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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (June 1, 2007)
Inside MEETING NO TICES See Page 4 V olume 108 Number 11 J une 1, 2007 P ortland Ramifications of ‘81 PATCO strike still being felt Georgetown professor tells Pacific Northwest Labor History Assoc. of the broad impact the strike had on labor By DON McINTOSH Associate Editor Historian Joseph McCartin set out to study the 1981 air traffic controllers strike, and ended up knee-deep in a his- torical mystery: What caused the sud- den death, or near-disappearance, of the strike? After 1980, American workers stopped going on strike. The year be- fore, there had been 235 major strikes (strikes of more than 1,000 workers), in which over a million workers took part. Last year there were 20, involving just 70,000 workers. McCartin, associate professor of his- tory at Georgetown University in Wash- ington, D.C., is writing a book about the air traffic controllers’ strike, in which President Ronald Reagan fired 11,359 federal employees. It was the symbolic beginning of an era of union-busting and permanent replacement of strikers. Though work on his book is still under way, McCartin shared his conclusions May 12 with a Portland audience of amateur and professional labor histori- ans at the annual meeting of the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association. McCartin said overwhelmingly, the members of the Professional Air Traf- fic Controllers Organization (PATCO) were white male ex-military, having learned their profession in the armed services. They were among the highest- paid federal employees, and had skills that it took at least three years to ac- quire. Their union was politically conser- vative, and backed Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. They wanted the Federal Aviation Adminis- tration to agree to better working condi- tions, better pay and a shorter work- week. Reagan, a former leader of the Screen Actors Guild, told them he un- derstood their grievances. But they came to feel he betrayed their trust. FAA didn’t budge in contract negotiations. It is illegal for federal em- ployees to strike, but others had done so without repercussions. When PATCO members struck on Aug. 3, 1981, Rea- placed by Democratic Mayor gan told them to return to work Maynard Jackson after a 48- within 48 hours or be fired and hour ultimatum. permanently banned them from Looking at the statistics, federal service. the pattern is unmistakable. They thought their strike From 1947 to 1977, the strike would bring commercial aviation had held steady. American to a halt, and that public opinion workers were surpassed only would not tolerate it. But one in by Italy and Finland in 10 strikers crossed the picket the number of work- line, and kept airport con- days per year lost to trol towers operating strikes. The 1950s alongside managers were the most and military con- strike-prone decade, trollers. And the public JOSEPH McMARTIN with an average of rallied around Reagan 352 major work for standing up to so- called “union blackmail,” McCartin stoppages a year. The 1960s averaged 283 a year, and the 1970s averaged 289. said. And then it dropped, dramatically to 83 It was a disaster for labor. But for McCartin, the PATCO strike a year on average in the ’80s, 35 a year was not a singular, exceptional event. It in the ’90s, and 23 a year so far in the was the most prominent example of a ’00s. February 2003 was historic, says pattern. McCartin found a remarkably McCartin — the first month, since the similar strike in 1977 in Atlanta, when Bureau of Labor Statistics started keep- about 1,300 sanitation workers repre- ing track in 1947, that not a single strike sented by the American Federation of of more than 1,000 workers was begun State, County and Municipal Employ- anywhere in America. For McCartin, understanding why ees (AFSCME) were permanently re- workers stopped striking is an intrigu- ing historical puzzle — and may be the key to reviving labor. McCartin has come up with several explanations. One is the example of the PATCO strike itself. Every city had an airport. It was the most widely publicized strike since World War II. So it was a defeat felt all over. It showed the impotency of the labor movement. Workers saw what could happen, and employers felt that permanently replacing strikers had been legitimated by the president of the United States. So permanent replacement became a much more common response to strikes. The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 1938 that strikers couldn’t be fired for striking, but could be “perma- nently replaced.” Of course, that stripped the hard-won legal right to strike of much of its meaning. But em- ployers seldom used the right to perma- nently replace strikers, because it was considered unfair and draconian by the public. Before 1980, employers hired permanent replacements in less than 2 A strike by air traffic controllers on Aug. 3, 1981 led to a showdown with President Ronald Reagan: He gave them 48 hours to return to work or be fired. The air traffic controllers didn’t blink, and 11,359 were fired. It was the symbolic beginning of an era of union-busting and permanent replacement of strikers that has continued to this day. percent of strikes. In the 1980s, they used permanent replacements in more than 14 percent of strikes. And adding to the psychological impact on workers, permanent replacement was often a fea- ture of big highly-publicized strikes — Hormel, Phelps-Dodge, International Paper, Greyhound. So workers came to believe that if they struck, they would lose their jobs. Their willingness to strike was also hit hard by the bad economy. Unem- ployment reached a post-war high of 9.7 percent in 1982, which meant that in theory, other workers were ready to take strikers’ jobs. The poorest workers were more desperate: The minimum wage was not increased at all from 1981 to 1990. Deindustrialization and globaliza- tion picked up speed in the 1980s. Basic manufacturing — labor’s stronghold and the birthplace of the mass strike as a vehicle for workers to get a greater share of increasing productivity — was more and more headed overseas. Con- tainerization was making it much eas- ier to ship goods, meaning that workers in different parts of the globe were now in competition with each other. The cas- cade of U.S. plant closings and mass layoffs that began in 1980s have never stopped to this day. And deregulation, begun under Pres- ident Jimmy Carter, had an effect, in- troducing competition into highly regu- lated and densely union industries. Airlines were deregulated in 1978, fol- lowed by trucking in 1980, which un- dermined the Teamsters master freight agreement. The U.S. had its first trade deficit in 1971, but deficits shot up after 1982, and even more after 1997. Finally, McCartin says, there’s been a shift in the labor movement brought on by the emergence of public-sector union power. From 1955 to 1975, the number of public-sector union workers rose 10-fold. By the end of the 1970s, public-sector workers were more likely to be union than private-sector workers. And that affected the public’s percep- tion of strikes. “Striker replacement was seen as un- fair and divisive by the majority,” Mc- Cartin said, “but when it comes to pub- lic-sector strikes, the public held a slightly different view. Private-sector strikes were against profit-seeking cor- (Turn to Page 6)
