McCartin--Fire the Hell

“Fire the Hell out of Them”: Sanitation Workers’ Struggles and the Normalization of the Striker Replacement Strategy in the 1970s Joseph A. McCartin

Three labor conflicts that occurred during the 1970s can tell us a great deal about the extent to which these years were a watershed in American labor history. Consider first the events that unfolded on April 4, 1977, in Atlanta, Georgia. On this ninth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Atlanta was in the midst of a bitter sanitation strike that had begun on March 28. On that April morning, Rev. John Bell reminded the city’s African American sanitation strikers that King had been assassinated while in Memphis, Tennessee, on a mission to aid men like them, also members of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). “We are here to give tribute to a man who has gone as we now are going,” Bell declared. Just as King’s martyrdom had helped the Memphis workers win union recognition, Bell prophesied, King’s spirit would inspire Atlanta’s sanitation workers to victory in their own struggle. The strikers cheered these words, but a sense of misgiving pervaded their ranks. They knew that at that very moment one thousand men were lining up to apply for their jobs, for these strikers had been fired by their mayor for refusing to end their walkout.

Adding to the strikers’ concerns was a scene playing out that moment at Atlanta’s city hall. Even as AFSCME members listened to Bell recall the life of Dr. King, Atlanta’s mayor, Maynard Jackson, was meeting with the press to invoke King’s name for a different purpose. On the strike’s second day, Jackson had announced that strikers would be permanently replaced if they did not return to work within fortyThis article would not have been written without the encouragement of Robert H. Zieger. Many other colleagues offered help and comments along the way. I’d like to thank Sven Beckert, Lizabeth Cohen, Melvyn Dubofsky, Meg Jacobs, Alex Keyssar, Bob Korstad, Alice O’Connor, Gail Radford, Adolph Reed Jr., Ron Schatz, Bruce Schulman, Rob Steinfeld, and the participants in Harvard’s 2003 – 4 Warren Center Seminar for their comments on versions of this piece.

Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Volume 2, Issue 3 Copyright © 2005 by Joseph A. McCartin

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eight hours. As promised, he terminated their employment on April 1. Now, on the anniversary of the King assassination, Atlanta’s first black mayor — himself a former attorney for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)—told the press that replacement workers were being hired that morning. Jackson reminded reporters that his handling of the strike enjoyed broad support. The Atlanta Business League and the Chamber of Commerce backed the mayor. So did the Atlanta Baptist Ministers Union, the Urban League, and the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). But the big moment of the mayor’s press conference came when Atlanta’s best-known minister spoke up. On the anniversary of his son’s death, the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr. defended Mayor Jackson. Jackson had gone far enough in trying to placate the unreasonable strikers, King Sr. declared. The time had come to draw the line. “If you do everything you can [for the union] and don’t get satisfaction,” he explained, “then fire the hell out of them.”1 Mayor Jackson had done just that, and now he was moving on.

To fully grasp the significance of what happened in Atlanta on April 4, 1977, consider two very different strike stories that unfolded seven years earlier in 1970.

One story played out at the national level; the second, in Atlanta. The national drama began on March 25, when air traffic controllers employed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) staged a national sickout to protest forced overtime and harassment of their union. This was their third major job action since they had founded the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) in 1968. The “thinly disguised strike,” as the New York Times called it, involved roughly three thousand controllers, lasted for more than two weeks, and wreaked havoc on the nation’s air system.2 Thousands of flights were canceled, and the volume of air traffic was halved in major centers like New York and Chicago. At one point during the sickout, sixty jets lined up on runways at John F. Kennedy International Airport awaiting takeoff clearance while fifty more circled above in holding patterns.3 This job action occurred despite the fact that strikes against the federal government were illegal. In an editorial, the Times archly warned that if “PATCO can strike . . . and win without penalty to its members, then we need not be surprised if in the future firemen go on strike at the height of a five-alarm fire, public health doctors in the middle of a major epidemic, and policemen at the crest of a crime wave.” Unless this walkout was broken, the nation would witness “anarchy and dissolution of the bonds and restraints that distinguish a civilized community from the jungle.” The government “cannot surrender to this attempt at coercion,” the Times concluded.4 Yet, in handling the obviously illegal PATCO job action of 1970, President Richard M. Nixon manifested none of the toughness of Maynard Jackson in 1977.

Nixon did not “surrender” to PATCO, but neither did he deliver what the New York 1. Atlanta Constitution, April 5, 1977.

2. New York Times, March 28, 1970.

3. Ibid.

4. Editorial, New York Times, April 7, 1970.

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Times hoped for. Rather, as he had done during the 1970 postal strike that had ended only weeks earlier, Nixon avoided harshly penalizing striking federal employees even though the law allowed him to do so.5 Instead, the administration negotiated the return of PATCO strikers on what many judged to be lenient terms. Over the vehement objections of Secretary of Transportation John Volpe and his undersecretary James M. Beggs, the administration decided to take tough action against only a small number of controllers. “We were going to fire the whole bloody mess,” Beggs later recalled. “I was in favor of firing them and starting all over again.” But the Nixon White House had other ideas. Beggs was allowed to terminate fewer than two hundred sickout leaders. Yet the White House developed second thoughts about meting out even these carefully targeted firings. In negotiations with union leaders designed to win labor support for other Nixon initiatives, the White House agreed to rehire all but one fired controller.6 The administration even restored PATCO’s eligibility to represent controllers despite its recent illegal job action. The FAA claimed that this decision “in no way diminished the gravity of striking against the Federal Government,” but PATCO leaders knew better.7 By 1974 the union had won the formal right to represent controllers, and leaders of the illegal 1970 strike whom Beggs wanted to fire had negotiated the first PATCO-FAA contract.

Even as PATCO’s 1970 job action was playing out, another drama was unfolding in Atlanta. The month of April saw the city in the grip of a thirty-seven-day sanitation strike, which became a bitter struggle between AFSCME and Sam Massell, who was then mayor of Atlanta. Unlike President Nixon, Massell decided to take on the union for leading an illegal strike. Early in the walkout, Massell threatened to fire strikers if they did not end their work stoppage. When they refused, he authorized 1,400 dismissal notices. But Massell’s hard line drew vehement criticism from civic groups and churches. Leading the criticism of the white mayor were civil rights activists who defended the African American strikers and insisted that the mayor “find some way to solve the problem short of tearing the city asunder.” Even Massell’s vice 5. Under the provisions of the Taft-Hartley Labor Act (1947), it was unlawful to strike against the federal government and strikers were subject to dismissal. Public Law 330 (passed in 1955) made it illegal to strike against the government, assert the right to do so, or join in an organization that asserted that right. See Murray Nesbitt, Labor Relations in the Federal Government Service (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 1976), chap. 13, 386 – 90.

6. Charles Colson, the White House counsel, brokered the rehiring of the controllers in negotiations with Jesse Calhoon of the Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association. James Beggs, interview by author, Bethesda, MD, August 14, 2003; Jesse Calhoon, telephone interview by author, August 24, 2001; Mike Rock, interview by author, Islip, New York, August 13, 2001. For evidence for Colson’s negotiations, see Nixon White House Recording 607 – 14, October 29, 1971, Cassettes 1333 – 5 /1334 – 1; Recording 608 – 1, October 29, 1971, Cassette 1336 – 1; Recording 13 – 83, November 3, 1971; Recording 13 – 99, November 3, 1971; Recording 13 – 121, November 4, 1971; Recording 300 – 16, November 4, 1971, Cassette 1391 – 16; Recording 13 – 154, November 5, 1971; and Recording 13 – 158, November 8, 1971; all in Nixon Presidential Papers, National Archives II, College Park, MD (hereafter cited as NAII).

7. FAA News Release, February 7, 1972, Employee Strikes file, box 387, entry 14, FAA Records, RG 237, NAII.

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mayor attacked him, calling the sanitation workers’ wages “a disgrace before God” and insisting that the mayor negotiate. Massell backed down under this pressure. On April 22 he rehired strikers and gave them a 4.3 percent pay raise. Later, most analysts agreed that the vice mayor played a key role in blocking Massell’s bid to replace the workers. That vice mayor was Maynard Jackson.8 Probing the History of the Striker Replacement Tactic

The juxtaposition of these stories inevitably raises questions. What happened between 1970 and 1977 to transform Maynard Jackson from a defender of striking sanitation workers into a champion of the taxpayers’ right to replace them? Why did Jackson do in 1977 what Sam Massell could not do and Richard Nixon dared not do in 1970?

Answering these questions helps us see the 1970s as a turning point for organized labor in the United States. In this essay, I use the rise of the striker replacement tactic as a barometer to measure how political and economic forces shifted against unions in these years. I argue that between 1970 and 1977 a profound change occurred in the willingness of employers to implement—and of the public to support—striker replacement in the public sector. The normalization of striker replacement in the public sector in turn paved the way for its expanded use in the private sector.

