There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  When, in 1933, in response to the Depression, the Academy moved to impose a 50 percent wage cut on actors’ salaries, resentment boiled over, and a contingent broke away to found the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). With the almost simultaneous passage of the NIRA and its Section 7(a), there occurred, as historian Garry Wills notes, “a stampede of stars out of the Academy and into the Guild.”1 SAG’s first success was shaking free of the controlling rules the Academy had put in place limiting actors’ freedom to chart their own careers. The next year SAG and Actors Equity agreed to peacefully coexist, and SAG was accepted into the AFL.2

  Reagan joined the West Coast film colony in 1937. A radio sportscaster with the Chicago Cubs, he had come to California on a spring training trip with the team, and while in Hollywood arranged to be screen-tested. Warner Bros. liked what it saw in the affable young man from Illinois and offered a seven-year contract. Reagan’s film career, which spanned fifty-three movies, would be spent almost exclusively in second-tier productions such as Love Is on the Air (1937), Dark Victory in 1939 with Bette Davis, Santa Fe Trail (1940), Knute Rockne All American (1940), and This Is the Army (1943). He joined SAG and in 1941 was elected to its board; in 1947, after stateside service in the Second World War, he became the union’s president, a position he would hold until 1952, and then again briefly in 1959.

  One of his first experiences with union politics came during the war, when SAG was drawn into a dispute involving the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), a coalition of technical workers’ labor groups that included some members of the Communist Party, and the reigning AFL-affiliated technicians’ union, the International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE). Reagan was part of a SAG team that met for months with the disputants in what proved a futile effort to resolve the standoff, and he came away disgusted by the process. “Some days I’d go home after hours of negotiations and think we’d made some progress toward a settlement,” he later wrote. “But the next morning we’d meet again and the strikers would walk into the room with their lawyers and 27 new demands we’d never discussed before, which they said had to be settled before they’d call off the strike.”3 Becoming impatient with so much pointless discussion, which he characterized as “a basketful of words,” Reagan concluded that the CSU’s implacability derived from communistic influence. In the years immediately following the war Reagan’s concern about Communism deepened, as he came to believe leftist unions were trying to impact Hollywood generally. “American movies occupied 70 percent of all the playing time on the world’s movie screens in those first years after World War II,” he would later write, “and, as was to become more and more apparent to me, Joseph Stalin had set out to make Hollywood an instrument of propaganda of Soviet expansionism aimed at communizing the world.”4

  Such a suspicion on Reagan’s part might have been attributable to his own wartime work in U.S. propaganda films, but he was hardly alone in holding this extreme view. Anti-Communist fervor was pervasive enough in the movie colony to infect everyone from cartoonist Walt Disney to gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, as well as Reagan’s own brother, Neil. Neil Reagan, along with Hopper and Parsons, was recruited by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to gather information about questionable local lefties. Neil at one point warned his brother to terminate his membership in the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP), founded in 1944 to support President Roosevelt’s reelection, because it had become a “suspect” organization. The group did have Communists as members but was not dominated by them. Although Reagan took Neil’s advice and resigned from HICCASP (along with friend and fellow member Olivia de Havilland), the future president was himself inquired after by the FBI because he had attended meetings of liberal organizations, including one opposed to aiding Chinese Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek.

  In order to join the fight against malignant Soviet influence, and to protect his career, Reagan turned FBI informant. Assigned an informer’s code number, T-10, he secretly provided to the FBI the names of SAG members he thought had Communist sympathies, and in 1947 he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), although he did not name names in that appearance.5

  Reagan, like many in Hollywood, was wary initially of the coming of television—he feared its incessant need for content would create an inferior product and ruin the experience of moviegoing—but he and the new medium proved a highly successful match. In the early 1950s he became a familiar presence in American homes as the host and occasional star of television’s General Electric Theater. General Electric, which was in the process of diversifying its operations and opening autonomous plants across the country, sent Reagan on the road each year to make promotional appearances at new GE sites. He worked hard to perfect his standard anecdote-filled speech, which, “couched in uncomplicated Reader’s Digest prose,” was “a primer of conservative doctrine,” touting free enterprise, criticizing the excesses of the New Deal, and warning about the dangers posed by the Soviet Union.6 Reagan was often called upon to give the address twice in one day—to GE workers, then again later in a public hall or school auditorium.

