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Reagan era of union busting { June 7 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.workdayminnesota.org/view_article.php?id=69f8e1128f25ca08dc6ef4d669e55c05http://www.workdayminnesota.org/view_article.php?id=69f8e1128f25ca08dc6ef4d669e55c05
Reagan remembered for new era of union-busting
By Barb Kucera, Workday Minnesota editor -- June 7, 2004
MINNEAPOLIS -- As memorial events are held this week for the late President Ronald Reagan, journalists, pundits and others are evaluating his legacy. Among labor activists, his presidency will be remembered as the start of a new era of union-busting.
His actions highlighted a little known union - PATCO, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization - and exposed weaknesses in the labor movement that put unions on the defensive throughout the 1980s.
PATCO was one of a small handful of unions that endorsed Reagan in his bid to defeat incumbent President Jimmy Carter in 1980. But just months after Reagan took office, PATCO members found that support meant nothing.
Faced with the longest working hours of any air traffic controllers in the world, PATCO members sought to relieve the stress of their jobs through changes in their union contract with the Federal Aviation Administration. Their main demands centered on safer working conditions, including a 32-hour workweek, updated computer equipment and retirement after 20 years of service.
When the Reagan administration balked at these demands, PATCO called a strike. Federal employees however, are forbidden by law to walk off their jobs. On the first day of the strike on Aug. 3, 1981, some 15,000 controllers went out, causing the cancellation of thousands of airline flights across the country. Two days later, Reagan fired the striking controllers.
Air traffic controllers demonstrated outside Chicago's O'Hare Airport in 1981. Two days after going on strike, they were fired by President Ronald Reagan.
File photo courtesy of Press Associates News Service.
By many Americans, Reagan’s action was viewed as decisive and positive. Many media outlets focuses on the controllers’ demand for higher wages, rather than the key issue of safety, engendering little public sympathy.
Writing in his memoir, An American Life in 1990, Reagan said that as a past president of the Screen Actors Guild, he "supported unions and the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively . . . but no president could tolerate an illegal strike by federal employees."
The union movement was caught off guard. In 1981, mass firings of strikers simply did not occur.
AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland denounced Reagan’s attack on PATCO. But he also sent a letter to AFL-CIO affiliates, discouraging them from taking any type of strike action in solidarity with PATCO, which was not an AFL-CIO affiliate.
The AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Day march in Washington, D.C., in September 1981 drew half a million union members. The event, which had been planned well in advance of the PATCO walkout, focused on the contrast between Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers and his support of the Solidarnosc (Solidarity) movement in Poland.
"There is a certain irony in the fact that Polish government workers in a communist country seem to have won more freedom to strike than U.S. government employees have in this supposed land of the free," editor Gordon Spielman noted, writing in the St. Paul Union Advocate.
In retrospect, the PATCO strike was just one event - albeit a highly visible one - in a chain of actions taken during the Reagan administration to shift the balance of power to corporations and management. The firings marked a kind of "open season" on workers that paved the way for managers to take advantage of a previously ignored U.S. Supreme Court decision barring them from firing strikers but allowing them to "permanently replace" those same workers.
The distinction has certainly been lost on the thousands of workers who have lost their jobs due to illegal union-busting in the last 20+ years.
When he took office in 1995 on a reform agenda, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney evoked the memory of the Reagan presidency in issuing a call for change.
"As part of the policies that drove down wages, Corporate America and their allies in Washington did their best to break existing unions and prevent working people from organizing new ones," he said.
"That is why the Reagan administration broke PATCO and packed the National Labor Relations Board with sworn enemies of collective bargaining. That is why Corporate America tried a whole new tactic -- permanently replacing workers who exercised their right to strike. And that is why a whole new industry emerged of attorneys, publicists, and pop psychologists who advise companies on how to keep out unions . . .
"We understand, that while the world and the workplace have changed, labor stood still and lost ground. Just as I challenge business to change, every day on my job I challenge labor to change."
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