To date, literature on the rise of the striker replacement tactic in the latetwentieth-century United States has largely ignored the evidence of this shift in the 1970s. Rather, the literature usually begins in 1981, crediting President Ronald Reagan’s permanent replacement of 11,352 striking air traffic controllers in that year as the event that popularized this tactic. To be sure, Reagan’s action was crucial. His dramatic busting of the PATCO strike clearly inspired many private sector imitators. Even though private employers had possessed the right to replace strikers since the Supreme Court’s 1938 ruling in NLRB v. Mackay Radio & Telegraph Co., not many large employers had exercised that right.9 Before the Reagan era, the permanent replacement of strikers was widely seen as an illegitimate exercise of a private employer’s power. As the literature notes, Reagan helped legitimize what was once illegitimate. In the years immediately following the PATCO strike, Phelps Dodge, Hormel, Greyhound, International Paper, and others followed Reagan’s example and replaced striking workers.10 The spread of this tactic in the 1980s had a profound impact on American unions. By the end of the decade, the fear of replacement had 8. New York Times, March 21, April 23, 1970; Georgia Journal of Labor, March 20, April 3, 10, 17, 1970.

9. An excellent treatment of the early history of the striker replacement law can be found in John Alexander Logan, “Defining ‘Industrial Liberty’: The State and Workplace Rights in the United States and Canada, 1933 – 1961” (PhD diss., University of California at Davis, 1999).

10. For background, see Dave Hage and Paul Klauda, No Retreat, No Surrender: Labor’s War at Hormel (New York: Morrow, 1989); Jonathan D. Rosenblum, Copper Crucible: How the Arizona Miners’ Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America (Ithaca, NY: ILR, 1995).

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defused unions’ willingness to strike.11 During the 1970s the United States averaged 289 major strikes annually; during the post-PATCO 1980s the figure plummeted by 78 percent to an average of 62 major strikes per year; during the 1990s the average was 35 per year.12 As these numbers suggest, the PATCO strike was a turning point in U.S. labor history.

But to look at the PATCO strike in isolation is to misunderstand its significance. Reagan was not the lone pioneer of the permanent replacement tactic. In fact, he had many unheralded collaborators in that endeavor: mayors who fought public sector strikes in the 1970s. Many of those mayors were Democrats like Maynard Jackson. To ignore their story is to fail not only to understand the favorable political context that had been created for Reagan’s handling of PATCO long before the 1981 controllers’ walkout but also to grasp the long process by which the permanent replacement tactic became normalized. In what follows, I argue that the legitimization of the replacement tactic was effectively carried out in the public sector, a terrain long neglected by labor historians. In a series of municipal job actions in the late 1970s, firing strikers became normalized as a legitimate managerial tactic. The adoption of this tactic by mayors enhanced its legitimacy long before PATCO and Phelps Dodge.13 Furthermore, onetime labor allies—like Maynard Jackson—played a critical role in this legitimizing process.

I make this argument by tracing the history of sanitation strikes from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. These strikes illustrate how public sector workers won a de facto right to strike by the early 1970s even when the law did not allow it and how in the process they forced public employers to renounce the use of replacement workers. In addition, these strikes indicate how public sector strikers lost their recently won protections against replacement amid the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and the political turmoil it created. These sanitation strikes thus show the devastating erosion of union power in the 1970s. To understand the dimensions of that reversal, we must begin by appreciating the extent to which workers had discredited the striker replacement tactic in municipalities by 1970.

11. Among labor historians, Timothy J. Minchin has done the most to trace the growing use of striker replacement. See his articles “Broken Spirits: Permanent Replacements and the Rumsford Strike of 1986,” New England Quarterly 74 (2001): 5 – 31; “Permanent Replacements and the Breakdown of the ‘Social Accord’ in Calera, Alabama, 1974 – 1999,” Labor History 41 (2001): 371 – 96; “Torn Apart: Permanent Replacements and the Crossett Strike of 1985,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 59 (2000): 31 – 58.

12. The Bureau of Labor statistics defines “major” strikes as events that involve at least one thousand workers and last at least twenty-four hours. See Bureau of Labor Statistics, Work Stoppages Involving One Thousand Workers or More, 1947 – 2000 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2001). By postPATCO 1980s, I mean the years from 1982 through 1989.

13. On historians’ neglect of public sector workers, see Robert Shaffer, “Where Are the Organized Public Employees? The Absence of Public Sector Unionism from U.S. History Textbooks, and Why It Matters,” Labor History 43 (2002): 315 – 34. A thoughtful overview of U.S. labor history in the 1970s can be found in Jefferson Cowie, “‘Vigorously Left, Right, and Center at the Same Time’: The Crosscurrents of Working-Class America in the 1970s,” in America in the 1970s, ed. Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 75 – 106.

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The Delegitimization of Striker Replacement in the 1960s

As the public sector union movement arose in the 1960s, it encountered a legal environment in which strikes were generally prohibited and strikers could be harshly penalized, and even fired, for striking. Despite such laws, public sector unionism experienced an upsurge in the 1960s comparable with the industrial union breakthrough of the 1930s. During this period workers began to strike whether the law allowed it or not. During the 1960s their militancy grew exponentially. Average numbers of public sector strikes rose from fewer than forty annually in the early 1960s to over four hundred by 1970.14 These strikes demonstrated what one observer called “a major change in the outlook, role conception, and politicization of the civil servant.”15 Initially, public employers responded to this militancy by getting tough; but by 1970 they had all but abandoned the effort to penalize or replace public sector strikers.

The trajectory of sanitation strikes in the mid- to late 1960s illustrates this trend. Sanitation workers were in many ways the militant vanguard of the public sector union movement of that time. More than any other government workers, they symbolized the liberating potential of public sector unionism, and their job actions helped inspire many other public sector workers to strike. During the first half of the 1960s, the nation witnessed an average of sixteen sanitation strikes involving 2,576 workers annually. But during the second half of the decade, the average number of strikes rose by 138 percent and the number of strikers by 320 percent—even though sanitation walkouts were generally illegal.16 As sanitation strikes spread during the late 1960s, both labor and management tentatively felt out the acceptable boundaries of conflict. Neither side seemed sure of what was acceptable conduct. On occasion, municipalities successfully defeated a strike by threatening to dismiss strikers. This happened in Bakersfield, California, in October 1966. When AFSCME members struck that municipality, the city manager, Harold E. Burgen, adopted a hard line. “Public employees do not have the right to strike,” he announced. City officials distributed a leaflet to strikers. “Do you intend to quit your jobs right now?” it asked. “If so, go into the office and they will process your resignation.” The leaflet continued: “If you . . . refuse to perform your work right now you will be subject to disciplinary action which may include demotion or being fired.”17 In this case, the workers called off their walkout, and the city agreed not to fire them.18 On other occasions, however, it was the employer who backed down from carrying out permanent replacement threats even when they were legal. The reluc14. Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism (New York: Verso, 1988), 212.

15. Cary Hershey, Protest in the Public Service (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books/D.C. Heath, 1973), 1.

16. Harry Wellington and Ralph K. Winter, The Unions and the Cities (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1971), 216.

17. On the public sector strikes in California law, see Winston W. Crouch, Organized Civil Servants: Public Employer-Employee Relations in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 216 – 17.

18. Bakersfield Californian, October 25, 26, 27, 28, 1966.

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tance to fire strikers became more common as the civil rights movement drew attention to the exploitation experienced by African American sanitation workers. What happened in St. Petersburg, Florida, only a few weeks after the Bakersfield incident illustrates this shift. On November 14, 1966, 350 African American sanitation workers left their jobs, dissatisfied with their low pay. The city manager, Lynn Andrews, who was white, fired the strikers and swiftly set about hiring replacements, promising applicants that “this is going to be a good job, a permanent job.” In this case, however, both the strikers and city officials decided to pull back from what could have become an explosive confrontation. Don Jones, the vice mayor, fretted publicly over “racial overtones” that were “beginning to creep ominously into the picture.” The firing and replacement of the sanitation strikers “is not a racial issue,” Jones maintained, “but our ability to keep it from becoming one may be taken from us.” Jones, who was white, had good reason to worry. The NAACP regional director Ruby Hurley offered support to the St. Petersburg strikers, and the Florida state NAACP director Marvin Davies promised to “get the total community behind the garbage men.” Fearing a race conflict, the St. Petersburg Times urged both sides to “think of St. Petersburg and the future” and find a solution that would return everyone to work. When the union dropped its demand for recognition, Andrews reluctantly agreed to rehire the strikers and create a grievance system. The union’s president, Joe Savage, saw this as a victory.

“From now on, we won’t be just garbage men. We’re city employees,” he said.19 In the years after 1966 the unwillingness of public officials to enforce penalties against sanitation strikers became more evident. The New York sanitation strike of 1968 was one indicator of employers’ growing hesitancy about breaking strikes.

