often prohibiting affiliation with labor or organizing at all.”32
The Public Employee Strike Wave
While the situation for public workers looked bleak at the conclusion of the 1950s, in reality, it was the calm before the storm. In a great strike wave that would span the next two decades, public workers across the nation would force obstructionist public employers to finally recognize public employee unions. Rejecting the backroom lobbying favored by the old guard, aggressive young public employee leaders demanded real collective bargaining, backed up with the right to strike. As a result of this surge, “Public sector strike activity increased dramatically during the 1960s and 1970s, despite the fact that such strikes were illegal in most states. Furthermore, public sector work stoppages increased to record levels at a time when strike activity was decreasing in the economy as a whole.”33
Far and away the most militant group of public workers during this period were teachers. Teacher activism would reach its high point in the late 1970s, amounting to “nearly 44 percent of all work stoppages by local government employees during the 1974-1980 period . . . the largest percentage of work stoppages in public employment.”34 Following the example of teachers, sanitation workers, air traffic controllers, and social workers all embraced workplace militancy. From 1958 through 1970, the number of strikes of public workers “rose from 15 to 412 per year, workers involved from 1,720 to 333,500, and man-days of idleness as a result of strikes from 7,510 to 2,023,200.”35 This explosion of strike activity spanned the breath of the country, from major northern cities to rural western towns to southern “right to work” states.
Even police and firefighters joined in the workplace uprising. To take but one example out of many, police in the small Oregon community of Klamath Falls struck for union recognition in 1973. Entering the 1970s, the police officers of Klamath Falls were among the lowest paid in Oregon, received no overtime pay, and were often forced to work off the clock writing reports. When their department refused to bargain, eighteen police officers and clerks walked off the job on June 5, 1973. As a history of the strike noted, “although police strikes in Oregon were illegal, this was not to be the crucial issue. ‘The big talk was not whether the strike was legal or not. It was a moral issue with the guys.’”36 The city attempted to run the department with sergeants as both sides dug in for a long fight. The key breakthrough came when the sergeants, fed up with working twelve hour shifts during the strike, “complained they had lost their patience and would walk out if the strike was not settled soon.”37 The strike was ended shortly thereafter, earning the officers a ten percent pay increase. At the same time the police of Klamath Falls were striking, Oregon legislators were voting on passage of public employee bargaining legislation. The strike “served as a prime example of the type of dispute a comprehensive bargaining law was aimed at preventing.”38
Rejecting the self-imposed prohibitions that had been in place since the 1919 strike in Boston, police began to strike across the nation, including in locations not considered union strongholds such as Oklahoma City, Tucson, and Las Cruces, New Mexico.39 In October 1975, nearly 600 Oklahoma City police walked off the job, frustrated by the city’s refusal to bargain. This was their third job action in eight years, which had included ticket writing slowdowns in 1967 and 1972. Fed up with years of inaction, administrator raises and poor supervisory practices, police again engaged in a ticket writing slowdown. The slowdown hit the city in the pocketbook, depriving it of revenue. An arbitrator then ruled that the police should be given large pay increases, but city officials refused to accept the ruling. (In many areas during this period, arbitrators would issue non-binding decisions which public officials often ignored if they did not agree with the ruling.) After city officials refused to abide by the decision of the arbitrator, outraged police officers began a campaign of radio silence, refusing to even acknowledge police calls. After an officer was rumored to be fired, the police began an impromptu march to city hall, with all on duty officers pulling their squad cars in front of the building. After one leader tossed his badge on the table at the city manager, “most of the department’s 583 officers…filed into the meeting room and tossed their badges on the table as officers outside the building cheered.”40 Both sides were careful not to call the action a strike, which was settled after three days. Although the settlement included a 9 percent raise, it also included a penalty of two days for striking in addition to the three days lost pay during the strike. The city council at first refused to endorse the settlement, but threats by the police officers to initiate political recall petitions convinced enough council members to vote for the settlement and the parties were soon able to establish a good bargaining relationship.
Even firefighters struck frequently during the 1970s. In Memphis, firefighters, upset that a purported $12 million city deficit had miraculously transformed into a $1.5 million surplus, struck for three days. After returning to work following an injunction, the firefighters walked out again after rejecting the proposed settlement, this time joining police on the picket line. After the involvement of the governor and the business community, the strike was settled in a compromise after eight days.41
Not all of the public employee strikes of this era were sanctioned by union leadership. In 1979, white collar state workers in New Jersey were represented by an independent union—the State Employees Association. After the SEA negotiated an agreement which failed to keep worker pay in line with the soaring inflation rate of the times, 15,000 New Jersey State workers responded with a wildcat strike.42 Lined up against the striking workers was the state government, the courts, the media and their own employee association. Facing enormous pressure, the workers returned to work after three days, with no improvement in the state’s position. The energy and solidarity developed on the picket line was not wasted, however. Dissatisfied with their union’s response, the workers formed the State Workers Organizing Committee, which challenged the SEA in a state election. Affiliating with the Communication Workers of America, Committee organizers went on to win a representation election for 35,000 state workers in 1981. Building on the solidarity from the wildcat strike, the new union launched an aggressive contract campaign featuring informational picketing and grassroots mobilizing, backed up by a strike vote. With the 1979 wildcat strike fresh in management’s memories, the first CWA contract secured “an unprecedented 17 percent across-the-board pay increase over two years,” better healthcare, and greatly improved contract language.43
Factors Behind the Upsurge
A variety of factors contributed to the rise of public employee unionism during the 1960s and 1970s. First, there were profound changes in society, including a massive expansion of public employment, which provided the material basis for the public worker upsurge. Labor historian Robert Shaffer writes about how “[t]he opportunity for public employee unions to arise was rooted in major postwar transformations in American life. These changes were at the core of a dramatic increase in overall public sector employment.” Over a twenty-year period from 1946 to 1967, the number of public employees rose from 5.5 million to 11.6 million.44
This public employee upsurge was part of a larger movement for social change that took place during the 1960s, with the women’s and civil rights movements in particular aggressively asserting their rights. These movements helped infuse public employees with a hopeful attitude about change, with younger public workers, caught up in spirit of the times, bringing a culture of protest into the workplace. Labor arbitrator Arnold Zach, writing in 1972, noted that among the factors contributing to the rise of public employee militancy was “a rising civil disobedience in the nation, as demonstrated in the civil rights movement, draft resistors’ movement, anti-poverty activities and war protests, [which] convinced militant public employees that protest against ‘the establishment’ and its laws was fruitful and could be a valued vehicle for bringing about desired change.”45 These social movements also provided natural allies for the rising public employee labor movement, a phenomenon which would be seen most clearly with the organization of sanitation workers in the South, who were able to strike and win collective bargaining agreements despite the anti-union attitudes prevalent in the region. Sanitation workers