  Reagan did this for eight years, later claiming to have visited all 135 General Electric facilities. The speech, which came to be called “A Time for Choosing,” depicted an America endangered; the enemy at the gates was collectivism in the form of big government, and each citizen would need to count himself ready to meet the challenge. “We have come to a time for choosing,” Reagan offered. “Either we accept the responsibility for our own destiny, or we abandon the American Revolution and confess that an intellectual belief in a far-distant capital (Washington) can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”7

  His relationship with GE ended in 1962 when the firm canceled the General Electric Theater. There were whispers the company had pulled the plug on the show partly out of concern its spokesman had gone over the edge politically, but by then Reagan was enough in demand as a speaker that he could carry on even without GE’s sponsorship, although he also continued to pick up sporadic work in Hollywood, appearing in his last film, The Killers, in 1964, and serving through 1965 as the host of the televised western series Death Valley Days.

  Reagan’s formal coming-out as a political figure is usually associated with an October 27, 1964, appearance he made on behalf of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, at which he delivered his signature talk and raised $1 million for the Goldwater campaign.8 Reagan, however, was by then part of a crusade far grander than Goldwater’s election hopes (which against popular incumbent Lyndon Johnson were slim). A fringe but powerful New Right coalition had been germinating ever since the 1952 Republican Party Convention, where conservative senator Bob Taft, coauthor of the Taft-Hartley Bill, had been rejected as a presidential candidate in favor of Dwight Eisenhower. Taft himself died in 1953, but his brand of isolationism, anti-Communism, and anti–New Deal rhetoric survived among other influential figures such as Phyllis Schlafly, author of A Choice Not an Echo; Robert Welch (who would soon found the John Birch Society); and Goldwater himself, whose 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, was a bestseller. The surge of New Right activity also produced John A. Stormer’s 1964 None Dare Call It Treason, which alleged Communist influence over the American media.

  Goldwater, as expected, lost to Johnson in a landslide, but the seeds of the coming conservative revolution had been sown, Reagan one of its most promising figures. It had long been assumed in California that a career in politics was his for the taking, and he had been approached about running for the U.S. Senate or the governorship. It was to this latter office that Reagan successfully ascended in 1966, the first step on his journey to the presidency and his confrontation with the nation’s air traffic controllers.

  FROM THE BOSTON POLICE STRIKE of 1919 to the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968, there had long been disagreement about the labor rights of government employees at the municipal, state, and also the
national level. In January 1962 President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order allowing federal employees to form unions and collectively bargain, and the Postal Reorganization Act, passed in 1969, established a means for binding arbitration in the face of labor stalemates involving postal employees. While these steps signaled acceptance by the federal government of its employees’ rights to organize and negotiate their demands, the Taft-Hartley Act and later the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 prohibited federal workers from striking. But could Americans in the nation’s employ really be expected to forgo so fundamental a weapon? At what point would even they deserve the right to strike? By 1981 the no-strike concept had begun to appear particularly anachronistic because the government was increasingly hiring contract services from the private sector, meaning that at some work sites a federal employee who was not at liberty to strike might work side by side with a colleague who was free to do so.9

  The seventeen thousand members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), founded in 1968, exhibited from the start a determination to defy such constraints. Unable to formally strike, they found various other means to make their grievances known. In the year of its founding the union launched what it slyly dubbed Operation Air Safety, a deliberate slowdown of traffic at the nation’s hub airports; the following year its members staged a three-day sick-out. Concerned by the unmistakable signs of PATCO insurrection, Transportation Secretary John Volpe asked former journalist and veteran presidential adviser John J. Corson to investigate. Corson’s report, issued in January 1970, detailed a poor working relationship between PATCO and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which governed the work conditions of the controllers and managed their daily schedules and prospects for promotion. It also cited the confusion resulting from the fact that Congress, not the FAA, established the controllers’ benefits and rates of pay. “Members of this committee have never previously observed a situation in which there is as much mutual resentment and antagonism between management and its employees,” said the report.10 The Corson Committee also noted that controllers were frustrated by “their inability to communicate upwards,” and that those who spoke out about on-site problems or equipment failures feared endangering their chances of advancement.11