The New York strike began February 2, when rank-and-file members of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association rejected a pact negotiated by the union’s leader John DeLury and Mayor John V. Lindsay.20 For nine days garbage piled up on New York streets. Lindsay stood his ground and counted on the harsh fines provided for in New York’s Taylor Law to help break the walkout.21 In the meantime, he called on Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller to mobilize the National Guard to pick up the city’s trash. But Rockefeller refused to help Lindsay. Still entertaining dreams of gaining his party’s nomination for the presidency, the governor was in no mood to be portrayed as a strikebreaker. Not only did he refuse to mobilize the Guard, Rockefeller 19. St. Petersburg Times, November 18, 19, 20, 1966. The NAACP’s state field director predicted that parts of Florida were on the verge of a riot in 1966. See Marvin Davies, “Assessment of the Racial Situation in Jacksonville and Duvall County,” May 21, 1966, Box C29, Marvin Davies Correspondence file, 1966 – 67, NAACP Papers, Part VI, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 20. Joshua Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000), 202 – 3.

21. The Taylor Law was enacted by the New York legislature in 1967. It replaced the Condon-Wadlin Act (of 1947), which had declared public sector strikes illegal and prescribed the firing of workers who participated in them. The Taylor Law also forbade public sector strikes. But rather than providing for the dismissal of strikers, it sought to deter strikes through heavy, escalating fines. See Ronald Donovan, Administering the Taylor Law: Public Employee Relations in New York (Ithaca, NY: ILR, 1990), 3 – 58.

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pushed for an emergency law that allowed the state to settle the strike. Thanks to Rockefeller, workers not only avoided Taylor Law fines but won higher raises than DeLury had been prepared to accept prior to the walkout.22 This episode solidified a growing expectation that public employees could defy the law and win.23 Although sentiment was clearly shifting away from penalizing public sector strikers by the late 1960s, many municipalities were still determined to take a hard line, including replacing strikers during walkouts. Not until two prominent attempts to defeat garbage strikes exploded into ugly incidents in 1968 did municipal employers largely drop the replacement threat.

The first of these controversial strikes erupted on February 12, 1968, when 1,300 African American sanitation workers struck in Memphis. In a walkout triggered by anger over the on-the-job deaths of two of their coworkers, the strikers demanded wage increases, safety reforms, and recognition for their union, AFSCME. From the beginning, the white mayor of Memphis, Henry Loeb, argued that AFSCME’s “outside agitators” were not legitimate representatives of Memphis workers. Loeb also worried about a projected municipal budget deficit of $2.2 million. Unwilling to make concessions to the union, he decided to break what he saw as an illegal job action.

As the walkout began, Loeb announced his unwillingness to negotiate. “The mayor can’t be in the position of bargaining with anyone who is breaking the law,” he explained. Two days later Loeb delivered an ultimatum. If workers did not return to their jobs by 7 a.m. on February 15, Memphis would begin replacing those “who have chosen to abandon their jobs and their rights.” Loeb then took to the radio to urge workers to apply for sanitation jobs. After one week, Memphis had hired 111 replacement workers. Yet from that point on, the city found it difficult to recruit replacements. “Most of the workers are Negro and the word has gone out in the Negro community,” one observer explained.24 As this observation suggests, Loeb’s effort to break the strike polarized Memphis along racial lines. Strikers and their supporters soon took to the streets in a series of marches and demonstrations that led to confrontations with the Memphis police. There seemed to be no way out of the standoff. As the historian Joan Turner Beifuss put it, Loeb’s “emphasis on the illegality of the strike brought the city into a real dilemma. How could it bargain with strike leaders who were acting illegally?”25 In the weeks that followed, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took up the Memphis strikers’ cause. While in Memphis to march with the sanitation strikers, King was assassinated on April 4. His murder, and the rioting it set off in cities across the nation, 22. New York Times, October 28, 1969.

23. In fact, there was a long history before 1968 of public employee strikers being given amnesty in New York City. See Freeman, Working-Class New York, 203 – 11.

24. Quotations from Joan Turner Beifuss, At the River I Stand: Memphis, the 1968 Strike, and Martin Luther King (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishers, 1989), 39, 42, 43.

25. Ibid., 48, 44; J. Edwin Stanfield, “In Memphis: Tragedy Unaverted,” supplement to the special report of March 22, 1968, Memphis: More Than a Garbage Strike (Atlanta: Southern Regional Council, 1968).

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radically changed the dynamics of the Memphis strike. White moderates now joined blacks in calling for a negotiated end to the walkout.26 On April 16 Loeb capitulated to growing pressure and signed an agreement that gave the strikers their jobs back and recognized the union. “If Dr. King hadn’t got killed, Henry Loeb would never have gave in,” one striker, Taylor Rogers, later argued.27 Besides discrediting Loeb personally, King’s martyrdom stigmatized Loeb’s strategy of striker replacement.

A second sanitation strike in St. Petersburg, which followed closely on the heels of Memphis, further reinforced the view that striker replacement was an unacceptable tactic in municipal conflicts. On May 6, St. Petersburg sanitation workers struck after Lynn Andrews, the city manager, rejected their demands for a twentyfive-cent per hour raise. Initially, St. Petersburg’s civic leaders hoped to avoid a confrontation between Andrews and the workers. The St. Petersburg Times called for both sides to use the negotiating machinery they had established following the 1966 strike. Don Jones, St. Petersburg’s mayor in 1968, publicly sympathized with the strikers’ demands and asked them to return to work while negotiations continued. This time, however, Andrews—who resented the agreement he had struck with the union in 1966 — was determined to fight. “In the past I put my hands over my eyes and called it a work stoppage” rather than an illegal strike, announced Andrews. “I have no choice this time but to move on those who do not work tomorrow and discharge them.” Joe Savage, the union leader, was not anxious to test Andrews’s resolve, so he urged his men to return to work. But many workers were too inspired by the recent Memphis strike to take Savage’s advice. Fifty-two sanitation workers refused to end their walkout. Andrews promptly fired them.28 These dismissals changed the nature of the St. Petersburg walkout. It was no longer about wages so much as the workers’ right to strike. Protesting the firing of their comrades, 150 more sanitation workers left their jobs. They too were fired, making the situation more acrimonious. Assuring all that “law and order” would prevail, Andrews sent replacement workers on trash runs with heavy police escorts and declared victory. “There’s nobody to negotiate with,” he explained, “these men have been dismissed.”29 Andrews spoke too soon. In the ensuing weeks, his firing of the strikers divided St. Petersburg along racial lines. The strikers’ organization was strongly connected to local black churches. With the support of those churches, civil rights activists, including Rev. A. D. King, brother of the slain civil rights leader, staged a series of marches on city hall. Tensions rose. A worried Mayor Jones broke with Andrews, saying the strike “didn’t have to happen.” The St. Petersburg Times also pleaded for 26. “Memphis: The Tragedy and Triumph,” Public Employee, April 1968, 5.

27. Rogers quoted in Laurie Beth Green, “Battling the Plantation Mentality: Consciousness, Culture, and the Politics of Race and Gender in Memphis, 1940 – 1968” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1999), 411 – 12.

28. St. Petersburg Times, May 7, 1968.

29. Ibid., May 7, 12, 1968.

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a compromise. “Every day of bad publicity costs all of Pinellas County uncounted sums,” the paper moaned. Undaunted, Andrews and a majority of the city council were determined to stay the course. One council member even attacked the black ministers for “condoning law violation.”30 Andrews’s rigidity fueled anger in the black community. In the strike’s early weeks, a local black power activist named Joe Waller emerged as a defender of the strikers. Waller’s group, the Junta of Militant Organizations (JOMO), soon became the strikers’ most vocal ally. On July 31 a huge rally was held in support of the sanitation strikers at which Rev. Ralph Abernathy, A. D. King, and others spoke. But it was Waller who drew the largest ovations. “As far as I’m concerned,” Waller thundered, “anyone who would starve 211 families is criminal.”31 The effort to replace strikers had created an explosive situation in St. Petersburg. Many observers worried publicly about the likelihood of a bloody confrontation.

On August 17 a confrontation did erupt: a race riot consumed the city. To suppress the uprising, state police were called in and an armored vehicle patrolled the city’s streets.

Officers made fifty-nine arrests. Strike leaders immediately blamed Andrews for the riot. The strikers’ lawyer, James Sanderlin, argued that the violence was ignited by the “continuing hard-line and unrelenting attitude on the part of the city administration.” Andrews’s rigid stand had brought on a catastrophe in St. Petersburg.32 As tear gas wafted through St. Petersburg’s business district, a conciliatory mood was suddenly evident. After insisting for two months that there was “no one to negotiate with,” Andrews reopened negotiations. After 116 brutal days, he settled the strike on August 30, by agreeing to rehire fired workers as soon as possible.33 After 1968 municipalities became leery of striker replacement as a tactic. In Memphis and St. Petersburg, racial politics had played a role in helping sanitation strikers delegitimize their replacement. Over the next few years, racial politics continued to strengthen the hands of sanitation workers when they struck.34 Often, African American sanitation workers picketed with signs bearing the slogan of the Memphis strikers: “I Am a Man.” In a political atmosphere charged with fears of racial conflict, politicians were increasingly reluctant to deny a right that sanitation workers claimed as central to their manhood: their right to strike.35 30. Ibid., May 11, 18, 11, 17, 1968.

