A Need for Inventiveness

After six days of a wildcat walkout, the biggest police strike in the U.S. since Boston's in 1919, more than 20,000 New York patrolmen returned to their jobs last week. Somehow, as they usually do, New Yorkers had muddled through. Crime did not rise, despite dire predictions that every gangster and petty criminal would have a field day, and traffic was no more snarled than usual. The fact that detectives, sergeants and ranking officers stayed on the job and that the weather was bitterly cold helped keep things quiet. One psychologist praised the "incredible selfdiscipline" of New Yorkers, a "different breed with an innate sense of their own survival."

Far beyond New York's viability, the strike raised an increasingly troublesome question: How does government prevent walkouts by essential public employees? The cops were not kept on the job by New York State's antistrike Taylor Law; nor have similar statutes elsewhere kept firemen, nurses and sanitation men from walkouts in the past. University of Pennsylvania Professor George W. Taylor is not entirely happy with the New York law that bears his name. But he has found no answer. "We are still searching," he says. "What we need is some social inventiveness."

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