Handschuh/AP Photo
Supporters of PATCO picketing in front of the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center, August 1981
This week marks the 40th anniversary of the air traffic controllers’ strike that President Ronald Reagan broke decisively when he fired those federal employees who refused to heed his back-to-work ultimatum and end their illegal walkout.
Reagan’s crushing of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) was a turning point in labor relations, inspiring corporate America to fight unions harder than at any time since the 1930s. Within a year of the PATCO debacle, a number of major corporations provoked walkouts by their own workers, which the corporations then used as a pretext to fire them and bust their unions. By the late 1980s, unions had all but abandoned the strike and thereby lost a key component of worker power. Today, 40 years after the PATCO strike, only 6.3 percent of private sector workers are unionized, roughly one-third of the figure in 1981. As unions declined, inequality has grown more extreme.
American unionists have often seen their struggle in biblical terms, and measuring suffering in 40-year increments recalls the ancient Israelites, who wandered the desert for that span in search of their promised land. “Labor, like Israel, has many sorrows,” observed the preeminent union leader of the Depression era, John L. Lewis.
Ray Stubblebine/AP Photo
Amid the PATCO strike, people and baggage are stacked up by the hundreds at John F. Kennedy airport, August 1981.
Lewis made that remark after the 1937 Little Steel Strike was crushed by brutal violence. Police fired into the backs of peaceful picketers in South Chicago on Memorial Day 1937, killing ten, wounding dozens. Twenty days later, a hail of deputies’ bullets killed two and wounded 50 more in Youngstown, Ohio.
Yet that defeat was a temporary setback amid a decade of great progress; the years between 1935 and 1945 saw unions achieve unparalleled growth. No sooner had Lewis evoked Exodus imagery than labor seemingly entered a land of milk and honey. Emerging from World War II, fully one-third of workers were unionized and a long postwar boom began that raised the incomes of those in the bottom two-thirds of the economy faster than those at the top, thanks in part to union strength.
Democratic access to the voting booth and to workplace representation are deeply interdependent. They rise or fall together.
It’s hard to imagine a similar leap forward today, despite the efforts of an unexpected anti-Reagan: President Joe Biden. The recent union defeat at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse illustrates why. Biden raised hopes in February when, in the midst of the Amazon union vote, he encouraged workers to unionize. Yet his words proved ineffectual. After flooding the plant with new hires just prior to the vote, thereby preventing union organizers from reaching all voters, then inundating workers with anti-union propaganda and employing a smartphone-based workplace surveillance system, Amazon defeated the union by a wide margin—no guns necessary.
Is another labor exodus even possible when corporate power over workers remains so daunting?
It is. Hope survives in the form of the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which, like voting rights legislation, now awaits a Senate vote.
The PRO Act would correct the imbalances in our 86-year old labor law whose decrepitude was vividly displayed in Bessemer. It deserves passage just as much as the For the People and John Lewis Voting Rights Acts, for, as 20th century U.S. history shows, democratic access to the voting booth and to workplace representation are deeply interdependent. They rise or fall together.
But passing laws isn’t enough. As the Supreme Court repeatedly reminds us, laws are only as just or effective as the bodies that enforce (or gut) them. The Little Steel Strike taught John L. Lewis that lesson. It was violently crushed only weeks after the court upheld the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act, a ruling, ironically, that had helped inspire the steelworkers to stand up to their bosses.
Unlike Moses’s staff, laws alone will not bring forth the waters of justice. Workers themselves will have to act.
And perhaps they are starting to do so. Intriguing instances of resistance—collective and individual—are visible on PATCO’s fortieth anniversary.
In recent years, unions have begun to turn PATCO’s go-it-alone strategy on its head, as they join with community allies and frame their demands as a fight for the common good. Teachers unions have helped lead the way. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) did this in its 2012 strike when it joined with parents and community organizations to win “the schools our children deserve,” and again in 2019 when they fought for affordable housing. United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) did this in January 2019, staging a weeklong strike not to improve the wage offer that was already on the negotiating table, but to champion the demands of community allies, including a legal helpline for immigrant families and an end to random searches of students. CTU and UTLA now help lead a network of unions committed to “bargaining for the common good.”
Possibly even more portentous are workers’ individual acts of rebellion in what analysts have begun calling “The Great Resignation.” “We haven’t seen anything quite like the situation we have today,” says Daniel Zhao, an economist at Glassdoor. Job-quitting is surging as millions leave bad jobs in search of better ones. In effect, those workers are telling employers to “Take This Job and Shove It,” as David Allan Coe’s 1977 country and western classic memorably put it.
Coincidently, many PATCO strikers sang those very lyrics at the moment Reagan fired them 40 years ago. How fitting it would be if that revived chorus marked the beginning of the end of labor’s long desert years.
