There is Power in a Union
Page 73
Ultimately, of course, the real problem for the controllers was that they had not anticipated Reagan’s readiness to break with White House practice and insist on firmly enforcing the letter of the laws governing federal workers. These laws expressed the idea that employees’ right to organize was in the public interest, so even though Reagan could legally fire the strikers who spurned his forty-eight-hour deadline, he himself was failing to honor the law’s broader implication. Many observers thought there was sufficient precedent, such as Nixon’s handling of the 1970 postal strike, to make it incumbent on the White House to at least try for mediated solutions, instead of Reagan’s “carpet bombing” approach, as Lane Kirkland, Meany’s successor at the AFL-CIO, termed it.52 Of course any comparison between the two strikes broke down when one considered the numbers involved—175,000 striking postal workers versus eleven thousand defiant controllers—and the fact that, unlike postal employees, who were visible, familiar figures “in their communities … few Americans have ever met, let alone know, an air traffic controller.”53
Compounding the loss of their jobs was the government’s effort to wreak havoc on the controllers’ lives. It saw to PATCO’s decertification, thus denying the now ex-controllers their organization, and “took special actions to completely prevent fired controllers from having access to unemployment benefits, housing subsidies, and other federal benefit programs.”54 Lane Kirkland pointed out to reporters that the president’s cruel actions were reminiscent of the Danbury Hatters case of 1908, in which severe financial penalties were levied against striking workers, even to the point of attaching their homes and bank accounts.55 One singular problem for the controllers was that their skills were not easily transferable to other kinds of employment. Civilian air traffic control was a highly specialized calling, “a working-class dream,” notes anthropologist Katherine Newman, in that it came with status and was relatively well paid, yet “required no educational credentials beyond a high school diploma. There was a catch, however. Only one civilian employer could make the dream come true: the federal government.”56
THERE WERE CLEARLY grave implications for organized labor in what had transpired. Not only had Reagan fired eleven thousand government employees, he had turned his back on eight decades of labor progress by whatever name it had ever aspired to be known, from industrial democracy to collective bargaining. Reagan “wanted to send a strong, unambiguous message to organized labor,” Nordlund recounts. “That message … was that organized labor—unionism—was essentially incompatible with the emerging free-market philosophy of the administration.”57 Democratic House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr., with grudging respect, conceded that the president was “a tough two-fisted person…. My brief dealings with [him] this year show he doesn’t know the art of compromise.”58
It was vintage Reagan—the defining of a controversy in simplistic moral extremes, a refusal to examine nuanced opinions or alternatives, a lack of interest in bargaining, and the adoption of a political stance that was admired for its intransigence alone. Some of Reagan’s appeal all along had been that he was resolute, certainly more so than Jimmy Carter, who had appeared equivocating in the face of the Iran hostage crisis. Already, only seven months along in his presidency, Reagan had brought the hostages home, survived an assassination attempt, pushed his budget through Congress, de-funded everything from school lunches to disability programs, and smashed a union of federal employees by selling the action as a matter of law and order.
Of course one reason Reagan’s policies had begun to stir so much concern was that the old GE pitchman was proving so adept at promoting them. His practiced but homespun words and the smoothness of his political salesmanship were anathema to progressives; they perceived in him a compelling phony whose popularity was especially maddening in that, as Kirkland complained, “he claims his victims as his allies [and makes] working people accomplices in his assault on their interests.” It gave labor leaders fits to know that 44 percent of labor households had voted for Reagan in the 1980 election despite most unions’ backing of Carter, and that he got away with claiming a special understanding of working people even though during his much-vaunted days as a “trade unionist” in Hollywood he had earned $150,000 per year and informed on his union colleagues to the FBI.59
Reagan’s firing of the air controllers was a bold statement, but of a piece with his approach to conservative governance. It was the beginning of the Reagan Revolution, shifting wealth from the middle class to the rich through tax cuts, moving government money out of social entitlement programs and into the military. To labor professionals, of course, the PATCO firings threatened to embolden further antiunion actions not only from government, but from employers generally. Much as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signature on New Deal labor legislation had been a “signal on a hill” to the nation’s workers, freeing them from hesitation about organizing, so would Reagan’s action now inspire antiunion retribution from management.60 Retired labor writer A. H. Raskin wrote that one likely result of Reagan’s handling of the PATCO situation would be the “costly spread of labor-management turmoil over broad sectors of public and private employment as governors, mayors, school boards and corporations seek to copy [Reagan’s] blitz tactics.” As AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Thomas R. Donahue asked, “Breathes there a city manager with soul so dead that he will not want to look like a hero when he sees the President of the United States being applauded for being tough and closing every door to a settlement in defiance of all the civilized rules of collective bargaining?”61
Forced to acknowledge the likelihood of the trend cited by Raskin and Donahue, other voices belatedly reconsidered the wisdom of the controller firings. On August 30 the New York Times, having supported Reagan’s tough stance initially, suggested that since the president had “proved that [PATCO] could not extort a favorable wage settlement by stopping the planes … it’s time to change strategy. Everyone’s interest—that of the president, the strikers and the public—would now be served by offering to rehire the controllers—on the government’s terms.” The paper cited polls showing “that most Americans are behind the president, but are uneasy about the harshness of his actions.”62 But Reagan turned a deaf ear to any second-guessing, and, still on the offensive, went out of his way to disrupt labor’s efforts to lick its wounds. When one hundred thousand union workers, including many fired air traffic controllers and their families, surged down Fifth Avenue in New York’s Labor Day parade on September 7, Reagan was nearby at Gracie Mansion, presenting a symbolic cardboard check to Mayor Ed Koch for federal funding of the long-delayed Westway development project, which would create thousands of construction jobs in the city. “A gimmick to give the appearance [he favors] the working man,” Lane Kirkland said in dismissing Reagan’s gesture.63 When Mayor Koch later joined the parade he was loudly booed and heckled. “That’s OK,” the ebullient mayor told a reporter. “It’s like being at Yankee Stadium. The boos are really cheers.”64