31. Ibid., June 27, August 1, 1968.

32. Ibid., August 18, 19, 1968.

33. Ibid., August 31, 1968.

34. Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Labor Disputes in Public Employment, Pickets at City Hall: Report and Recommendations (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1970), 37. According to a 1975 report by the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC), 49.2 percent of the nation’s fulltime service maintenance workers in sanitation and sewage were minorities. Beyond this, it is difficult to determine precisely the racial makeup of the nation’s sanitation workforce. See U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Minorities and Women in State and Local Government, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977), 151, 177.

35. For example, Miami Beach, Florida, sanitation workers picketed with this slogan in 1968. See Miami Herald, August 22, 1968. On sanitation strikers’ manhood, see Steve Estes, “I Am a Man: Race Masculinity and the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike,” Labor History 41 (2000): 153 – 70.

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Sanitation strikes that erupted in Cleveland, Ohio; Miami, Florida; Washington, DC; Lubbock, Texas; and Atlanta between 1968 and 1972 were typical of the new pattern of municipal labor-management conflict that emerged after Memphis and St. Petersburg. During each of these strikes, officials had the power to replace striking sanitation workers. Yet in each case officials either decided not to use this tactic or, after attempting to replace strikers, dropped the effort under pressure.36 In many cases, politicians even came to criticize the laws that mandated the firing of public sector strikers. After refusing to discipline sanitation workers who staged a wildcat strike in 1968, Cleveland mayor Carl Stokes blasted the Ohio law that made public sector strikes illegal. “All cities in Ohio have found recourse to the Ferguson Act unrealistic,” he insisted. Similarly, after facing a tense sanitation strike in 1968, Dade County executive Porter Homer criticized the “lousy damn law” that banned public sector strikes in Florida. When AFSCME members struck the District of Columbia, where strikes were illegal under federal law, they showed how reluctant employers had become to break walkouts. Officials there agreed to “take no punitive or retaliatory action against the Union or any employees.” AFSCME’s Jerry Wurf pointed with pride to this statement, noting that it was conceded by “an arm of the federal government, despite a statute that specifies, ‘Strikes, picketing in furtherance of labor disputes and other forms of work stoppages by employees of the District of Columbia are prohibited.’”37 By the early 1970s, sanitation workers had clearly won a large degree of immunity from penalties including firing and replacement during their strikes. A handbook prepared for city administrators in 1970 contained a chapter that revealed municipalities’ new approach. Titled “Living with a Strike by Sanitation Workers,” it urged patience rather than mass firings in dealing with garbage strikes. Both municipal employers and the public, it seemed, had come to recognize the reality of public sector strikes and had concluded that firing and replacing strikers made little sense.

The public had “overcome its initial blind fear of the public employee strike,” according to one mediator, Arnold Zack, and had “learned to adapt its daily living to the illegal action.” The editorial page of the Miami Herald reflected this shift in thinking.

The Herald argued that the days when public officials could respond to a municipal strike by firing the strikers were over. “Public officials need some options, because the threat to fire teachers or garbage workers gets beyond the point of reason,” the editors noted. The paper called for new methods that would preserve a “middle ground for negotiation,” a “safety valve” that would “prevent explosions between government and public employees.” Nor were the Herald’s views unusual. By the early 1970s, experts 36. Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 25, 26, 27, 28, 1968; Miami Herald, August 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 1968; Yolanda G. Romero, “Adelante Companeros: The Sanitation Workers’ Struggle in Lubbock, Texas, 1968 – 1972,” West Texas Historical Association Year Book 69 (1993): 82 – 88.

37. Stokes quoted in Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 25, 1968; Homer quoted in Miami Herald, August 17, 1968; Jerry Wurf, “The Revolution in Government Employment,” in Unionization of Municipal Employees: Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 30, no. 2, ed. Robert H. Connery and William V. Farr (New York: Academy of Political Science, 1970), 140.

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not only counseled against replacing public sector strikers, they called for an end to remaining state and local laws that banned public sector strikes. All of this reinforced public workers’ sense of their newly won power. “One word from me and the traffic lights don’t work; the bridges don’t open; the trash isn’t collected, and the heat in all city buildings is cut off,” explained AFSCME’s Philadelphia leader, Earl Stout. “The mayor knows I can do this. That’s why he listens to me.”38 These new attitudes undoubtedly responded to the tenfold increase in the annual number of municipal strikes between 1965 and 1975.39 Since the threat of firing strikers had clearly lost its bite in the face of this militancy, several states relaxed or eliminated prohibitions on public sector strikes in the belief that negotiation rather than ineffectual efforts to penalize strikers would be more effective in restraining labor militancy.40 Richard Nixon’s moderate line on PATCO’s 1970 job action and Sam Massell’s retreat during Atlanta’s sanitation strike of that year must therefore be understood in the context of a general acceptance of the reality of public sector strikes.

Yet no sooner had public sector workers won the de facto right to strike than events turned against them. During the mid-1970s, their ability to strike waned, and their emboldened employers revived the replacement tactic. To understand how that happened, one must appreciate how the economic crisis of the 1970s changed the playing field for public sector workers.

Reversal of Fortune: The Fiscal Crisis and Revival of Striker Replacement

The irony of the public sector union movement was that it crested just as government at all levels entered a period of sustained fiscal crisis. As David T. Stanley of the Brookings Institution put it, the rising demands of municipal unions could not have “come at a worse time.” Local government finances were “in a crisis as a result of inflation, urban decay, the flight to the suburbs, outmoded tax systems, and insufficient aid from state legislators.”41 It was in the mid-1970s that the collision between 38. Carmen D. Saso, Coping with Public Employee Strikes: A Guide for Public Officials (Chicago: Public Personnel Association, 1970), 131 – 35; Arnold M. Zack, “Impasses, Strikes, and Resolutions,” in Public Workers and Public Unions, ed. Sam Zagoria (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 103; Miami Herald, August 21, 1968. Calls for legalization of public sector strikes can be found in Theodore W. Kheel, “Summation,” in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Public Employment Labor Relations, May 3 – 5, 1971 (New York: International Symposium on Public Employment Labor Relations, 1971), 211 – 19; “The Right to Strike,” in Sorry . . . No Government Today: Unions vs. City Hall, ed. Robert E. Walsh (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 234 – 38; Richard J. Murphy, “Public Employee Strikes,” in The Crisis in Public Employee Relations in the Decade of the 1970s, ed. Richard J. Murphy and Morris Sackman (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 1970), 71 – 80. Stout quoted in Francis Ryan, “Everyone Royalty: AFSCME, Municipal Workers, and Urban Power in Philadelphia, 1921 – 1983” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2003), 228 – 29.

39. Steve Troyer, “Labour Relations in the Public Service in the United States,” in Public Service Labour Relations: Recent Trends and Future Prospects, by Tiziano Treu et al. (Geneva: International Labour Organisation, 1987), 249.

40. These states were Alaska, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.

41. David T. Stanley, “The Effect of Unions on Local Governments,” in Connery and Farr, Unionization of Municipal Employees, 48.

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public sector workers’ aspirations and municipal government’s fiscal problems became clear. The mid-1970s saw both inflation and unemployment rise, ballooning budget deficits and straining relations between municipalities and public sector unions. “Collective bargaining works rather well when we are sharing a growing pie,” observed one AFSCME official.42 Once the pie stopped growing, though, dynamics shifted against the unions.

The new labor relations dynamics in the public sector became visible in the summer of 1975 during New York City’s fiscal crisis. The 1973 – 75 recession had pushed the city’s finances to the verge of default. When investment banks refused to underwrite municipal bond sales in January 1975, and the Ford administration refused to offer loan guarantees, Governor Hugh L. Carey and the New York legislature had to assemble a vehicle to rescue the city’s finances: the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC).43 In return for refinancing the city, the MAC demanded layoffs and a hold-the-line strategy in union settlements. Mayor Abe Beame complied by laying off nineteen thousand employees (including three thousand sanitation workers) on July 1.44 Angry sanitation workers responded to Beame’s layoffs with a strike that turned “fun city into ‘stink city,’” according to Newsweek. But this time sanitation workers received noticeably less sympathy from the public than in the past. “You don’t find Jane Fonda or Paul Newman out here raising money for us,” admitted one sanitation worker. “We’ve got no celebrities, no folk singers, no popularity.” More to the point, the strike alienated many beleaguered working-class New Yorkers. “I have three children to watch over and now I have to keep them out of the garbage in the streets,” Mrs. Gloria Feliz complained outside a Harlem welfare office. “You don’t find the garbage blocking Park Avenue,” an unemployed trucker added. The strike ended when Mayor Beame secured state funds to rehire most workers. But the noticeable lack of sympathy for New York’s sanitation workers was a harbinger of things to come.45 By the mid-1970s, government officials at all levels dealt with the growing fiscal crisis through budget cutbacks, hiring freezes, and hard-line union negotiations. As often as not, the austerity programs were instituted by Democratic administrations once allied to the public sector union movement. Thus in 1975 Pittsburgh mayor Peter F. Flaherty cut payrolls by one-third. California governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. scaled back planned wage increases for state workers. Massachusetts gover42. Donald Wasserman quoted in Jeffery L. Sheler, “A Hard Line against State, Local Unions, Too,” U.S. News and World Report, August 24, 1981, 20.

