Strikes and job actions are intentional alterations, disruptions, or suspensions of the work roles of a significant number of employees for the purpose of forcing employers to satisfy worker demands. Among public safety employees, these actions have included a number of covert job actions and overt strike tactics. The former category includes principally the ”ticket blizzard,” in which the issuing of traffic citations reaches epidemic proportions, and the ”blue flu,” or sick-ins, during which extraordinary numbers of officers report themselves ill and unable to work, as well as other speed-up and slow-down tactics. The latter category is reserved for the strike, in which significant numbers of officers overtly refuse to work in order to achieve their collective goals. Such activities have been widely and popularly perceived as disruptive of and an interference with, if not a grave threat to, commonwealth interests. This article focuses principally on the overt strike, and only incidentally addresses covert forms of job action.
Arguments: Pro and Con
At the outset, it is well to recognize that ”unionization” and ”strikes” are not coextensive phenomena. Nonetheless, in the public perspective on these matters, fear of strikes by police often appears to dominate the collective consciousness. Anticipation of the strike, then, necessarily influences attitudes toward unions. For that reason, arguments regarding the propriety of police unionization and the right of officers to strike are intimately related. Publicly accepted understandings of the purpose and role of unions, on the one hand, and the importance assigned to the role of police, on the other, have often led unions and police to be seen as incompatible. As a result, the unionization of and strikes by public sector employees have traditionally been regarded as inappropriate. Only since the 1960s and 1970s has this attitude tended to soften and become less rigid. The opposition has several facets.
When applied specifically to public safety workers such as police, the foregoing arguments have been refined and supplemented. Of particular importance is the issue of strikes among employees who provide allegedly essential services, that is, those regarded as indispensable for maintaining the health, safety, and well-being of the populace. There are several facets to this issue: First is the concern over the fear generated in the population by the suspension of such services. Second, there is concern that the supposedly essential nature of their duties affords these workers undue influence in the collective bargaining process. The third concern is that, taken together, these and other matters put government at a disadvantage in negotiations. However logical this may seem, evidence suggests that the foundations on which much of this concern rests, that is, the dire consequences of suspending essential services, including injury, loss of life, destruction of property, loss of property, loss of profits and revenue, and a decline in public order, are more anticipated than real.
Additionally, arguments developed in opposition to specific reforms sought by line officers have frequently been converted into arguments opposing unionization of police officers. For example, efforts to establish a dues check-off system, of great help in maintaining organizational stability and rank-and-file solidarity, were attacked on the grounds that government agencies cannot be used to collect private debts.
Line officers’ quests for the establishment of formal grievance procedures were opposed by many police administrators, who labeled such advances as a threat to the civil service system and to the customary lines of authority in police departments. Furthermore, efforts to secure collective bargaining agreements have been beaten back as unconstitutional delegations of authority. Further granting police the right to unionize and engage in collective bargaining has been staunchly opposed by those who regard police in the military/soldier model. Given that perception, police are not entitled to the same rights granted other public sector employees. Finally, one alternative model of police, that of professional, has also been used to argue against police unionization, on the grounds that such an arrangement is contrary to professionalization.
Brief History
By the early 1900s, police were unionized in no fewer than thirty-seven American cities. One of the earliest and most indelible American experiences with a police strike was the 1919 walkout of Boston police due to dissatisfaction with wages and general working conditions (police in Cincinnati, Ohio, had struck in September 1918). For three days thereafter, Boston was the scene of an inordinate degree of robbery, vandalism, petty theft, looting, and general mob behavior. In all, eight persons were killed. Order was not restored before the mayor’s request for the mobilization of the state guard was met by then-Governor Calvin Coolidge. Beyond the riotous actions of citizens, this strike ushered in several decades of strongly negative sentiment regarding unionization of public employees in general and police officers in particular. In some jurisdictions, even police benevolent and fraternal societies were outlawed.
In the years following the Boston police strike of 1919, the legitimacy and hence the organizational basis necessary for initiating successful job actions by police was largely extinguished in the United States. Thus, despite efforts to restore police unions prior to mid century, it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that police fraternal and benevolent associations and other labor organizations experienced significant official approval in the form of dues check-off systems, formal grievance procedures, and collective bargaining rights. To be sure, such recognition and concessions were not won without the threat and/or use of job actions, such as sick-ins, slowdowns, and ticket blizzards in places such as Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, New York, and Pittsburgh. However, it was not until the decade of the 1970s that police strikes occurred in any regular way.
Such antiunion sentiment did not survive, however, and during the post-World War II period, the unionization of police officers was again being pursued with growing vigor. By the late 1960s and the 1970s, the ”ghost” of 1919 had been dispelled. To no small degree, the aggressiveness of the increasing number of police unions at this time was matched and likely encouraged by similar activity among other public employees. Indeed, the militancy of public workers during the 1970s was in keeping with the generally militant, antiestablishment attitude that prevailed during that and the preceding decade. Thus, relative to other categories of public employees, police job actions at that time were hardly unique.
Effects of Police Strikes
The outcomes of police strikes may be assessed in any of several ways. One is to examine the effects on working conditions for officers, including changes in wages or benefits and other work-related issues. A second area of assessment is the influence of these actions on law and public policy pertaining to such job action among public sector employees. A third area is the analysis of the organizational structure of the union itself, including geographic location, size, membership, and perspectives on police-labor relationships. Finally, one may assess their outcomes vis-a-vis alteration in crime patterns and, related to that, the meaning of police strikes for the security of persons and property in our society.
There are two schools of thought concerning the effects of police strikes on criminal activity. First is the view that during the officer’s absence, the criminal and lawless elements are free to indulge their perversities and pose a threat to social orderliness and that police stand as a ”thin blue line” between civility and savagery. The disorderly conditions during and allegedly because of, for example, the Boston police strike are often cited to support this perspective. The second and competing perspective suggests that, in fact, police have less influence on fluctuations in the rates of crime than any of several other factors and that police have little or no way of preventing or controlling criminal behavior.
Conclusions
It is apparent that these few paragraphs stand as the briefest survey of a complex, highly emotional issue. We may nonetheless conclude that, characteristically, the politicization of police, including the resort to unionization and strikes, rests on the same general issues leading other workers to take similar action—wages, benefits, and general work conditions. Despite this common element, a resort to unionization and striking by police (and a few other categories of public workers) has been defined and evaluated in qualitatively different terms and almost exclusively on the basis of short-run, parochial interests. On that basis, job actions among police have been the topic of far more discussion and resistance, and the basis of more public anguish than their scope and consequences would necessitate.
