There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  PATCO had also been inattentive about establishing a reliable base of allies. Deposed president John Leyden had worked over the years to maintain favorable relations with key figures in organized labor, but Poli and his renegade forces had done little to reassure or cultivate these potential sources of support. Indeed, so badly handled had been the ouster of Leyden and his lieutenants, some had filed unfair labor practices complaints with the NLRB.23

  On June 22, 1981, Poli and Secretary Lewis discussed a provisional new contract package for the controllers. Lewis described it as the best the administration could do, since Reagan was seeking to reduce government spending. It offered a raise of $4,000 per year to each controller, technical improvements in their workplaces, steeper raises for controllers who also served as instructors, a night shift raise, and time and a half after thirty-six hours of work in any given week. Other benefits offered included the proviso that controllers sidelined by medical conditions would receive paid retraining for less stressful jobs within the system. Poli termed the offer “fair.”24 Later he said he was inclined to accept it because, by PATCO’s own rules, a vote of 80 percent of all controllers was required to stage a walkout, and in an earlier vote only 75 percent had approved such a potential action. Had the PATCO members accepted the deal as offered, estimated to be worth about $40 million, and Congress had then approved it, the agreement would have represented a significant union victory, since PATCO would walk away with an expanded wage-and-benefits package. But the members soundly rejected the pact Lewis had outlined, voting 13,495–616 against ratification.

  This lopsided vote suggests not only the high level of unhappiness among controllers, but that wages were not the lead motivation for the strike. Many controllers were reported to be displeased that the contract offer failed to address their request that the standard workweek be reduced from forty to thirty-two hours. Poli himself later explained that “the strike was called because of early burnout, because U.S. controllers work more hours than controllers in other free-world countries, because wages do not keep up with inflation and because of management attitudes that ridicule our profession and turn deaf ears to our input into aviation safety.”25 Poli was correct in citing the number of hours worked; American controllers, averaging forty hours per week, were well above comparable rates for France (thirty-two hours), West Germany (thirty-three), or Australia (thirty-five), and received fewer vacation or paid sick days than controllers in major systems worldwide.26

  What exactly led PATCO to reject the deal has never been entirely clear; some historians suggest that a “good cop, bad cop” scenario was planned all along to make it appear that the government’s offer had at least received a hearing. Poli, speaking before a union gathering shortly after pronouncing Lewis’s offer “fair,” was welcomed with a standing ovation by fellow PATCO executives, yet at the same meeting, when the union’s board refused ratification, hundreds of attendees jumped to their feet, chanting “Strike! Strike! Strike!”27 Ultimately, the government and PATCO were too far apart for negotiations to have much effect. PATCO wanted a package worth about $740 million. Lewis, who continued to meet with Poli, offered ways the $40 million package could be reconfigured, but refused to enlarge upon the deal itself.

  The PATCO leadership set a strike deadline for August 3, at the same time making new demands that included the thirty-two-hour workweek and a $10,000-per-person across-the-board wage hike. Lewis, calling the demands “nothing short of outrageous,”28 warned there would be no more concessions. Attorney General William French Smith then informed Poli and other PATCO officers that they as well as the heads of striking PATCO locals would be prosecuted “to the fullest extent of the law” in case of a walkout. In Congress, fifty-five senators signed a letter accusing PATCO of threatening to force concessions from the government by punishing air travelers, and warned that Congress would not be “receptive to any demands negotiated by force.” Most significantly, it vowed to back Reagan if he chose “to use the full force of the law to protect the public interest.”29 A similar letter was circulated in the House of Representatives.

  Poli remained confident, believing that the prospect of a controllers’ strike’s crippling the nation’s air transport system would leave the opposition no choice but to renegotiate, and that Reagan would ultimately make good on his implied promise of support. Yet when Lewis told Reagan PATCO was set to strike, the president instructed Labor Secretary Ray Donovan “to advise the union’s leaders that, as a former union president, I was probably the best friend [the] organization ever had in the White House, but I could not countenance an illegal strike nor permit negotiations to take place as long as one was in progress.”30 Reagan called a White House staff briefing (set, appropriately, beneath a portrait of President Calvin Coolidge). Echoing Coolidge’s famous edict that “there is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time,” Reagan told his aides that where PATCO was concerned, “Dammit, the law is the law, and the law says they cannot strike. If they strike, they quit their jobs.”31

  The president was as good as his word. Late on the morning of August 3, four hours after the strike was officially called, Reagan issued an ultimatum from the Rose Garden stating that striking controllers would be fired if they did not return to their jobs within forty-eight hours. “Let me make one thing plain,” Reagan told the nation. “I respect the right of workers in the private sector to strike. Indeed as president of my own union I led the first strike ever called by that union…. But we cannot compare labor management relations in the private sector with government. Government cannot close down the assembly line; it has to provide without interruption the protective services which are government’s reason for being.”32 Seconding his boss’s remarks, Drew Lewis assured reporters, “I don’t care whether it’s 9,000 or 12,000 or 100,000—whoever is not at work will be fired.”33

