More on Strikes by Public Employees

Abstract

We have two brief observations on the paper by Messrs. Burton and Krider.1 First, we suggest that society is not limited to a choice between their strike and no-strike alternatives. Our earlier article argued that the typical municipal political structure is vulnerable to strikes by well entrenched public employee unions,2 and that, given this existing political structure, the no-strike model is preferable to the strike model. We stated, however, that changes in the political structure which reduce the vulnerability of municipal employers to strikes by public employees can be made and that we intended (and we still do intend) to explore these possibilities in a future article.3 There is, therefore, a third model -one which permits some strikes in conjunction with various changes in municipal political structures. Second, we wish to define what seems to be the principal area of our disagreement with Messrs. Burton and Krider. All agree that the services performed by some public employees are in one way or another essential and that this essentiality is in some sense related to society's ability to tolerate strikes. However, which employees under the Burton-Krider strike model are to have union activities limited4 depends very much on one's view of essentiality. It is now clear that our vision is different from theirs. For them, the essentially of the service depends on the extent to which disruption of the service by a strike would immediately endanger public health and safety. They limit the concept to situations creating an immediate danger to the public health and safety and, therefore, advocate a prohibition on strikes affecting municipal police