  One persistent anxiety among the controllers was that the physical and psychological demands of the job were so great, they would never manage to remain at it long enough to earn a decent retirement. FAA data indicates that “between 1976 and 1979 about 8 percent of U.S. controllers who retired did so for medical reasons before they were eligible for full retirement benefits.”12 Controllers felt that the position’s extreme difficulty was not taken seriously by management. Most had not forgotten (or forgiven) previous FAA head Langhorne Bond’s thoughtless observation that air traffic control was no more stressful than driving a bus in New York City.13 More welcomed were the conclusions of investigating Boston University psychiatrist Robert Rose, who reported frequent occurrence of hypertension, job stress, and psychiatric problems among as many as 50 percent of the controllers examined.14 Senator Daniel Fong, a member of a Senate civil service committee, found it ironic that “a blackjack card dealer in Las Vegas is generally relieved from his duty after 40 minutes of dealing because of the monotony and mental stress of keeping up with a deck of cards, while an air traffic controller responsible for moving airplanes in and out of a busy airport will frequently remain on the radar-scope for four hours without relief.”15

  Juggling as many as thirty planes at a time through three-dimensional space, the controllers functioned in “a world not of mundane routine, but of intense emotions,” writes anthropologist Katherine Newman, “of adrenalin rushes and gnawing tension, interspersed with boredom.”16 One controller reported, “Some days I go home and walk in the door and my wife takes one look at my face—and my clothes, which are sweated through from the neck down—and she doesn’t say a word. She sends my son to his room and she makes me a drink and we don’t talk for two hours.”17

  Their work’s uniqueness created militancy among the controllers as well as a distinct sense of pride. Most had developed their skills in the military, many in Vietnam, and the FAA training they experienced included an eighteen-week training course so rigorous a significant percentage of trainees were eliminated. The controllers, even as they resented being taken for granted, saw themselves as elite, excelling at a job few people could or would do.18

  In March 1970, when twenty-two hundred controllers staged a massive sick-out that lasted for twenty days, the Air Transport Association (ATA), representing the major airlines, obtained a court order sending the controllers back to work under the threat of lawsuits and fines. The ATA stopped short of demanding the fines, but as part of the negotiated settlement, PATCO was forced to accept a permanent federal injunction forbidding the union from engaging in concerted actions such as strikes, stoppages, or slowdowns. In the event of any such stoppage, the union could be fined $25,000 per day.

  The disgruntled controllers quickly found ways to defy the injunction. One effective yet entirely legal means involved their insisting on the mandated five-mile horizontal flight separation between aircraft. It was well known in the flying business that controllers at busy hubs routinely shortened the separation space to three miles or less in order to facilitate more takeoffs and landings. The airlines knew of and benefited from this practice. But controllers could insist on the standard required spacing, and when they did, the resulting delays hurt the airlines’ reputations with consumers and wasted as much as $1 million a day in fuel as planes idled on runways.

  In the spirit of the ATA settlement, Transportation Secretary Volpe had agreed to rehire some of the controllers fired over the illegal sick-out. However, despite the permanent injunction, stoppages occurred in 1976 over salary issues and in 1978 because international airlines ceased offering controllers the cherished perks known as “fam flights,” in which a controller was allowed a free ride in a plane’s cockpit in order to become familiar with pilot-to-ground communications. Everyone in the industry knew the privilege was abused for the controllers’ personal travel, but it was nonetheless seen as disrespectful when it was taken away.