  Attorney General Smith also followed up on his earlier warning. His Justice Department hit PATCO immediately with $4.4 million in fines for violating the back-to-work order, and filed felony charges against seventy-two PATCO local leaders in twenty cities. Poli predicted that he would be arrested but the government chose not to make a martyr of him, although five executives of PATCO locals were taken into custody. “There’s more effort going into busting our union than there is into fighting drug abuse or organized crime,” griped Poli after news photos showed PATCO officers in handcuffs. But he insisted the controllers’ spirit would not be broken. “PATCO is more than a name,” he stated defiantly. “PATCO is more than a union—it’s a religion.”34

  DESPITE SUCH SPIRITED TALK, PATCO’s leaders appeared to have badly misjudged the controllers’ indispensability, and had not fully appreciated how swiftly press and public would turn against them. “The air controllers have no right to hold up the nation,” observed the New York Times. “President Reagan’s tough threat to fire workers … is appropriate. A settlement that rewards them for illegally withholding vital services would be a serious mistake.”35 Travelers inconvenienced at the nation’s airports also tended to support the White House. “I think they [the strikers] were very foolish … [they] are in danger of losing everything,” observed Eric Peterson, seventy-four, of Orlando. “I have been a union man myself for 35 years so I should know. I sure do think the president did the right thing.”36 Policeman William Hoy, on duty at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, said, “Sure, they have a right to strike, and they have the right to get fired, too. I can’t feel sorry for them. Reagan has to draw the line somewhere.”37 A Newsweek poll conducted the week of August 17 found that 57 percent of Americans backed Reagan’s action, and only 29 percent did not.38 This broad public support included even many working-class citizens, suggesting that the president had tapped into a wide vein of antiunion feeling. The National Association of Manufacturers, smelling the blood of all organized labor in Reagan’s tough stance, overnight launched a committee to advocate for “a union-free environment.”

  The president did not have
everyone in his corner. “It seems to me particularly embarrassing to see pictures in the media of the PATCO strikers being escorted to jail in leg irons and manacles, while we were all cheering lustily the courage of Lech Walesa and Solidarity,” said Congressman William D. Ford. “I suspect that if the equivalent of PATCO went on strike in Russia tomorrow, we would have parades in the streets in support of them.”39 There were also expressions of disappointment that Reagan refused to make even an attempt at bargaining. “What is absolutely without precedent, at least in modern times,” observed John Dunlop, secretary of labor in the administration of President Gerald Ford and a coauthor of New York State’s Taylor Law, which prohibits public workers from striking but allows for methods to soothe labor-management tensions, “is that [the Reagan administration] has brought in no outside, dispassionate group to look at the problem. That ain’t right. The administration has decided … to leave no avenue of escape for the union. You just don’t do that.”40

  The union had probably missed a chance to gain public support when it failed to adequately publicize the safety and working conditions that motivated the strike; instead, most coverage featured their steep wage and benefits demands. Inflation was a major policy issue at the time, and the emphasis everywhere was on saving money and trimming government waste. In a year in which the country saw the end to the sixteen-month trauma of Americans being held hostage by Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and Reagan had himself almost been assassinated, the idea of well-paid controllers grounding air travel because they wanted more money simply proved not to be a winning or compelling crusade. Reagan’s “political prowess is the skill with which he picks his battles,” wrote the New Republic in a piece that argued PATCO had failed to gain the moral high ground by going on strike. “[He] appears to have been spoiling for a fight with organized labor, and the controllers handed him a perfect opportunity.”41

  In practical terms the strike was probably lost the moment it became evident the controllers were not indispensable, for the impact of the strike on the nation’s commercial airlines was far less profound than PATCO had hoped. Initially it grounded about half the nation’s fifteen thousand commercial flights, causing cancellations and difficulties at several major hubs. But the Reagan administration had, in anticipation of a strike, and apparently unbeknownst to PATCO, obtained an improved strike contingency plan from the FAA to replace one drawn up during the Carter years. The new plan managed air traffic by reducing it 25 percent overall through a method known as “flow control,” wherein takeoffs at one airport are closely coordinated with the volume of landings elsewhere, thus reducing the strain on controllers. The FAA also temporarily grounded all noncommercial and nonessential forms of aviation. In addition to the controllers who were either not in the union or did not strike, about one thousand PATCO strikers had heeded Reagan’s forty-eight-hour ultimatum and returned to work, and many supervisors as well as military controllers also filled in where needed. Meanwhile, the FAA’s air controller training facility in Oklahoma City reported that seventy-seven thousand job applications had poured in during the first several days of the standoff.

