Parity with Their Peers

All the outlanders love to laugh about how fouled up New York City is, -- and rarely has the laughter been louder than during last January's transit strike. Since then a lot of cities across the nation have discovered that strikes by public employees--which Franklin D. Roosevelt once described as "unthinkable and intolerable"--are no laughing matter.

Demanding that their in-station hours be cut from 56 to 50 a week, 278 of Kansas City's firemen last month got around state laws by playing sick for four days; in so doing they defied a court injunction and created a wrangle so bitter that National Guardsmen were sent to guard firehouses. In Atlanta, 500 of 726 firemen quit their own union, the International Association of Fire Fighters, which bars strikes, then walked out for 21 days despite a court back-to-work order.

In Michigan, which has had more public strikes (15) in the past twelve months than in 17 previous years, 250 Lansing workers recently won pay hikes and benefits worth $100,000 a year after a three-day walkout that shut down everything but the city's golf courses and graveyards. Garbage men have been on strike in Dayton and Youngstown, Ohio, and in Louisville, where one militant leader last week promised to hold out "until the garbage backs up to the heavens." Around Detroit and Los , Angeles, teachers and welfare workers have joined the parade.

Amid all this, no union has been more aggressive than the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s 300,000-man American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, whose membership, ranging from clerks to cops, has grown 66% since 1960. According to Union President Jerry Wurf, 47, more city officials had better be ready to go to the bargaining tables--and then to their treasuries. Public workers, he says happily, "are willing to take nothing less than parity with their industry peers."

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