source of New York State's public-employee labor law: "It's going to be a mess for generations."
Wrong-Way Laws