43. As one Ford administration official put it, “If individuals and companies have to pull in their belts, cities and states have to adjust to a leaner mixture, too.” See “The Crisis in ‘Stink City,’ ” Newsweek, July 14, 1975, 16.

44. For an extensive treatment of the New York fiscal crisis and labor, see Michael Spear, “A Crisis in Urban Liberalism: The New York City Municipal Unions and the 1970s Fiscal Crisis” (PhD diss., Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2004).

45. Quotations from Newsweek, July 14, 1975; for background on the strike, see Jewel Bellush and Bernard Bellush, Union Power and New York: Victor Gotbaum and District Council 37 (New York: Praeger, 1984), 381 – 419.

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nor Michael S. Dukakis announced layoff plans. At the federal level, fiscal constraint became the hallmark of Carter administration economic policy. All of this strained relations between political leaders and public sector unions, who had once been allied.

As liberals embraced fiscal restraint, Vice President Walter Mondale explained that they had to adjust their “values of social justice and compassion to a new age of limited resources.”46 In this new environment, “standing up to” public sector unions became the litmus test of a politician’s sense of fiscal responsibility. This was particularly true for Democrats, who had to fight the charge that they would “give away the store” to their labor allies. Thus when 260,000 New York state employees entered into negotiations with Governor Carey in 1978, union leaders feared “the roughest [negotiations] in a long time,” since the climate was “not conducive to large settlements.” “Everybody is bargaining harder than in the past,” explained an AFSCME official.47 Inflation only intensified such conflicts. The average annual inflation rate in the 1970s was 7.1 percent (up from 2.3 percent in the 1960s). This spike had a perverse impact on public sector labor relations. On the one hand, it spurred militancy among public sector workers, whose wages lagged behind prices. As Jerry Wurf put it, inflation was “leading to something I’ve never seen before, a class consciousness of have and have-nots developing among the workers.”48 On the other hand, inflation fueled a powerful antitax movement determined to lower the cost of government. The inevitable collision of these two trends would prove costly for organized labor.

Inflation-driven public sector militancy rose in two waves. The first crested in 1975 when the nation saw 446 public sector strikes—more than any previous year in U.S. history. The second wave peaked in 1978 as the strike rate jumped by 18 percent in one year. During the fall of 1978 militancy abounded: teachers struck seventy-five school districts; police strikes hit Memphis and Cleveland; firefighters struck Chattanooga and Manchester, New Hampshire. “We’re going to see more of these strikes,” warned W. Howard McClennan, of the AFL-CIO’s Public Employees Department.

“We are tired of being made the scapegoat of the plight of the cities.”49 Yet this militancy fed a backlash, which became evident after the mid-1970s.

Many Americans grew weary of public sector strikes in these years. “The expecta46. For reports on state and city cutbacks, see “Cities in Peril,” U.S. News and World Report, April 7, 1975; “Crisis in ‘Stink City.’ ” On the Carter administration, see Taylor Dark, “Organized Labor and the Carter Administration: The Origins of Conflict,” in The Presidency and Domestic Policies of Jimmy Carter, ed. Herbert D. Rosenbaum and Alexej Ugrinsky (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), 761 – 82; Gary M. Fink, “Fragile Alliance: Jimmy Carter and the American Labor Movement,” in Rosenbaum and Ugrinsky, Presidency and Domestic Policies of Jimmy Carter, 783 – 803. Mondale quoted in Steven M. Gillon, The Democrats’ Dilemma: Walter F. Mondale and the Liberal Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 298, 200.

47. “Among Public Workers: Backlash on Tax Revolt,” U.S. News and World Report, July 17, 1978, 73; Linda Lampkin quoted in “Why So Many Strikes by Public Workers?” U.S. News and World Report, August 7, 1978, 65.

48. Wurf quoted in Government Employee Relations Report (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Affairs, July 22, 1974).

49. “The Public Strikes Back,” Newsweek, September 18, 1978, 71; McClellan quoted in “Why So Many Strikes by Public Workers?” 65.

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tion of a city awakening one morning to find it has no police or fire protection is an experience that has become commonplace in the United States,” a New York Times columnist claimed.50 Frustration with public sector militancy in turn exacerbated long-simmering resentment of taxes. Polls showed that the public blamed labor more than business for rising inflation.51 Inflation contributed to higher property taxes and “bracket creep,” which in turn made tax burdens heavier for working- and middleclass families. In 1978 antitax feeling burst into view in what observers termed the “tax revolt.” The passage of Proposition 13 by California voters on June 6 signaled the advent of that rebellion. It quickly spread beyond California. Voters in Massachusetts and other states soon demanded similar legislation. All this was enough to terrify even the safest liberal politicians. “The voters are out for blood this year,” one frightened Michigan legislator confided in 1978.52 The antitax movement popularized the notion that “government waste is the nation’s biggest growth industry,” as the conservative writer Ralph de Toledano put it.53 Unions challenged that perception. They also tried to counter the tax revolt with proposals for progressive taxation. “We’re going to put together a massive program, with people and money behind it, to sell the idea of more-progressive tax systems,” vowed one AFSCME official.54 But unions were less adept at enacting tax reforms than at wringing concessions from employers. Indeed, as one scholar saw it, unions placed “pressure on local governments to find new and expanded revenue resources” but proved unable “to obtain aid from higher levels of government or to make their own revenue systems more productive.”55 In the end, public sector unions made fat targets for antitax forces.

The woes of private sector unions in the 1970s only complicated matters. As industrial unions lost members, layoffs devastated autoworkers and steelworkers, deregulation destabilized the transportation industry, and once-powerful unions were forced into concession bargaining, there was a softening of private sector union support for public sector workers. Many unionists worried public employees’ gains might come at the expense of higher taxes, which could no longer be offset at the bargaining table. Writing in 1978, Nicholas von Hoffman contended that public opinion had “turned so ferociously against striking civil servants that non-governmental union members won’t even support them.”56 Although von Hoffman overstated his claim, the degree of support for public sector strikes had clearly begun to wane.

50. John Herbers, “Public Safety in an Age of Self Interest,” New York Times, sec. 4, July 6, 1980.

51. Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider, The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor, and Government in the Public Mind (New York: Free Press, 1983), 212.

52. “Public Strikes Back.” For more on Proposition 2 ½, see James Ring Adams, The Secrets of the Tax Revolt (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 307 – 34.

53. Ralph de Toledano, “America’s Biggest Growth Industry,” Policy Review 12 (1980): 150 – 56.

54. “Among Public Workers,” 73.

55. David T. Stanley, Managing Local Governments under Union Pressure (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1972), 135.

56. Nicholas von Hoffman, “The Last Days of the Labor Movement,” Harper’s Magazine, December 1978, 22.

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The volatile recipe of rising public sector union militancy, inflation, and antitax activism made public sector unions more vulnerable than they had been at any time since the rise of their movement in the 1960s. Suddenly the union became a convenient political scapegoat for public officials who had to deal with declining relative tax revenues, demands for improved public services, and taxpayer unrest.57 In only five years, the public sector unions had gone from being labor’s cutting edge to its controversial lightning rod, attracting the wrath of an ever-widening circle of foes.

“Unfortunately, many officials have created an atmosphere of vehement dislike for public employees,” admitted one Los Angeles union official in 1977.58 Indicative of this shift was a noticeable erosion of support for public sector strikes. Polls trace declining support for such strikes to the years between 1974 and 1978. As this shift progressed, no longer did one hear calls for the legalization of public sector strikes. To the contrary, Murray B. Nesbitt observed in 1976, “the reverse trend is quite apparent.” Suddenly it seemed that strikes were more likely to strengthen management’s hand than the union’s. As David Lewin of Columbia University explained, government employers now saw taking a strike as an effective way to rally sentiment against the union and force it to “moderate” its demands.59 Not only did support for public sector strikes diminish, the tactic of permanent replacement experienced a rebirth. In many ways the public sector provided the best available arena for legitimizing permanent replacement in the years before 1981.

Whereas private employers who broke strikes with replacements could be accused of placing profit ahead of workers’ rights, public employers were immune to such charges. Rather, they could claim to be protecting taxpayers (including working-class constituents) against the claims of a special interest (the union), which, if granted, would unreasonably burden the public. As early as 1974, there was unmistakable evidence that public sector employers grasped this logic. In March of that year, eightyfour teachers were permanently replaced during a strike in Hortonsville, Wisconsin.

Later that year fifty-five Baltimore policemen were fired during a strike. Even in a strong union city like San Francisco, striker replacement gained a degree of acceptance. Speaking at a mayors’ convention in 1975, San Francisco’s Democratic mayor Joseph L. Alioto urged that “municipal employees who go on strike be ‘fired.’” After a series of public sector work stoppages, San Francisco voters endorsed this stance by passing a 1976 ballot initiative in favor of firing municipal strikers.60 57. For an extended treatment of these dynamics, see Paul Johnston, Success While Others Fail: Social Movement Unionism and the Public Workplace (Ithaca, NY: ILR, 1994).

58. Joe Anguiano of the Service Employees quoted in “Public Employee Unions Push to Catch Up,” Business Week, August 1, 1977, 49.

