KANSAN COMMENT
Illegal strikes: the only way?
The classic battle of labor against management has been plaguing government in the United States ever since it decided it had an obligation to help resolve industrial shutdowns that endangered the national interest. Until recently, the government could remain a relatively neutral mentor to labor disputes.
Now, however, it has discovered that it can—and has—become a party to such battles, and government seems unsure of just what to do.
Striking teachers, sanitation workers, police and firemen have brought many cities to a moral impasse. One way or another, the disputes have been solved, or at least papered over, but city governments have yet to formulate a workable policy for avoiding stoppages by employees whose everyday services are a necessity.
The postal workers defied court injunctions, their own leaders' pleas to return to work and a call-up of the National Guard to replace them.
Likewise, last week's postal workers strike and the continuing "sick-out" by air traffic controllers caught the federal government off guard. By law, U.S. employees cannot strike, but they did, call it by whatever name they may.
The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, led by its attorney, F. Lee Bailey, also refuse to heed a restraining order requiring the union to withdraw its support of the nationwide slowdown.
In the face of overwhelming resistance to its orders, the government grew more strict. Congress
refused to act on the workers' demands so long as an ax was over their heads. Soon, though, the logjam was broken. Postmen returned to work and, as of this writing, the air traffic controllers were doing the same. Now that the pressure has been slightly relieved, negotiations have started, tempered by union threats of more walkouts if they don't proceed satisfactorily.
During the height of the mail stoppages congressmen, appointed officials, newspapers and other citizens complained indignantly about the government employees' riding roughshod over services guaranteed them by the Constitution. But the blame lies with a stubborn and unseeing Congress and executive.
Although President Nixon denies it, union leaders and some congressmen have claimed that he tied any postal wage increase to reform of the system. The President's alleged intransigence was matched only by that of Congress, which was slow to accept even the idea of reforming the cumbersome post office department, let alone of writing it into law.
The postal workers, the air traffic controllers—all government workers—claim the law against their striking leaves them little hope for improvement in their working conditions. Theirs is a worthy argument.
The postmen, for example, are paid from $6,176 to $8,442 a year—the latter figure attainable after 21 years on the job. They demanded a 40 per cent increase, to a scale of $8,500 to $11,700, but even
that was cropped by union leaders to 12 per cent retroactive to last November. The government seeks to go lower than that.
Meanwhile, the air traffic controllers were protesting the heavy work loads imposed upon them by the Federal Aviation Administration and the concomitant reduction of safety standards.
All federal workers are distressed by the President's freeze on federal pay raises (part of his inflation fight).
Honest grievances, such as these, cannot be legally redressed by government employees. They must wait for government to act, and government is often slower than the greediest corporation.
Can federal workers, then, strike against the national interest? Other groups have made good use of civil disobedience, not only to publicize their grievances, but to get concrete results. Distasteful as it seems to a nation which depends on the mails and the airlines, striking may be the workers' only way out.
They are, of course, responsible for their actions, and if jailings and fines are the results, the strikers must accept them.
The unfortunate part of the whole affair, is that government is under no danger of such penalties. Unless, of course, the electorate rises in support of the complainants.
hearing voices一
—Monroe Dodd
To the editor:
I would like to address several questions to those persons who disrupted the March 16 SUA Minority Forum. I would include the member of the Forum committee who gave the most abominably discourteous introduction I have ever been embarrassed to sit through.
You speak of totalitarianism, of denial of basic freedoms, of enslavement by a corrupt system. What makes your philosophy so different from those totalitarianisms who have historically, consistently sought to repress ideas in conflict with their own? Who have seen the danger of freedom of speech and have destroyed it? Is there really much difference between the philosophy of you who would pelt a man, who seeks to express himself, whether right or wrong, with insults and marshmallows, and those who seek a more permanent repression of freedom of opinion with bombs and bullets? Why do you so energetically seek to protect your own freedoms and deny another man his? How can you justify such a system that seeks freedoms for a few?
In contrast to your tactics, Lt. Col. Jack Mohr did not attempt to force his opinions upon me. He accepted an invitation to express himself in an atmosphere of intelligent give and take designed to arrive at the validity of his statements. Unfortunately those who attended his speech intending to make their own decisions about the validity of these opinions, were deprived of this right. I protest this mental enslavement. I demand my right to freedom of thought.
Kay C. Martinez Lawrence junior
To the editor:
Perhaps our educational system stands justifiably condemned by the employees of the Kansas University Printing Service. They are, after all, products of our educational system and while their minds may not be "polluted" like the minds of those of us still committed to the values of a free press and a free society, they are obviously experiencing a great deal of difficulty in understanding their own history and their own society.
How sad and even tragic that men could believe today that the North's victory in the Civil War and the 13th Amendment were all that was needed to assure basic human dignity for "some elements of our society." (Would it have been so very painful for "great and silent majority" of printing service employees to call our black students "people" or "men" instead of "elements?") How unfortunate that
men would choose the issue of taxation as the most important issue of the American revolution and as the most important problem facing the great majority today, when we were then and are now being torn apart on problems of human survival, dignity, and freedom. (How ironic that men who are being paid by taxpayers should despair taxes.)
Perhaps the next time the employees of the printing service walk out on their jobs (are these walk outs, by the way, "disruption(s) of the orderly process of the university" that should be brought to the attention of Senator Shultz?) they might walk in on a few classes and try to find out if they are asking the right questions as well as try to learn whatever they want to learn. Maybe if they tried being students for a while they would even come to understand the extraordinarily limited nature of current student "rights" and "freedoms."
Mary Kay Cordill Instructor of Sociology and Kansas City graduate student
To the editor:
Violence is as American as apple pie. That has been shown to be a fact. However, one group of Americans, the blacks, has remained basically non-violent, at least until very recently. Perhaps this is one reason they are still so discriminated against. Even since slavery they have been good niggers to the white folks: they have refused violence as an alternative.
Now, the whites are in danger of losing their whipping boy. More and more blacks are discovering, sadly, that violence is indeed the American way. Because of this, white Americans, with their right to oppress being threatened, have renewed their level of violence against black persons (Lamar, S.C., is a recent example). Many black and other revolutionaries, however, are trying other forms of violence as an answer. Instead of using physical violence, which their past has shown they cannot consciously accept, they are experimenting with such things as symbolic violence, i.e., violence against property. (The throwing of the UDK's into Potter's Lake is a recent example.)
Maybe white America still has its whipping boy, who still refuses to play the game by the rules.
I know this letter contains generalizations, but certainly no more than does Mr. Moser's of last week.
Jim Merryfield Bartlesville, Okla., junior
'Who put that stupid tree up there?'
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