Thursday, October 1, 2026
We don’t allow police officers or firefighters to go on strike. Why? Because if they did, people would die.
We make a collective societal decision that there are some positions that are essential in order for our civilized society to proceed safely and economically. We categorize these employees differently than we do those in the private sector, who, if they went on strike, would merely impact the profits of private companies.
The public sector is different.
If we were developing a society from scratch, would we ever have a provision allowing people who take jobs to help others in the society at large to decide to strike and put their fellow residents in peril?
Of course we wouldn’t.
We would have to make sure, however, that those workers were paid a decent wage so that we could continue to attract them to do those jobs. The day those wages were too low would be the day we’d stop attracting those workers. There would also pressure at the ballot box if their salaries were too low.
But to allow the public at large to suffer when there was an economic impasse between public workers and their government management would be senseless and dangerous.
The workers of the Long Island Rail Road are, at the very least, quasi-governmental. Equally significant is that they’re a monopoly. Unlike a strike at, say, one private airline, during which we can choose to fly with a competitor, there’s no other railway available when the LIRR goes down.
Some have taken the position that railroad workers are different from police officers, firefighters or sanitation workers. They’re different to the extent that they don’t fall under the state’s Taylor Law, which prohibits strikes by some essential employees. Rather, they fall under a federal railway act that doesn’t prohibit walkouts.
The federal government must address this.
Congress does have the ability to intervene in some strikes by railroad or aviation workers when it deems that there is a crisis. But usually, by the time Congress does get involved, an enormous amount of damage has already been done. Additionally, there is no guarantee that elected officials in Washington who have bankrolled their campaigns via union contributions would cross that Rubicon.
To avoid this situation from developing in the first place, our local congressional delegation should band together in a bipartisan fashion and submit legislation to forbid these strikes.
There’s tremendous chaos among the general public when these workers — whether we call them government or quasi-government workers — go on strike. People suffer enormously when traffic comes to a standstill. Doctors and nurses being unable to get to the hospital on time is untenable. And what about the other essential government workers who can’t get where they need to go to protect us?
Many people are shocked to learn that President Franklin Roosevelt, who is remembered as one of the most pro-labor presidents in history, actually opposed the unionization of public-sector employees. The same goes for George Meany, one of the nation’s best-known private-sector union organizers.
The leftist push of the 1960s and ’70s brought with it a movement to unionize public employees. It wasn’t always like that — and who says it should stay that way in the future? Let’s pay our public employees a decent wage and give them fair working conditions, but let’s strike that balance at the ballot box and in the market itself — not by allowing strikes that create havoc and endanger the public.
Steve Levy is executive director of the Center for Cost Effective Government, a fiscally conservative think tank. He has served as Suffolk County executive, as a state assemblyman and as host of the podcast “On the Right Side.”