59. Harris polls showed that the majority of respondents did not oppose the right to strike for teachers, policemen, and firemen in 1974. But by 1978, majorities opposed the right to strike for these categories of workers. See Government Employee Relations Report, December 18, 1978, 25; Murray Nesbit, Labor Relations in the Federal Government Service (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 1976), 390 – 91; David Lewin quoted in “Public Employee Unions Push to Catch Up,” 49.

60. On Hortonsville, see Dustin Beilke, Wisconsin Education Association Council: A History (Madison: Wisconsin Education Association Council, 2001); Jason F. Hellwig, “Big Labor in a Small Town: The

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Despite the revival of interest in permanent replacement, however, there were limits to the utility of this tactic in the mid-1970s. Permanent replacement was not feasible in most public sector strikes because the strikers involved were too hard to replace. “It’s rather difficult for a city to replace an entire fire department,” an official of the U.S. Conference of Mayors explained.61 If the permanent replacement tactic was to be broadly relegitimized in the public sector, it was sanitation workers’ strikes that were best able to facilitate that process. To be sure, sanitation workers’ struggles had helped shift the tide of opinion against the use of the replacement tactic in the late 1960s. Even as late as 1978 a majority of Americans felt that sanitation workers deserved the right to strike, while teachers, police officers, and firefighters did not. Yet ultimately sanitation workers were more vulnerable than other public employees to mass firings. Their strikes made the public uncomfortable, their replacements could be quickly trained, and immediate cost savings could be realized from their replacement. Per capita municipal expenditures on sanitation had grown by over 60 percent between 1967 and 1973, and many mayors were determined to lower those costs. Mayors had already discovered new ways to save money in sanitation services. Many cities adopted new technology in the 1970s that replaced rear-loading refuse trucks with side-loading models, which allowed for the reduction of crews from three to two workers per truck. Sanitation workforces thus declined from an average of 1.41 per thousand in city population in 1975 to 0.7 per thousand by 1983. More important, between 1973 and 1979 the number of cities that contracted out trash collection to private companies doubled. According to one study, sanitation became “the prime example of how cities can benefit from cooperation with private enterprise.”62 All of this meant that mayors had much to gain by confronting sanitation unions in the late 1970s. It was in this context that several prominent mayors—some of them well-known liberals—revived the striker replacement tactic.

Legitimizing Striker Replacement in Atlanta, 1977

So many things made Maynard Jackson an unlikely strikebreaker in 1977. Elected as Atlanta’s first black mayor in 1973, he had established strong credentials as a defender Hortonville Teachers’ Strike,” Voyageur: Northeast Wisconsin’s Historical Review 19, no. 2 (2003): 10 – 26. Alioto quoted in New York Times, July 7, 1975. On San Francisco, see Government Employee Relations Report, November 15, 1976, B14; and Randolph H. Boehm and Dan C. Heldman, Public Employees, Unions, and the Erosion of Civic Trust: A Study of San Francisco in the 1970s (Frederick, MD: Aletheia Books, UPA, 1982).

61. Sheler, “Hard Line against State, Local Unions,” 20.

62. Polls cited in Government Employee Relations Report, December 18, 1978, 25. Cost figures from Facts and Figures on Government Finance: Fifteenth Biennial Edition, 1969 (New York: Tax Foundation, 1969), 220; and Facts and Figures on Government Finance: Eighteenth Biennial Edition, 1975 (New York: Tax Foundation, 1975), 230. Labor force data from Passing the Bucks: The Contracting Out of Public Services (Washington, DC: AFSCME, 1983), 10; and contracting-out data from John D. Hanrahan, Government for Sale: Contracting Out, the New Patronage (Washington, DC: AFSCME, 1977), 37. On privatization, see Ann Cohen and James Dooley, “Privatizing Philly vs. AFSCME DC 33,” Labor Research Review 9 (1990): 15 – 23.

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of the black community’s interests, especially in his fight for jobs and contract setasides for African Americans in the building of Hartsfield Airport. He also had a long history of friendship with organized labor. AFSCME warmly supported his election in 1973. Jackson also had been among the first to call attention to public sector labor’s plight in the climate of fiscal austerity. In 1974 he had “predicted that the nation’s economic situation will get worse and that cities will tend to be ultraconservative in budgeting,” a development he hoped Atlanta could avoid.63 Yet the things that made Jackson an unlikely strikebreaker also made him effective in that role.

Charges of racism and union busting that strikers had once hurled against Henry Loeb in Memphis were ineffective against an acknowledged civil rights leader and onetime NLRB attorney. Once Jackson decided to break a sanitation strike, he was well equipped to accomplish the feat.

At least two factors pushed Jackson toward his confrontation with AFSCME in 1977. First, he was up for reelection that year. He had secured his base in the black community, but he was determined to win over middle-class whites and the business establishment. Second, Atlanta faced a budget shortfall, and the law mandated that the city balance its annual budget. Jackson was determined not to be “the first mayor since 1937 to take us to the bank.” “Before I take the city into a deficit financial position,” he vowed, “elephants will roost in the trees.”64 To balance the budget, he drew the line on employees’ demands.

Jackson’s political commitments ensured a confrontation with Atlanta’s sanitation workers. AFSCME had been pressing unsuccessfully for a raise for over a year, and its members were losing patience. A sanitation strike had almost erupted in July 1976 only to be postponed when Jackson diverted some federal funds into a temporary $200 pay bump for workers. But with inflation running at nearly 7 percent, workers saw no more money forthcoming from the city. Jackson claimed there was nothing he could do. “The employees need a pay increase. The employees deserve a pay increase,” he admitted. “But we don’t have it.” A brief January 1977 wildcat walkout had let the mayor know how desperate the workers were becoming. As Jackson continued to urge patience, sanitation workers finally reached the end of their rope.

“Every time someone has to bite the bullet, it’s always us,” the union’s leader, Leamon Hood, complained.65 The strike began on March 28. The 1,300 strikers demanded a fifty-cent-perhour wage increase to boost incomes that averaged only $7,000 annually (placing families of four with one breadwinner below the poverty line). As one striker, Willie Morris, explained, “We need to tell the city that you can’t buy us for the same price you bought us for last year.”66 63. Government Employee Relations Report, November 25, 1974, B10.

64. “Atlanta: The Strikebreaker,” Newsweek, April 25, 1977, 29.

65. “Atlanta Mayor Fails to Keep Commitments,” Public Employee, December 1976, 6; Atlanta Constitution, April 4, 1977.

66. Leamon Hood, interview by author, Washington, DC, September 30, 1999, tape recording in possession of the author; Atlanta Constitution, April 4, 1977; Atlanta Constitution, March 29, 1977.

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It soon became clear that Jackson was determined to fight AFSCME to the bitter end. His strategy was both clever and effective. He charged that the walkout was dreamed up in Washington by AFSCME’s white president, Jerry Wurf. “Maybe the union thought that because I’m liberal, because I’m black, I would respond to any demand no matter how outlandish,” the mayor barked. “If they think that, they’ve got another think coming.” He also hinted that a broader conspiracy was afoot. “I see myself as only the first domino in [labor’s] Southern domino theory,” he explained.

He made it clear that “if labor makes the move on black political leadership, it’s going to have severe consequences for labor Southwide.” The very future of black political leadership, he argued, depended on his showing that his administration could not be intimidated by unions into a fiscally irresponsible settlement.67 Atlanta business leaders cheered Jackson’s stance and offered him some advice. On March 30 the Atlanta Constitution ran an editorial titled “Fire the Strikers.” “Perhaps the time for being sympathetic to the union is over,” the editorial read.

“The mayor now needs to show some sympathy for the taxpayers and [should] notify the strikers they will be fired unless they return to work immediately.” On the day that this editorial ran, Jackson issued an ultimatum: if employees did not return to work by April 1, they were terminated. The mayor claimed that he had “leaned over backwards for AFSCME. We’ve leaned over backwards so many times that I think AFSCME is walking up our back.”68 Jackson made clear that he was leaning over no more.

Like previous efforts to replace sanitation strikers, the Atlanta strike became ugly. AFSCME ran an advertisement in the New York Times castigating Jackson’s administration for “phonyism and cronyism.” Union spokespersons tried to expose Jackson as a union buster, disabusing those who had been “buffaloed into believing [Jackson] is the friend of the poor man, working man, black man, and so forth.”

Strikers even unfurled a banner that read “Maynard’s Word Is Garbage” during a nationally televised baseball game. None of this deterred Jackson. He authorized termination letters to the strikers as soon as the forty-eight-hour deadline passed. Strikers were initially unfazed by the firing notices—many of them had also been fired during the 1970 strike only to be rehired soon afterward. But unlike Sam Massell in 1970, Jackson began hiring replacement workers, and strikers were stunned when hundreds applied for their jobs.69 Strikers were also surprised when Atlanta’s black elite coalesced behind Jackson.

Most black community leaders took the mayor’s side. The Atlanta Daily World, a black-owned paper, set the tone for elite black opinion. It called AFSCME “extreme,” termed the strike a “power grab by the Union,” and wondered why 67. “Atlanta: The Strikebreaker”; Atlanta Constitution, April 10, 1977; New York Times, April 17, 1977.

