Word: buffalo
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...Buffalo Evening News cried that the calling of the strike marked a "day of infamy," and Mayor Bernard J. Dowd denounced the "open revolt against the Government." Leftwingers joyfully applauded the teachers' "militancy." All such talk seemed to distress the teachers. They disliked even the word "strike," and they tried to duck the whole issue by calling it an "abstention from work." ("Strike," explained one teacher primly, "has an ugly connotation...
Like most U.S. white-collar workers, Buffalo's teachers had not thought of themselves as union labor: only 500 had joined either the A.F.L. or C.I.O. teachers' unions (which supported, but did not declare, the strike). Buffalo's walkout was the work of the independent Buffalo Teachers Federation, which insisted even on the picket line that it was a "professional association" and not a union...
Striking against Whom? Regardless of their semantics, the actions of Buffalo's teachers spoke for them: like it or not, they were on strike against their own city government and ultimately against the state. Most of the nation's editorial writers, recalling Calvin Coolidge and the Boston police strike, held that the strikers were in the wrong, even while many writers sympathized with their grievances. (According to the Federation, the average Buffalo teacher was going into the hole every year, had to borrow, or take a part-time job to make ends meet...
...teachers had first taken their salary demands to the city. They wanted, among other things, a permanent raise in minimums from $1,775 to $2,400, in maximums from $2,975 to $4,000. The city's answer was that Buffalo is broke, and that only the state legislature-in session at Albany-may empower the city to raise its tax rate. A little unsure whether it was up to city or state to help them, the teachers walked out, and put the pressure on both...
...strike's third day, the nonstriking teachers threw in the towel. "We do not feel justified," they told Superintendent Bapst, "in accepting the taxpayers' money. ... It is only wasted." Buffalo closed down the entire school system and notified the state government that "public education has collapsed...