Viewpoint: PATCO’s Lessons for this Crisis

Donald Trump’s March 27 executive order revoking the collective bargaining rights of more than 700,000 federal workers is the largest act of union-busting in U.S. history.

The closest historical parallel is Ronald Reagan’s busting and decertification of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization. When 12,000 air traffic controllers initiated an illegal strike on August 3, 1981, and stayed out in defiance of Reagan’s ultimatum, the federal government came down on them with all its might.

Many PATCO leaders were arrested, the union was bankrupted and decertified, and the strikers were permanently replaced and banned for life from returning to the Federal Aviation Administration.

That very public defeat had a devastating impact. Coming as it did on the heels of concessionary bargaining that had already begun in auto plants and amid the explosive growth of the union avoidance industry, Reagan’s action inspired private sector employers to imitate his strikebreaking in setting after setting in the 1980s, hiring replacement workers and either busting unions completely or forcing them into painful givebacks.

The bloodbath that flowed from a string of broken strikes made workers and unions reluctant to engage in walkouts for many years after. The annual average of major work stoppages fell from 289 in the 1970s to 35 in the 1990s. As unions lost the clout that strikes had once given them, inequality widened, and a confident anti-unionism surged.

Given that 50 percent of the labor movement is now public sector (35 percent was in 1981), and public workers are already under attack in many states, Trump’s union-busting could be even more catastrophic for public workers across the country. With public sector unions decimated, private sector unions will be more vulnerable to attack.

Yet we shouldn’t despair. The lessons of PATCO can help us decide how to best respond to this crisis.

POPULAR APPEAL

First, we should appreciate the differences in context. The PATCO strike was waged by one small union that had distanced itself from the rest of labor by endorsing Reagan’s election in 1980.

The strikers made no effort to garner public support and instead relied on what they believed was their irreplaceability (it takes years to train an air traffic controller) and their unity (80 percent were prepared to defy the government’s strike ban).

They struck against a president at the height of his popularity—Reagan’s approval was around 67 percent, whereas Trump’s is currently around 46 percent. They were demanding a hefty publicly funded raise at a time when other unions were engaged in concessionary bargaining and the public was facing double-digit inflation.

And air traffic controllers were invisible—many in the public didn’t even know they existed until the strike.

Today’s situation is radically different. Federal workers cannot be scapegoated as the aggressors. They are asking to be allowed to continue work in the public interest and to enjoy the rights to organize and bargain that have been honored by both parties for decades.

Their chief tormentor, Elon Musk, is widely despised (with 38 percent approval), while Trump lacks the avuncular bipartisan appeal that made Reagan such a difficult political foe for labor.

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In contrast to the controllers in 1981, the public knows and appreciates what its park rangers, Veterans Administration nurses, medical scientists, and Social Security workers do. Multiple constituencies who benefit directly from the work of government workers are available to be mobilized in their defense.

LABOR MUST SAVE ITSELF

Yet while the context is more favorable, the damaging impact of Trump’s action will not be blunted or reversed without a fight. The PATCO story stands as a warning to anyone who believes that labor should hunker in a defensive crouch to survive the next four years.

Union strength has been more than halved since 1981; a similar diminution over the next decade will make the movement all but irrelevant. Neither courts nor politicians will save it; the labor movement must save itself by showing some fight.

In 1981, labor leaders limited their support of PATCO to staging sympathetic pickets, issuing public statements, and building the largest labor march in U.S. history, the Solidarity Day march of September 19, 1981.

But they were wary of engaging in civil disobedience in support of an unlawful strike against a popular president. Whatever one thinks of that decision, their view seemed prudent in that moment given the unfavorable circumstances they faced.

It could have gone differently had one union been willing to stand with PATCO. Airline pilots did not have to formally strike. They only had to exercise their right to refuse to fly if they deemed the skies unsafe. Unfortunately, PATCO never built relations with the pilots prior to the strike that would have encouraged such solidarity. Instead, most pilots resented the controllers’ walkout for triggering the furlough of thousands of their coworkers.

CREATIVITY REQUIRED

Repeating that lack of solidarity now would be a grave mistake. Labor must develop an effective strategy of collective action that gives workers a way to fight back.

The strategy might need to be nontraditional. Effective traditional strikes by federal workers—let alone the general strike that some are calling for—do not seem viable, especially in the short term. A federal workers’ walkout might only speed the firing of its participants by an administration bent on shrinking the federal workforce by any means necessary.

Yet other forms of civil disobedience might be devised that could elicit broad popular support. For some workers, maybe it looks like demanding to work, resisting being kicked out of their workplaces, or publicly carrying on their work in an alternative setting. Or maybe it looks like sit-ins and disruptive protests that take the fight to the people holding the levers of power. What if protestors began to risk mass arrests at Tesla dealerships or congressional district offices or set up “Muskvilles” that occupy federal properties?

Whatever strategy emerges, devising it must be the work of all union members, not only the elected leaders. The readers of Labor Notes and participants in the vibrant Federal Unionists Network are well positioned to work out strategies experimentally on the local level.

However it emerges, there must be an action strategy. Labor simply can’t afford a defeat that will dwarf PATCO by comparison.

Joseph McCartin is the author of Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America and president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association. He wrote this longer article in Dissent. Read Labor Notes Editor Alexandra Bradbury’s review of Collision Course here.