68. Atlanta Constitution, March 30, 31, 1977.

69. New York Times, March 30, 1977. The official quoted was Jim Gray of the union’s public affairs department in Washington; “The Atlantic Story,” Public Employee, April 1977, 7; Hood interview; Atlanta Constitution, April 5, 1977.

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AFSCME challenged a black mayor “at this time, when we stand at the point of convincing the world that our people can lead a section in the South.” Atlanta’s branches of the NAACP and the Urban League also supported the mayor, and Rev. Joseph Lowery of the SCLC urged strikers to return to work. But Jackson’s most effective supporter was Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. When King defended Jackson on April 4, he did so in bold terms. “If any group [like AFSCME] comes in to try to destroy our town, we are against it, with all the power we have,” said King.70 Atlanta’s business elite could not have been more pleased with Jackson’s handling of the strike. The mayor was simply “willing to stand up for what’s right,” according to Richard Kattel, president of Atlanta’s powerful Citizens and Southern Bank. By wooing fiscally conservative whites like Kattel, Jackson knew he could win reelection with a large mandate. The strike gave him a valuable opportunity to declare his fiscal integrity. “If anything, it will help him in the white community,” predicted the civil rights leader John Lewis.71 During the strike, AFSCME did retain some allies in the civil rights community. The Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) denounced Jackson for using “black workers as political pawns in his efforts to please a middle class black political constituency and satisfy the white establishment.” Pastors of some smaller churches also condemned Jackson’s actions. James Farmer, formerly of the Congress of Racial Equality, and Rev. James Lawson of Memphis also supported the strikers. A veteran of the 1968 Memphis strike, Lawson even compared Jackson with Henry Loeb. But Jackson’s retort to such criticisms was pointed: “Is it liberal to make a predominantly black city financially unsound?” he asked.72 As the hiring of replacements proceeded unimpeded during April, the union realized that it was defeated. On Easter Sunday, Leamon Hood, the strike leader, offered to call off the walkout if Jackson reinstated strikers and resumed negotiations.

As Newsweek reported, Jackson “replied coldly that Hood’s offer could not be accepted since the city had already hired more than 200 new workers.” In words eerily reminiscent of the St. Petersburg city manager’s in 1968, Jackson announced that the strike was over and that “as far as I’m concerned, we’ve made our decision and are moving on.” By late April, nearly half of the strikers had given up and applied to get their old jobs back. Many were rehired at lower salaries through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). Bowing to the reality of the situation, the union surrendered unconditionally on April 29 and admitted that “the mayor won.”73 70. Atlanta Daily World, April 3, 7, 1977; Atlanta Constitution, April 5, 1977; New York Times, April 5, 1977; Dr. J. E. Lowery to Leamon Hood, mailgram, April 13, 1977, Strike 4/77 file, Box 37, AFSCME Local 1644, Southern Labor Archives, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia (hereafter cited as SLA); Hood interview; King quoted in Atlanta Constitution, April 5, 1977.

71. Kattel and Lewis quoted in “Atlanta: The Strikebreaker.”

72. CBTU quoted in “The Atlanta Story,” Public Employee, April 1977, 6; on support from Farmer and others, see Strike 4/77 file, Box 37, SLA; Lawson’s criticism in Public Employee, April 1977, 8; Jackson quoted in “Atlanta: The Strikebreaker.”

73. “Atlanta: The Strikebreaker”; Atlanta Constitution, April 29, 1977; Atlanta Daily World, April 29, 1977.

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All was not lost for the union. Most strikers regained full-time jobs with the city at their old wages by the end of the year, and AFSCME reorganized sanitation workers following the strike. But AFSCME’s Atlanta local had received a stinging blow from which it would take years to recover. The mayor’s use of replacement workers had been vindicated. Even more discouraging, Jackson’s popularity soared.

According to one analysis, Jackson’s fight against AFSCME “shored up his support among white moderates and the business community in Atlanta.” The fall elections bore this out. Jackson took 63.6 percent of the vote in a multicandidate election. The candidate endorsed by AFSCME finished far out of the running.74 When the dust from the 1977 Atlanta strike settled, it was clear that Maynard Jackson had done something that perhaps only a popular black mayor with a strong labor and civil rights record could have accomplished. He had made it permissible to employ a tactic that AFSCME had once associated only with white “Southern-type city officials.”75 He had fired and replaced strikers. Soon other municipal employers would follow suit.

Auguries of 1981: The Spreading Popularity of Sanitation Striker Replacement

Within sixteen months of the Atlanta strike, Jackson’s successful use of the replacement threat was replicated at least three times. These events involved sanitation workers in different regions. Yet in each setting they led to startlingly similar results.

The first of these strikes began on July 22, 1978, when four hundred members of the San Antonio Refuse Collectors Association (SARCA) walked off their jobs after two months of frustrating bargaining with city administrators. The overwhelmingly Hispanic sanitation workers complained that “our wives all have to work” and “most of us have to get second jobs just to get by.” They demanded overtime pay and a hefty raise. “We Have Been Underpaid Too Long,” SARCA placards declared. But Tom Huebner, the city manager, wrestling with a projected $7.4 million municipal deficit, refused to negotiate. The Democratic mayor Lila Cockrell, and the majority of the city council, supported Huebner’s stand. Huebner announced that “anyone striking or otherwise taking part in a job action will be fired immediately.” Mayor Cockrell backed up the threat. Thus far the city council had “bent over backward” to find money for pay raises, she claimed. If the walkout proceeded, firing would be “the only action that is appropriate.” Henry G. Cisneros, a city council member (and future San Antonio mayor and Clinton administration official), desperately tried to head off the clash.

However, his proposal that San Antonio seek a back-to-work order from a court rather than firing the strikers found little support from either side. SARCA members believed that Cisneros merely advocated a less brutal method of breaking their strike.76 74. New York Times, April 17, October 3, 5, 1977. Local 1644 endorsed Emma Darnell for mayor in 1977. See “AFSCME Local 1644 Endorsements,” Leaflets file, Box 35, SLA. 75. The AFSCME organizing director P. J. Ciampa had attributed the use of striker replacement to “Southern-type city officials.” See Miami Herald, August 16, 1968.

76. San Antonio Express, July 21, 22, 1978. On Lila Cockrell, see “In More Big Cities, It’s ‘Her Honor the Mayor,’ ” U.S. News and World Report, July 16, 1979, 54.

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The lines of battle were soon drawn. “Huebner can’t carry out the threat,” claimed one sanitation striker, Robert Lira. “He went too far.” “We need the money for our families to live.” Daniel Hernandez agreed: “If they fire us, I don’t see how they can replace all these guys.” Yet Huebner stood firm. “I hope the men go out and find themselves employment soon,” he responded, because “they are through as city employees, there is no mistake about that.” Huebner insisted that “any patience with this kind of action only encourages more of it.” Huebner found broad support for his stance. “The Proposition 13 backlash makes public service strikes particularly unpopular now,” the San Antonio Express explained. The city council also stood with Huebner, rejecting an appeal by Archbishop Raymond Peña that the city negotiate with SARCA.77 Like AFSCME in Atlanta, SARCA tried to rally community support. Strikers marched behind banners that read “Viva la Huelga” and “Fire Racist Huebner.”

But officials reported that calls to the city switchboard favored Huebner by a margin of 8 to 1. Even the Mexican American community was split over SARCA’s strike.

“City workers do not have the legal right to strike,” Joe Alderete, a Hispanic council member, told one rally. Enjoying strong public backing, Huebner declared victory. “I think that if [the strikers] had gone ahead and succeeded in forcing a major concession we would have had a series of strikes from anybody and everybody who thought they had a lever on the city,” he declared. Now a different lesson had been driven home. “Everyone ought to take notice that they threatened the hell out of us but it didn’t work.”78 As in Atlanta, defeated strikers scrambled to apply for reinstatement to their old jobs. SARCA leaders advised fired workers to take advantage of the appeals process in the city’s personnel code. But even sympathetic council members disabused workers of the thought that they would all gain reinstatement. Cisneros distinguished between leniency and amnesty for strikers. “There are some [strikers] who ought to be reinstated,” Cisneros allowed. But there was “no way SARCA will come back as a whole.” “Unless you file those appeals, you’ll get nothing, nothing, nothing,” he added. As it happened, even those who appealed their firings got very little.

On August 21, the city’s civil service commission refused to hear the mass appeal of fired workers. Each striker was thereafter forced to plead individually to get his job back. As the story slipped from public view, 120 strikers were unsure whether they might ever be rehired. “It is very difficult in some cases to fire everybody who strikes,” Huebner pointed out later. But Huebner had come very close to doing just that.79 Huebner’s line-in-the-sand approach resonated favorably far beyond San Antonio. “Hats off and lots of luck,” wrote a woman from Tennessee. “This country needs more good men like you,” read a letter from New York. “I only hope that you 77. San Antonio Express, July 23, 24, 26, 28, 1978.

