Strike

In Buffalo last week, 2,400 teachers walked out of the public schools into a 50-mile-an-hour snowstorm. Bundled up to their ears against the cold, they threw what they chose to call "observation lines" around the schools. Most pickets were as polite as they could be as 534 of their fellow teachers walked through the lines. At first, in the biggest teachers' strike in U.S. history, most of Buffalo's 72,000 public-school pupils had no classes, and the rest had only the barest instruction. Then the Mayor decided to close all the schools (before the joyful students wrecked them) and the nonstriking teachers stayed at home.

Endowed with holidays until further notice, the school kids had nothing to fear but the end of the strike. Not so their parents, who had constant noisy reminders of the valuable time that was being lost. And not so the majority of the teacher-strikers, who could not 'forget a basic issue: Have teachers the right to strike?

The Buffalo Evening News cried that the calling of the strike marked a "day of infamy," and Mayor Bernard J. Dowd denounced the "open revolt against the Government." Leftwingers joyfully applauded the teachers' "militancy." All such talk seemed to distress the teachers. They disliked even the word "strike," and they tried to duck the whole issue by calling it an "abstention from work." ("Strike," explained one teacher primly, "has an ugly connotation.")

Like most U.S. white-collar workers, Buffalo's teachers had not thought of themselves as union labor: only 500 had joined either the A.F.L. or C.I.O. teachers' unions (which supported, but did not declare, the strike). Buffalo's walkout was the work of the independent Buffalo Teachers Federation, which insisted even on the picket line that it was a "professional association" and not a union.

The Federation's president, Raymond J. Ast, is an elementary-school principal and a past commander of the county American Legion. He distilled the teachers' reluctance into an oddly unmilitant strike slogan: "Remember the dignity of our profession."

Striking against Whom? Regardless of their semantics, the actions of Buffalo's teachers spoke for them: like it or not, they were on strike against their own city government and ultimately against the state. Most of the nation's editorial writers, recalling Calvin Coolidge and the Boston police strike, held that the strikers were in the wrong, even while many writers sympathized with their grievances. (According to the Federation, the average Buffalo teacher was going into the hole every year, had to borrow, or take a part-time job to make ends meet.)

The teachers had first taken their salary demands to the city. They wanted, among other things, a permanent raise in minimums from $1,775 to $2,400, in maximums from $2,975 to $4,000. The city's answer was that Buffalo is broke, and that only the state legislature--in session at Albany--may empower the city to raise its tax rate. A little unsure whether it was up to city or state to help them, the teachers walked out, and put the pressure on both.

On the strike's first day, only 21 schools opened their doors; Superintendent Robert Bapst closed down the other 77 because he knew there would not be enough nonstriking teachers even to keep order. The "observation lines" were reinforced by older students (some of whom had union cards) and in some cases by parents.

Cops & Chaos. Scenes inside the schools were less orderly than they were outside; in some schools they looked like rehearsals for chaos. Bobby-soxers roamed from room to room, singing, cheering and shrieking. Some scrawled on blackboards: "Teacher is a scab." As soon as a harassed schoolmarm managed to herd one group of revelers into a classroom, another gang careened into the corridor. Policemen tried to talk the pupils into going home, but the kids were having too much fun in school.

On the strike's third day, the nonstriking teachers threw in the towel. "We do not feel justified," they told Superintendent Bapst, "in accepting the taxpayers' money. ... It is only wasted." Buffalo closed down the entire school system and notified the state government that "public education has collapsed."

At week's end, Buffalo's Mayor Dowd decided that he could, after all, do something about the teachers' troubles. He pledged the teachers raises of $300 to $625 (considerably less than they had asked). He would ask Albany for new taxes to pay for the bill. The teachers accepted his offer, and the school bells rang again in Buffalo.

The battle of Buffalo was over, but the war went on. In Atlantic City, a committee of the powerful National Education Association (341,000 members) warned against any ban on teachers' strikes. Said the committee: "Teachers must not be coerced into working for substandard wages with no way of making effective protest." In New York City, where several of the city's teachers' groups began talking strike, Superintendent John Wade sent a carefully phrased note to all 34,000 teachers. He approved, he said, of the continued "professional campaign" for higher pay, but nervously threatened that "any other course of action" (i.e., a strike) would "jeopardize the security of teachers."

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