The New Militancy

In Des Moines, a strike by municipal employees filled the city with the stench of uncollected garbage and untended sewers. In New York, Detroit and other scattered spots around the nation, teachers picketed their own schools, forcing hundreds of thousands of children to play hooky (see EDUCATION). Forty-two thousand copper workers in half a dozen states stayed off the job for the ninth week, while a violent walkout of steel truckers in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana interrupted vital steel shipments.

The vast River Rouge complex outside Detroit was eerily still in what should have been one of its busiest weeks. Across the country, 92 other Ford plants were shuttered in the second week of a United Auto Workers walkout. And at Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall for the first time in 35 years, the famed Rockettes, all 46 of them, refused to lift another shapely leg onstage until they were given a minimum of $140 a week (they now earn $99 to start).

Worse & Still Worse. It was all too clear already that 1967 was shaping up as the biggest year of labor strife in more than a decade. In the first six months, reports the Labor Department, more man-days (14,470,000) were lost to strikes than in any like period since 1953. About the only hopeful development last week was an apparent end to the impasse between the railroads and six shopcraft unions. As ordered by a presidential arbitration panel, acting under an extraordinary congressional mandate, the railroads will grant an 11% wage increase over two years to 137,000 workers. The settlement was unexpectedly generous to the unions.

Even so, the rail panel's recommendation was probably not much more than the unions could have got on their own --if they had been allowed by Congress to strike. For U.S. labor is in an aggressive mood; unions are demanding, and most often getting, more than they have been accustomed to. The 3.2% voluntary ceiling on wage increases that President Johnson promoted so vigorously only a year ago has gone the way of the great consensus; hardly anyone even bothers to talk about, much less follow, the 5% guideline that succeeded it.

Answers in Part. What accounts for labor's militancy? One reason is prosperity. In a time of low unemployment (now 3.8%), the worker commands a premium. Other goads are inflation and ever rising local and state taxes--not to mention the threat of a new 10% fed eral surtax (see following story). In their drive for higher wages, union members are rejecting one-seventh of the contracts accepted by their leaders.

Labor's militancy is also prompted in part by inter-and intra-union rivalries, which force each faction to try to win more than its competitor. A bitter feud between the A.F.L.-C.I.O.-affiliated American Federation of Teachers and the older National Education Asso ciation has escalated teachers' demands in the past few years. Similarly, Walter Reuther may have been less ready for his U.A.W. to settle with Ford because of his own longstanding differences with A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany.

Baloney about Money. Yet there is a new psychological mood behind the 1967 strikes. Industrial shutdowns, after all, are hardly novel, but mass strikes of teachers and municipal employees, who supply services essential to an orderly community, are unprecedented in the U.S.--and ominous in every way. Teachers, in particular, seem to have inherited their aggressiveness from the civil rights movement, which has demonstrated that sometimes the best way to get what is wanted or needed is simply to take it, regardless of laws or traditions. "Let the politicians stop playing patsy," said a striking New York teacher, who could never be confused with kindly Mr. Chips--or an old-fashioned grammarian. "This is baloney about not having the money. They can dig it up if they want it bad enough."

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