I Say With All Sincerity

New Yorkers awoke on New Year's Day, 1966, to discover the city's bus and subway system eerily still. Thirty-five thousand transit workers had walked off the job. It was a baptism by fire for John V. Lindsay on his first day as mayor. For the next 12 days, tens of thousands of New Yorkers resorted to driving to work, producing monumental traffic jams, while others trudged marathon distances in the cold.

Like Condon-Wadlin, the Taylor Law uses a broad definition of strike activity, making it a crime for public employees and their unions to "cause, instigate, encourage or condone a strike." An employee is presumed to be on strike if he or she "is absent from work without permission" or "abstains wholly or in part from the full performance of his duties in his normal manner" during a strike. The courts have held that the law even prevents employees in certain situations from stopping voluntary work.

On August 3, 1981 nearly 13,000 of the 17,500 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) walked off the job, hoping to disrupt the nation's transportation system to the extent that the federal government would accede to its demands for higher wages, a shorter work week, and better retirement benefits. At a press conference in the White House Rose Garden that same day, President Reagan responded with a stern ultimatum: The strikers were to return to work within 48 hours or face termination. As federal employees the controllers were violating the no-strike clause of their employment contracts.

The executive board representing more than 30,000 New York transit employees voted Thursday to return to work while contract negotiations continue with the Metropolitan Transit Authority. Union chief Roger Toussaint said members would return to work immediately but it is not clear how soon trains and buses will be moving again, or what services will be running for tonight's commute.