Not Too Bad

As the first shock of the first nationwide telephone strike wore off, the U.S. pinched itself to see if it still could move and talk. It could--and with surprising alacrity.

In New England, where most of the telephone workers are not affiliated with any of the 39 striking unions, service was 99.7% of normal. Virginia, which requires unions to go through at least five weeks of conferences before striking a public utility, had service as usual. So did Indiana, which has a compulsory arbitration law to forestall such calamities as telephone tie-ups.

The rest of the U.S. was not so well off--long distance service was down 80% in most places, and rural and suburban users of manual phones were thoroughly muzzled. But people got along.

Minor Inconvenience. In New York City, the strikebound 10% were advised to use police boxes in a pinch. In Chicago, big businesses with perishable out-of-town orders put most long distance calls in the emergency (fire, flood, death) or urgent business category, got cut off occasionally when they started a supposedly desperate call with a windy "How's the weather out there?" Chicago suburbanites had their crises too. James Ruzek, who lives in dialless Berwyn, works in a struck plant in dialless Cicero, and has a worrying wife, sent his pet carrier pigeon flying home daily with a message: "Entered plant O.K. Don't worry. Jim."

Atlanta felt no more than minor inconvenience, and teachers actually found new hope for teen-age boys and girls who were driven by the shutdown from endless nightly phone communion to homework. In Kansas City, as in most struck cities, telegraph business zoomed a staggering 50 to 80%. In flooded Michigan, hurried conferences between company and union officials quickly restored emergency service to stricken areas. Radio "hams" took over part of the disaster-message burden in the devastated wake of the Texas-Oklahoma tornado (see Disaster). Denver's harassed company officials indignantly refused to deliver "Come home to lunch" calls from relatives to telephone pickets.

And in San Francisco's Chinatown exchange, where operators answer with a cheery "Gay Daw Ho" (number please), speak many dialects and know most customers' numbers by heart, a walkout of all the regular operators caused a wonderful confusion.

Rough & Tough. But the real snafu, the place where the phone strike began to realize its ugly potential, was in New Jersey.

Twelve minutes after the 12,000 telephone operators of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Co. walked out, Governor Alfred E. Driscoll invoked a one-year-old law prohibiting strikes against public utilities, seized the company and ordered the strikers back to work. But because the law provided no penalties, the strikers, mostly women, went calmly about their picketing. Next day the legislature rammed through a penalty clause: strikers who did not return to work now could be fined $250 to $500 a day, and jailed up to 30 days for every day they stayed out. The striking unions could be fined $10,000 a day.

While strikers cried "Fascism," police arrested three female officers of one union. The women were promptly released on bail (and one got married), but the arrest was enough to start lawyers for both sides preparing a case to test the constitutionality of Governor Driscoll's rough-tough law.

At week's end, negotiations between the National Federation of Telephone Workers and the A.T. & T. were at a standstill. Government conciliators shuttled futilely between the two groups.

Management was standing firm, and it was clear that the union had not quite gained the hoped-for shock which would cause capitulation by A.T. & T. In Walla Walla, in fact, metal products manufacturer Dave Barer was rather enjoying himself. Said he: "You know, it's kinda nice not having that damn thing ringing all day long."

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