"The greatest disaster in the history of American Labor"

Thirty-one years ago today.

 

The response to this outrage should have been "Never Again!" Instead, the AFL-CIO responded with "please don't hit me."

 

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Regardless of the wisdom of the air traffic controllers going on strike, Reagan’s busting of their union had widespread implications. It invigorated the latent anti-union sentiment in the country. According to Alan Greenspan, Reagan is to be lauded for his actions precisely because it emboldened private employers to treat their own workers as expendable and take a harsher stance against organized labor. And it’s not like everyday Americans came out in support of the PATCO cause: in the weeks after the strike began, 45,000 people applied to become air traffic controllers.

Organized labor certainly saw the threat to its future and held what they called Solidarity Day on September 19 that drew about 250,000 people, mostly organized union members, to Washington. But even such a large rally was pretty easy for Reagan to ignore, particularly with him receiving a lot of support from his base and the more conservative parts of the country. And what does such a march do anyway? Not much. The AFL-CIO sent out letters to its unions banning them from engaging in any secondary strikes or more radical actions. From a legal perspective that makes a lot of sense, but from a strategy perspective it was pretty disastrous because it showed the labor federation completely unable to mobilize effectively in response to this threat. Moreover, AFL-CIO Lane Kirkland explicitly told Reagan he wouldn’t do anything to damage him and said he opposed “anything that would represent punishing, injuring or inconveniencing the public at large for the sins or transgression of the Reagan administration.”

Great leadership Lane.

From the perspective of air safety and cost effectiveness, busting the union could have been destroyed Reagan. Air traffic safety was severely compromised; even Reagan’s own supporters worried that plane crashes would result from his actions. It took 10 years for the government to train enough workers to restaff the air towers at the level of 1981. The cost of this was billions more than the workers demanded in 1981.

 

SNIP

 

The airplanes did not crash (though they certainly could have) and Reagan gained his desired reputation for toughness. Both American labor and the Soviets took note of his stand. Public sector unions never again took such an aggressive bargaining stance toward the federal government.

There’s plenty of places one can mark where American labor began its decline: Taft-Hartley. The expulsion of the communists from the unions. The Border Industrialization Project. But right at the top of this depressing list is the PATCO strike. Even today, labor has not recovered from this and still doesn’t have an effective strategy for dealing with employers’ uncompromising union-busting tactics. 

Read the whole thing.