  PATCO did have some success, with the help of the Corson Report and other publications, in educating Washington and the public to the idea that air traffic controllers deserved special consideration because their jobs were both crucial to the public and extremely high-stress. By 1980 the controllers had won from Congress the ability to retire at age fifty with full benefits if they had twenty years of service. PATCO had also amassed a $5 million nest egg based on dues income as well as a separate “subsistence” trust worth almost as much, which was, albeit not in name, a strike fund. In anticipation of a scheduled renegotiation of its contract the following year, PATCO’s executive board in June 1980 ousted the union’s genial president, John Leyden, who had headed PATCO for ten years, and installed the younger, more militant Robert Poli, who had been a vice president. Poli, a former air force controller who had worked in the FAA’s Cleveland center, moved quickly to replace top union staff and attorneys with his own loyalists.

  THE CHANCES FOR THE AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS, were they to strike, did not appear half bad. PATCO had the distinction of being the only federal workers’ union to endorse Reagan in the recent 1980 election. This had not been solely a strategic move, for many of the controllers were Republicans and genuinely liked the conservative California governor. Candidate Reagan had, in turn, written a letter to PATCO on October 20, 1980, informing its members that he was aware of “the deplorable state of our nation’s air traffic control system … that too few people working unreasonable hours with obsolete equipment has placed the nation’s air travelers in unwarranted danger.” He assured them that, as president of the United States, he would “take whatever steps are necessary to provide our air traffic controllers with the most modern equipment available and to adjust staff levels and work days so that they are commensurate with achiev
ing a maximum degree of public safety.”19 Robert Poli had the letter framed and hung on the wall above his desk at PATCO headquarters in Washington.

  Reagan had met privately with Poli on October 23 to accept PATCO’s endorsement, and Poli had come away believing his union had Reagan’s support. The PATCO leader, along with most Americans, then watched approvingly as the newly inaugurated president hailed the valiant struggle of the Polish shipyard workers’ movement, Solidarnosść, led by Lech Walesa. Emulating the Polish unionists, PATCO members adopted the term “solidarity” and began referring to fellow members as “brother” and “sister.”

  The controllers could also look with hope at one of the last major labor actions involving federal workers, a 1970 wildcat postal strike in which 175,000 of the nation’s 600,000 postal workers walked off the job, and the precedent set at the time by President Nixon. Federalizing National Guard soldiers to deliver the mail in place of the missing mailmen, Nixon did not invoke the laws that would have declared the strikers felons nor threaten to fire them. Instead, his secretary of labor, George P. Shultz—with the AFL-CIO’s George Meany serving in an advisory capacity—sat down and hammered out terms for better wages and a restructuring of management-employee relations in the postal system. The striking workers returned to their mail routes.20 More recently, when in 1980 controllers at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport staged a slowdown because the FAA had refused to pay them a special “stress bonus,” the administration of President Jimmy Carter did not enforce the permanent injunction or seek to fine PATCO.

  But what Poli and his fellow PATCO executives had not adequately considered was Reagan’s basic antipathy for unions. The president’s kindly words for PATCO had in no way constituted an assurance that he intended to bargain over wages or allow strikes, and among his inner circle of aides and advisers there was not a single labor-friendly figure, someone who might be expected to soothe and troubleshoot a crisis as Shultz had for Nixon.21 Ray Donovan, whom Reagan had appointed secretary of labor, was a former vice president for labor relations at a construction firm and held views antithetical to unionism, while Reagan’s secretary of transportation, Andrew “Drew” Lewis Jr., was a businessman and staunch Reagan loyalist whose chief credential was having managed the president’s election campaign in Pennsylvania. There were other warning signs. In February 1981, soon after Reagan took power, Lewis’s department had hired the law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, which had a record of working against unions, to lead the contract negotiations with PATCO; then, in March, Reagan named J. Lynn Helms, the former head of Piper Aircraft and a known union-buster, to be the FAA administrator. The FAA had never taken seriously, or at least had never acted on, the troubling information contained in the Corson and Rose reports about the conditions and attitudes among air traffic controllers; instead it geared up for the coming negotiations by examining ways to undermine PATCO. “Rather than correcting management inadequacies,” historians Richard Hurd and Jill Kriesky wrote, “if the agency could weather the strike, PATCO would be destroyed and the problems would disappear.”22