What’s a prez to do? Reagan and PATCO

Ronald Reagan liked to boast that he was the only union president to be elected president of the United States. In fact, he was the only union member to be elected president of the United States. In office, he professed to be a friend of workers.

But he didn't seem friendly in the summer of 1981. The inflation of the 1970s had been hard on Americans. Workers struggled as prices rose more quickly than wages. Unionized workers had the recourse of going on strike. If the work they did was critical to the economy, they had a decent chance of negotiating pay increases closer to the increase in prices. In 1981 the union contract of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization—PATCO—was up for renewal. The controllers’ work was certainly critical to the economy. They had high hopes of a substantial raise.

The issue was complicated, however, by the fact that the controllers were employees of the federal government rather than of private companies. In a negotiation in the private sector, workers' gains come at the expense of owners or customers of the firm. Those parties are free to sell their shares or take their business elsewhere. Negotiations in the public sector are different. Workers’ gains come at public expense. Taxpayers have to pay their taxes whether they like the government services or not.

The difference is built into the laws under which unions of government employees operate. Federal workers are forbidden to strike. To make their terms of employment perfectly clear, the air traffic controllers had to sign an oath declaring they would not strike.

The PATCO leaders understood the situation and negotiated a new contract with the Department of Transportation. It provided for a substantial increase over the previous contract. But the increase wasn’t great enough to satisfy the members of PATCO, who in a referendum decisively rejected the deal. They prepared to walk off the job.

Reagan warned them not to. He reiterated his pride at being a union man. But he underscored the difference between the public sector and the private sector. “Government cannot close down the assembly line. It has to provide without interruption the protective services which are government's reason for being.” He supported the workers as workers, but he had a responsibility to the American public. “It is for this reason that I must tell those who fail to report for duty this morning they are in violation of the law, and if they do not report for work within forty-eight hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.”

Reagan was as good, or as bad, as his word. When the controllers ignored his warning and stayed home, they began receiving dismissal notices. The transportation department started training replacements, even as the airlines put supervisors at the desks left vacant by the controllers, and pared back their flight schedules. The public, of necessity, scaled back their travel schedules.

Public opinion sided with Reagan, and in hardly more than a week it was apparent the president had won. The new controllers steadily filled the ranks of the missing. The airlines restored canceled flights.

Reagan declined to take a victory lap. To a mother whose son had been one of those terminated, he wrote a commiserating letter that included an explanation. "Mrs. Browning, there are more than two million federal employees. What message would we be sending to all of them if we allowed a strike by one group or gave amnesty to them if they did strike? Believe me, there is no thought of punishment in what we are doing. There just is no way I can avoid enforcing the law." 

The failure of the 1981 PATCO strike has often been described as a landmark in the decline of organized labor in America. Reagan has been portrayed as the chief union buster.

The second charge is truer than the first. With Reagan, presidential attitudes toward strikes came full circle. In the 19th century, presidents were happy to send federal troops to break strikes by railroad and other workers. At the beginning of the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt flummoxed coal bosses by taking an even-handed position between union and management. In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal Congress came down firmly on the side of labor, writing protection for union activities into federal law. Reagan's rebuff of PATCO—a rebuff that included decertification of the union by the federal government—seemed a return to 19th century form.

But the decline of unions in America reflected larger trends. The loss of jobs in manufacturing and mining to automation, foreign countries, and union-unfriendly states was more significant than anything Reagan did. Doubtless Reagan's hard line against PATCO encouraged some corporations to take a tough stance against their unions. But they didn't need the encouragement. Their bottom line was encouragement enough. The changing economy made the tough stance stick.