A New President, and a Union's Last Stand

By BRYAN BURROUGH
Published: November 5, 2011

The columnist George Will celebrated the defeated strike as a sign that years of liberal permissiveness had ended. “In a sense,” he wrote, “the ’60s ended in August 1981.”

A kind of myth has arisen — that the Reagan administration had this all planned, that it lured the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or Patco, into a trap so that it could be demolished. But as Joseph A. McCartin writes in his excellent history of the strike, “Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America,” (Oxford University Press), nothing could be further from the truth.

The book says that the Ronald Reagan of early 1981 was no union buster, that he had been reaching out for union support and that, in Patco’s case, he agreed to grant concessions more plentiful than any ever granted to a public employee union by an American president. It was Patco’s hubris, contends Mr. McCartin, an associate professor

of history at Georgetown University, that forced Mr. Reagan’s hand and led to the union’s subsequent implosion.

“Collision Course” charts the rise of Patco and other public-sector unions over the course of 20 years, from the moment that President John F. Kennedy allowed government workers to bargain collectively. This power, however, came with strict limitations; unions like Patco were not allowed to strike or bargain for higher wages. Their negotiations with the government typically revolved around working conditions.

Mr. McCartin is especially good at showing why air traffic controllers quickly emerged as perhaps the most militant group of government workers. As air travel surged in the 1960s and ’70s, conditions in American control towers didn’t keep pace. Controllers were working longer hours than ever, often with equipment dismally out of date. Many controllers had come from blue-collar backgrounds — many were sons of union members, in fact — and came to believe that the responsibility they carried for the safety of millions of travelers entitled them to white-collar wages, a contention that few in government agreed with. Supervisors at the Federal Aviation Administration tended to treat the controllers as drones.

The story of Patco’s formation in the late 1960s is a stitch. The would-be unionists hired the press-hungry lawyer F. Lee Bailey to oversee its birth. With communication among the far-flung controllers primitive at best, he took to telegraphing important moves, including a 1968 work slowdown, during appearances on “The Tonight Show.”

The collision course that Mr. McCartin evokes took shape in the 1970s, as Patco’s growing militancy seemed out of place in a fiscally strained nation in which cities like New York were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Patco began a series of work slowdowns and sickouts that the F.A.A. was largely able to quell with little real improvement in working conditions. But that made the Patco rank and file only angrier; its hard-liners took each defeat as another humiliation. By the late ’70s, the union had grown even more restive with the influx of hundreds of younger, Vietnam-era controllers who often had a reflexive distrust of authority figures.

AS controllers’ salaries and work hours did slowly improve, the more militant among them kept asking for more. The flashpoint came in 1978 over a demand that, in retrospect, seems remarkably ill advised. Patco controllers, like many workers in the airline industry, had long enjoyed the benefit of a limited number of free airline seats. This “familiarization program” enabled controllers to see air operations up close and was limited to domestic flights. In 1978, Patco began demanding that its members receive free seats on international flights as well.

When airlines and the F.A.A. balked, Patco leaders instituted a work slowdown, causing delays at major airports. The decision was widely unpopular with the flying public, and even among some in Patco who thought it overreaching. Even one of Patco’s lawyers privately called the slowdown “indefensible.” Faced with court fines if it continued, Patco caved in, ending the action.

That, Mr. McCartin shows, was the final straw for Patco militants. The union’s president was overthrown in a boardroom coup, making way for hard-liners to take over. For these men — and they were almost all white men — the union’s long string of defeats was too much to stomach. They began itching for a strike well before the 1981 contract talks. A network known in the union as “the Choirboys” emerged to begin spreading the gospel of a strike, never mind that any strike would be illegal. “In the eyes of many union members,” Mr. McCartin writes, “the Patco fight concerned a fundamental human right: the freedom all workers should have to strike in protest of their conditions.”

By and large, the new Reagan administration took little notice of Patco. The union had endorsed Mr. Reagan in the 1980 election, after cutting a closed-doors deal in which Reagan advisers, while promising few specifics, made it clear they would look kindly on union demands. But Patco leadership emboldened by the deal, demanded pay raises. In June 1981, Mr. Reagan actually gave in, granting the union what Mr. McCartin shows was possibly the most generous set of concessions made to a federal public employee union in government history.

It wasn’t enough. The rank and file rejected the deal, setting the stage for a strike that, in retrospect, had little to do with salary. This was about respect, about a deep-seated anger at years of perceived humiliation at the hands of F.A.A. supervisors. It was only after the union rejected the government’s offers, Mr. McCartin demonstrates, that Mr. Reagan took his historic hard line. Any controllers who struck, he vowed, would be fired. And they were fired, in the thousands. Supervisors and military controllers filled in, and replacements would be trained and hired. For the most part, the public applauded while unions cringed. The cause of organized labor was set back years, if not decades.

History books seem to come in two guises these days: popular and academic. “Collision Course” is a successful fusion of the two; the author is an academic who can tell a story. The book can be dry in places — much high drama, including the suicides of some Patco strikers, is passed over glancingly — but the narrative is clear and well paced. Mr. McCartin deals with policy but also with personalities, and the book is better for it. For anyone at all interested in labor or business history, I recommend it.

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The Strike That Busted Unions

By JOSEPH A. McCARTIN

But the risk paid off for Reagan in the short run. He showed federal workers and Soviet leaders alike how tough he could be. Although there were 39 illegal work stoppages against the federal government between 1962 and 1981, no significant federal job actions followed Reagan’s firing of the Patco strikers. His forceful handling of the walkout, meanwhile, impressed the Soviets, strengthening his hand in the talks he later pursued with Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Although a conservative, Reagan often argued that private sector workers’ rights to organize were fundamental in a democracy. He not only made this point when supporting Lech Walesa’s anti-Communist Solidarity movement in Poland; he also boasted of being the first president of the Screen Actors Guild to lead that union in a strike. Over time, however, his crushing of the controllers’ walkout — which he believed was justified because federal workers were not allowed under the law to strike — has helped undermine the private-sector rights he once defended.

By 2010, the number of workers participating in walkouts was less than 2 percent of what it had been when Reagan led the actors’ strike in 1952. Lacking the leverage that strikes once provided, unions have been unable to pressure employers to increase wages as productivity rises. inequality has ballooned to a level not seen since Reagan's boyhood in the 1920s.