  One reason the disruptions were taken in stride was that the PATCO shutdown was, to an extent, a crisis the major airlines welcomed. Due to the 1978 deregulation of the airline industry, which had allowed for the emergence of low-price airline competitors like People Express and New York Air, the industry was suffering from numerous flight redundancies. The need to reduce the number of aircraft aloft for safe handling by the replacement controller force gave the airlines the opportunity to sift through presently scheduled flights and suspend those that were least profitable.

  Conspicuously unhelpful were the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), as well as other airline unions such as the machinists and flight attendants, who refused to go out in sympathy with PATCO; most of their members crossed PATCO’s picket lines to report to work. There were a number of reasons for this. Unlike the controllers, other workers more directly affiliated with the airlines were private sector unions and governed by the Railway Labor Act; since the controllers’ strike was illegal, they could not join it without risking damage suits from the airlines. And as with the general public, the relatively high pay received by the controllers created minimal sympathy among lower-paid airline workers.42 In addition, pilots saw potential harm to their own jobs in that the controllers’ strike was allowing the government and the airlines to trim flight schedules. John J. O’Donnell, ALPA president, told the executive council of the AFL-CIO “that his members would have him thrown out of office if he attempted to insist that they respect the controllers’ picket lines.” The failure of ALPA’s forty thousand pilots to stand with PATCO was perhaps the biggest strategic blow to the controllers’ strike, since a combined walkout of the two unions could not have failed to shut down the nation’s air travel network. The best ALPA could do was to encourage the White House to rehire the fired controllers.43 “If the airline pilots had refused to cross the picket lines, the strike would have been a success,” lamented a controller years later. “They made a mistake and they’re paying for it now. Labor made a mistake.”44

  From the perspective of much of the labor movement, however, it appeared that it had been PATCO that had miscalculated. The headstrong controllers had been warned a strike would possibly be “suicidal,” and, as a clear result of the shift from the Leyden to the Poli administration, it had failed to consult adequately with other airline-related unions in advance.45 To be sure, some labor support did emerge. On August 15, four hundred teachers, autoworkers, firemen, and transit workers joined striking controllers on picket lines at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. Carrying hand-lettered signs, they chanted “Tell Ronald Reagan to stop all his fussing, ’cause there ain’t gonna be no union-busting.” New York City transit employee Tom Spence told a reporter, “Any self-respecting trade unionist should be here supporting PATCO because the administration’s attack on PATCO is a threat to all unions.” Another, Larry Ingram, suggested, “It’s like the quote that goes something like this—‘First they came after the Communists, and I wasn’t a Communist, so I didn’t do anything. Then they came after the trade unionists and again, I did nothing. Then they came after the Jews and because I wasn’t a Jew, I did nothing. And finally, when they came for me, there was no one left.’ Well, it’s better to fight for their jobs than to have to fight for mine.”46

  On August 16 the Coalition of Flight Attendants took out a full-page ad in the New York Times reprinting Reagan’s October 1980 letter to PATCO in which he had vowed his concern for the outdated equipment and punishing work schedules controllers dealt with, and the ramifications for air safety. Reagan had ended his letter with the words, “I pledge to you that my administration will work very closely with you to bring about a spirit of cooperation between the President and the air traffic controllers.” The flight attendants admonished Reagan “to honor his pledge to the air traffic controllers and return to the bargaining table with PATCO.”47

  The community of international air traffic controllers also offered support. The Canadian controllers’ union refused for two days to clear flights emanating from the United States, and Portuguese controllers based in the Azores staged a two-day stoppage. Both efforts caused some disruption and delays on transatlantic routes but were largely symbolic (the two stoppages were not coordinated, which would have had a far more devastating effect).48 On August 13 the sixty-one-country International Federation of Air Traffic Controllers’ Associations, meeting in Amsterdam, voted not to back the striking U.S. controllers, although like other labor bodies it urged Reagan to reopen talks with PATCO.

  Thus, one part of PATCO’s strategy—that the strike would hobble the nation’s airways—was only minimally successful. There was also a morally reprehensible element to the controllers’ action that reflected negatively on them: the appearance that they had forced the White House into a game of chicken using the lives of innocent air travelers. As everyone knew, some sort
of incident—a near miss involving two planes, or worse—would offer convincing proof of the controllers’ indispensability, while each hour that passed safely tended to underscore the Reagan administration’s vow that the system could function without them. While there were air fatalities during the era around the strike, including the January 1982 crash of an Air Florida plane into the Potomac River in Washington, in which seventy-eight people died, none could be linked to air controller failure. Flights were canceled and delayed, and some passengers refused to fly out of concern for their safety in the hands of inexperienced controllers, but in fact the air transport system responded well to the emergency. “The president was a lucky man during this episode of American history,” writes historian Willis Nordlund, “in that there were no large air disasters that could have been attributed to a less than perfectly functioning air traffic control system.”49 Within days, flights were back to a 70 percent level,50 the quick adjustment encouraging the president to suggest that “before the strike, the air traffic control system had about six thousand more controllers than it really needed to operate safely.”51