78. Ibid., July 28, 30, 1978.

79. Ibid., July 26, 28, August 23, 1978; “Let Public Workers Strike? No,” U.S. News and World Report, September 25, 1978, 81.

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remain firm. To compromise now will assure a continuation of disobedience by public employees,” counseled another fan. Asked later whether denying public employees the right to strike amounted to an infringement on their constitutional rights, Huebner quickly disputed the suggestion. “I don’t think the Constitution says anything about the right to strike,” he responded, “and certainly one has a choice: He does not have to work for government; he can quit and find employment elsewhere.”80 Another reprise of the Atlanta strategy occurred in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, even as the San Antonio strike was fizzling. Tuscaloosa sanitation workers began a strike on July 25 when their city introduced a new curbside trash-pickup system that reduced the size of sanitation crews. Mayor Ernest “Rainy” Collins wasted little time in making his position clear. On the strike’s first day he issued a forty-eight-hour ultimatum, similar to Maynard Jackson’s. Collins warned that “workers who fail to return to their jobs by Thursday at 7 a.m. will be fired.” The Tuscaloosa News quickly supported the mayor. “A city law prohibits any work stoppage by city employees,” the paper reminded readers. Furthermore, the paper argued, a strike would “only result in a disruption of city services, ill-will from the taxpayers who ultimately foot all city bills and the probable loss of jobs for the striking workers.”81 Aware of the tenuous nature of his members’ position, AFSCME Local 2237 president James Brown began talks with the city. Tuscaloosa officials were not anxious to fire their entire sanitation department, so they offered “amnesty” if strikers returned to work by Monday, July 31. When officials also promised to look into the scheduling issues raised by the union, the strikers accepted these vague promises and decided to return to work rather than risk being fired. The union even dropped its opposition to the new trash-pickup system. The Tuscaloosa News found AFSCME’s “willingness to be reasonable” to be “very encouraging.”82 Only days after the failed Tuscaloosa strike, Detroit sanitation workers were forced to demonstrate a similar “willingness to be reasonable” in a third reprise of the Atlanta strategy. On August 1 a wildcat strike by AFSCME members halted trash collection and bus service in Detroit in a dispute over overtime pay. When a court order demanded that strikers return to their jobs, they refused. Detroit had “so incensed the employees that they voted to strike even though we told them this strike is illegal,” one union official explained.83 Detroit mayor Coleman Young was determined to force the strikers back to work whether union officials cooperated or not. A former labor activist himself, Young was seen as a friend of public employees. But as Detroit faced a budget crisis of its own in 1978, Young was in no mood to give in to a wildcat strike. When strikers did not respond to the court order, Young fired an unmistakable warning shot in an August 2 press conference. “I can assure you that we will take whatever action is 80. San Antonio Express, July 27, 1978; “Let Public Workers Strike? No,” 81.

81. Tuscaloosa News, July 23, 25, 26, 1978.

82. Ibid., July 31, 1978.

83. Detroit Free Press, August 2, 1978.

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needed,” he announced, “including firing of employees if they resist the [court] order.”

In case strikers didn’t get the word, Young dispatched city officials to the picket lines with leaflets bearing the mayor’s ultimatum. “Mayor Young is urging all American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees to return immediately to their jobs and to comply with the order of the Wayne County Circuit Court and with the union’s valid contracts,” the leaflet read. “Those city of Detroit employees who continue to strike will be fired.”84 Young’s aides reinforced the threat. “The mayor is serious. He means business,” said one. Deputy Corporation Counsel George Matish elaborated: “We’ve given them an opportunity to come back to work. What do they want us to do? Turn over the keys of the city?” Under Young’s order, Detroit officials prepared the paperwork to fire 3,500 employees.

Faced with this threat, the union backed down. Late on August 3 AFSCME ended its walkout. In return Young withdrew his dismissal threat. Afterward, Young admitted that he had not relished the thought of firing strikers. “It would be a painful thing for me,” he allowed. Yet he also made it clear that he would have done so if necessary. “It’s a different thing to strike against the public than to strike against industry,” Young explained.85 Dawn of a New Era in U.S. Labor Relations

By 1978 one thing was becoming clear: striker replacement was no longer considered illegitimate in the public sector. Moreover, the strikes in Atlanta and San Antonio had shown just how effective the replacement threat could be. Unsurprisingly, sanitation strike rates declined after 1978.86 As one AFSCME official observed, there was “no feeling of optimism that a strike would do any good.”87 Thus years before private sector workers learned the lesson that striking was too risky, municipalities had convinced many sanitation workers of the futility of walkouts. Politicians also learned that voters would support striker replacement in the public sector—at least if it was properly couched. It took little time for politicians to grasp the power of this new weapon. Shortly after his election as mayor of New York in 1977, Ed Koch announced that he would not tolerate police or firefighters’ strikes. Koch warned workers that if they did strike, he would bring “disciplinary proceedings with the view of ending your employment permanently.”88 Whereas firefighters might once have felt immune to such threats, that was changing. When seventy firefighters struck 84. Government Employee Relations Report, October 7, 1974, B17; Detroit Free Press, August 2, 1978; Detroit News, August 3, 1978.

85. Detroit News, August 3, 1978; Detroit Free Press, August 3, 1978; Detroit Free Press, August 4, 1978; “Public Strikes Back.”

86. Sanitation workers accounted for 7.1 percent of public sector strikes in 1978, but only 4.7 percent in 1979. See Bureau of Labor Statistics, Work Stoppages in Government (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1980), 6.

87. AFSCME official quoted in “Talking Tough to Public Workers,” Business Week, April 27, 1981, 114.

88. Koch quoted in Chief, November 18, 1977, 1. Thanks to Michael Spear for calling this citation to my attention.

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to protest Proposition 13 budget cuts in the Los Angeles suburb of Vernon, California, in August 1978, they were successfully replaced.89 The late 1970s saw the rise of hard bargaining by public sector employers. In many cases Democratic administrations led the way in getting tough. According to one reporter, the “old stereotyped image” of a government negotiator as “a slightly over-the-hill bureaucrat . . . often caving in to militant union demands, and above all fearing the ultimate disruption of a strike” gave way to a new breed of negotiators who were “coming out swinging.”90 That new breed was in evidence at the 1978 conference of the National Public Employer Labor Relations Association. This gathering of public sector labor relations officers celebrated Maynard Jackson’s victory over AFSCME. “In Atlanta, people took a strike and won,” cheered Tony Russo of New York City’s office of labor relations. Conferees were encouraged to emulate Jackson.

They received a three-hundred-page Strike Planning Manual, which instructed readers on how to defeat walkouts. “I come from the bomb-them-into-submission school of labor relations,” boasted one author of the manual.91 Public sector unions held their own in this increasingly hostile environment, but by the late 1970s their ability to strike was being severely eroded. In 1979 California and Illinois courts ruled that public sector strikers could be fired, and Tennessee legislators passed a law that made public sector strikers liable to dismissal or forfeit of tenure for three years.92 Even more alarming was the rise of voices calling for an end to “amnesty” in public sector strikes. Once fired, workers ought not be rehired under any circumstances, these voices insisted. “Each time public servants strike in violation of court orders, laws or contractual agreements, officials warn that the strikers will be punished, usually by fines or firings or both,” observed one Washington Post columnist, Bill Gold, in 1979. “But in almost every case, the warnings prove to be without substance,” Gold argued, because officials would later offer amnesty to strikers in order to end walkouts. The insidious result, according to Gold, was to encourage more strikes. “Why should anybody be afraid of laws or court orders that have been revealed to be nothing but hot air?” Gold wanted tougher action, and he was not alone.93 On the morning of August 3, 1981, that tougher action came. When President Reagan strode before the microphones in a nationally televised press conference, the PATCO strike was only four hours old. Speaking three years to the day after Coleman Young forced Detroit strikers back to work with a firing threat, Reagan announced that he too was prepared to fire workers who struck illegally. As Maynard Jackson had done in 1977, Reagan gave the controllers forty-eight hours to abandon 89. Government Employee Relations Report, September 23, 1978, 18.

90. Ibid., March 20, 1978, 15.

91. Michael J. Rybicki quoted in ibid., 19.

92. For a survey of public sector labor laws in this period, see U.S. Department of Labor, Summary of Public Sector Labor Relations Policies (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor, 1981).

93. Washington Post, March 20, 1979.

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their walkout. Mindful of what happened when PATCO staged its 1970 job action, most striking controllers remained confident. Many of them had been threatened with dismissal eleven years earlier, only to see the Nixon White House ultimately cut a deal with them. It was “one thing to walk out and say in forty-eight hours he’s gonna fire all the air traffic controllers, and it’s certainly another thing to do it,” as one striker put it.94 But the controllers did not realize how much had changed since 1970, nor did they appreciate how legitimate the firing of public sector strikers had become. When 11,352 PATCO strikers refused to heed his warning, Reagan did fire them. Nor did he later offer amnesty to those who wanted to return to work. These actions opened a new chapter in U.S. labor history. But, as America’s sanitation workers well knew, it was a chapter that had been long in the making.

94. Bob Butterworth, telephone interview by author, February 1, 2002, tape recording in possession of the author.