End of a Strike

"I'm thrilled," said Philadelphia's Mayor Frank L. Rizzo. "Now I can walk around without some teachers jumping out at me."

What thrilled the onetime cop, who had vowed never to give in to the teachers' "arrogance," was that President Nixon's chief negotiator, Assistant Secretary of Labor Willie Usery, had just settled the second-longest teacher strike in the nation's history. It had lasted eleven weeks and two days (two days short of the 1971 Newark walkout) of mounting bitterness that will not soon die. "I don't think we'll even try to talk to the scabs," said Fifth Grade Teacher Anne Philips.

The issues were the familiar ones.

The teachers wanted a 34% salary increase, smaller classes, and fewer teaching hours in proportion to preparation time. The school board, then operating on a $52 million deficit, claimed union demands would cost $1 billion. When the board offered a pay raise of only 3%, the strike was on.

Court of Common Pleas Judge D. Donald Jamieson issued an injunction to end the walkout. When the teachers ignored him, the confrontation got rougher. Some 317 teachers were arrested for picketing and will be arraigned for trial next week. Union Negotiators Frank Sullivan and John Ryan were jailed for contempt but were permitted to emerge each morning to continue negotiations, then returned behind bars at night. Teachers who continued to work (about 3,500 of the 13,000) suffered tire slashings and other harassment.

Divided City. In the background was the intractable division between blacks and whites. Philadelphia's teachers are 70% white, but 65% of the city's 285,000 public school pupils are black; of the city's 240,000 white children, more than half go to parochial schools, among them four children of Union Negotiator Ryan.

Throughout the long controversy, the city tried to maintain an appearance of business as usual. Some 260 of the 285 schools officially remained open part-time, local television stations broadcast supplementary lessons, and eight special "learning centers" were opened for college-bound seniors. Even this part-time education reached only about half the students. One senior, Marilyn Etkins, 17, got 1,500 student signatures on a petition protesting the poor quality of the substitute education, but nobody at city hall would accept it.

The final pressure came from other unions, which said that their 100,000 members would shut down Philadelphia for a "day of conscience" if the strike was not settled by last Wednesday. At that, Usery closeted himself and the negotiators in a room on the seventh floor of the Penn Square Building. Fifty-two hours later, the room was a shambles of sandwich wrappers and coffee cups --and there was a settlement. The terms: $99.5 million over four years. Mayor Rizzo, who had promised not to increase taxes, said he would raise the money through "a conglomerate of new taxes that won't affect the workingman.

"Everybody won," he insisted.

And the children who missed two months of school? a reporter wondered.

"I agree," said Rizzo. "Everybody lost."

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