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About The Oregon state employee. (Salem, Oregon.) 1944-195? | View Entire Issue (July 1, 1951)
12 Can Public Employee Strike Be Avoided? For 50 days, Detroit, “The Motor .^C'ity,” /was stalled. During thattime, the*3,700 dity em ployees who operate Detroit’s ground transportation system were out on strike for higher pay, and not a bus- wheel turned. As a result two million citizens of Detroit found out hdw badly too many private cars can choke a city’s streets, how business suffers when shoppers, are forced tb stay away, and what a staggering problem it is to get 230,000 production workers to work. Detroit’s citizens did Jhave one small consolation, however: The strike was illegal. Michigan’s Hutchinson Act, not yet tested in the courts, was designed to punish striking municipal workers with immediate dismissal. If re-hired, they faced a loss of seniority and pen sion rights. Despite this, the law proved no deterrent, and the willing ness of municipal employee groups to buck stringent legislation is not con fined to Detroit; j In 1950, city employees in Yonkers, New York, defied the state’s Condon- Wadlin act 3 probably the most dras tic of its kind on the books. New York City’s 44,000 transport workers went Yonkers employees one better: with a token strike of 8,000 non-operating workers, they refused to recognize its, existence, and for a time threatened a complete work stoppage. Behind the backing and filling,- however, and the bargaining between New York City officials and union leaders are these very real facts that have little to do with legal issues; H Invoking the law and thus dis missing 44,000 transit workers would not provide transportation' facilities for the TV2 million people in and around New York who rely on daily service. I 2; Municipal jobs are becoming in creasingly difficult to fill, even under.; the most favorable conditions. There are, for example, 10,000 provisional id employees among New York’s trans port workers, and there is no reser voir of skilled candidates. Stern anti strike legislation, coupled with low- take-home pay and other problems of civil service employees, will not im prove the recruiting picture. Yet, against this background, an in creasing number of states are outlaw ing strikes by public employees in well-meaning attempts to prevent ci vil servants from destroying the framework of orderly government. Many of these laws, though, are pat terned after New York’s Condon-Wad- lip act, which misses the basic point in labor ;— and human — relations: employee relations is the responsibili ty of the supervisor. It is a manage ment skill and one that cannot be leg islated. The law may prevent a few strikes, but being prohibitive, will not solve basic issues. Sound administer ing will. Since, one after another, the anti strike laws designed to keep public employees on the job and performing their vital services have proved in effective, and at times have seemed— as in the case of the New York trans port workers — an invitation to chaos, the question arises, can these damag ing and potentially dangerous strikes be avoided? , They can, if along with legislation that protects the public welfare, ma chinery is set up for handling em ployment problems before they reach the crisis stage. This idea of catching problems at their source, which is so well under stood in industry, is invariably for gotten by legislative groups who feel that passing a law is enough- The re sults are exactly the opposite of what the legislators hoped for: often public employee disputes develop to the point of “ crises” before an effort is made to solve it. Frequently, the ef fort at a solution comes too late. As far back as 1946 the National C i- (Continued on Page 20)
