Teachers' Strike

Can schoolteachers win public support and higher pay by going on strike like miners and dockers?

"We will win!" chanted 4,600 teachers as they hit the picket line last week in New York City. Circling 267 schools, they crippled junior highs, left students staring at blank blackboards in unattended classrooms (surprisingly little disorder resulted). Cried happy kids: "Hold that line!" The first teachers' strike in the city's history was called by the United Federation of Teachers, A.F.L.-C.I.O., which claims one-quarter of the 39,000 teachers in the nation's biggest urban public school system. The union had solid demands, from sick pay to duty-free lunch periods, but most of all it wanted collective bargaining rights. Therein lay the real issue. As one of 39 organizations representing New York teachers, the union sought to become the strongest.

The strike was illegal under New York State's never-used Condon-Wadlin Act, which outlaws strikes by public employees on pain of dismissal. But School Superintendent John J. Theobald did not invoke the law, instead suspended the strikers. Then Mayor Robert F. Wagner called in three top labor leaders, including the Garment Workers' Dave Dubinsky, to "mediate." Said one: "We pledge to the families of New York City that there will be no recurrence."

The strike lasted just one day. Theobald guaranteed no reprisals, but leaders of the teachers' union rumbled that the end was only "an honorable truce." Whether prelude or epilogue, the strike was a classic example of the dilemma facing U.S. teachers. To get needed gains in pay and treatment, they now have two rival organizations: the noncombative, 714,000-member National Education Association, which is mostly dominated by school administrators, and the aggressive, 60,000-member American Federation of Teachers, A.F.L.-C.I.O. As proved in New York last week, national labor chieftains--sensing the unpopularity of strikes that can be described as "against the children"--are not much interested in supporting teachers. What U.S. teachers really need is an overall professional organization to negotiate the demands that many citizens consider them entitled to.

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