Originally from Dispute Resolution Journal

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Nearly two million school children throughout the country were denied critical days of education when the fall term began this year because of disagreements between their teachers and Boards of Education. Breakdowns in negotiations between the parties over wages, classroom discipline, and managerial responsibility brought a rash of teachers strikes in New York, Michigan, Illinois, Kentucky, Florida and elsewhere. These strikes, and those of other public employees such as firemen, policemen, transit workers, garbage collectors and social workers in the past few months raise serious questions for the public. Are such strikes increasing in number? Why do they occur? Can they be avoided, or hopefully even eliminated?

We have all learned to live with occasional strikes in private industry. Why do we inject a different standard in public employment? Certainly the airline strike in the summer of 1966 caused some disappointment among vacationers and businessmen alike, and the Ford strike of 1967 delayed sporting new auto models to our neighbors. But by and large, these interruptions in industrial service and production are sufficiently irregular and sufficiently remote from our immediate needs, that we have come to accept them as a cost of the free labor market