Two weeks later in Washington, the antipathy toward the president over the PATCO firings helped bring about the first large public outpouring of dissatisfaction with the Reagan presidency. On September 19 the AFL-CIO coordinated a massive rally in the nation’s capital conspicuously dubbed Solidarity Day. The day was warm and sunny as the participants flooded into the city by bus, train, and car from all parts of the United States. A crowd estimated at 260,000 (larger than had attended either the March on Washington in 1963 or the anti-Vietnam War Moratorium in November 1969) gathered around the base of the Washington Monument before moving slowly toward the Capitol, taking three hours to traverse the distance. As many as two hundred diverse labor-affiliated organizations were represented. Five years earlier the notion of George Meany’s labor federation leading an antiadministration protest in the nation’s capital would have been unthinkable, but now there was no such hesitation. Union leaders from across the country, many bitter about the thrashing PATCO had taken, were determined to make a strong showing,
and rank-and-file workers from both independent and public service unions were joined by thousands of ordinary citizens, eager to show their disdain for the president. Many were taking part in their first protest. Most cited revulsion for the president’s assault on the working people, his brusque style of governance and lack of substance as having motivated their decision to attend.
“I’m not a radical. But Ronald Reagan made me come here,” remarked Mildred Donahue, a librarian who had flown in from Connecticut.65 Woodrow Wellington, a sixty-eight-year-old retired maintenance man from Newark, Delaware, expressed a common disappointment. “He made out like he was this big labor person. But I don’t think he ever did much work but play with that toy pistol on ‘Death Valley Days.’ ” Another attendee, John Richardson of New York, said he had gone through job training in a Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) program and had attained a job through it, but that under Reagan CETA had been canceled. Many of his coworkers had been in the program for five years; some had gotten married, thinking they would have job security. “But there’s no security now,” Richardson reported.66
Simply to have mounted such an ambitious event, stage-managing the tens of thousands of participants, seemed proof of labor’s vitality, and it was an energized Kirkland who took to the podium to declare:
Reagan has told us that he alone speaks for the working people of this country…. But if you believe that governments are raised by the people, not as their enemies but as their instruments, to promote the general welfare, look about you. You are not alone…. You are the people that do the work of America. You run its factories and offices, work its farms, transport its produce, maintain its buildings, teach its children, nurse its sick, clean its streets and fight in its defense. When something goes wrong in America, you feel it first—before the politicians or the more securely placed. Something has gone wrong and you know it all too well.67
Many op-ed page editors, even conservative columnist William Safire, scolded Reagan for avoiding Solidarity Day by slipping out of town to Camp David. Presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Richard Nixon had remained in the capital to face protestors or at least hear their chants, but Reagan, who very rarely assented to hold a press conference, Safire wrote, “has evidently decided to conduct his presidency one step removed from the public. He wants to avoid having his scripted generalities challenged in the give-and-take of hard questioning.”68
While the sentiments of Solidarity Day left a warm glow, labor’s agenda remained short on specifics. The threat Reaganism posed was unmistakable, yet it was unclear what form resistance should take, or how it might be implemented by so diverse a constituency. If labor intended to confront the nation’s “ascendant conservatism,” it needed something more substantive than what one paper termed “a Quixotic wish list” of demands for “safety in the workplace” and “jobs and justice for all Americans—voiced by a parade of assorted workers and unhappy liberals.”69
Reagan never repudiated his actions toward PATCO, although in the short term his efforts failed to conform to his reputation for slashing government spending. His unforgiving stance toward the union probably wound up costing the United States and the airlines around $30 billion, or $1.5 billion per month over the twenty months it took to get the air traffic control system back to full strength.70 Training new replacement controllers alone cost the government $2 billion.71 As Nordlund reports, between 1981 and 1985 the number of flights in the United States had grown from 66.7 million to 71.4 million (and to 80.4 million by 1988), yet in 1985 there were almost five thousand fewer controllers on the job than in 1981. “After almost ten years of turmoil, the expenditure of billions of dollars, the destruction of homes, families, and careers … little real improvement occurred.”72
In the coming years, as had been predicted, his hard-line example inspired employers generally to take a tougher approach to labor relations—ordering lockouts, suppressing collective bargaining, and further legitimizing “replacement workers” as the tonic for troublesome workplace stoppages. Unions have always been sustained by society’s disapproval of those who cross a picket line. “After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a strikebreaker,” author Jack London had believed along with many of his countrymen. But an unwholesome effect of the PATCO affair was that the entire nation saw the president defy the oldest taboo in America’s culture of work; in doing so he contributed to murdering the very idea of collective bargaining, since negotiations of any kind are naturally compromised when management can readily fill “open” jobs with nonunion replacements. “[Reagan] will be remembered for many things,” asserts Nordlund, “but the one event that remains in the psyche of every American is the discharge of federal air traffic controllers for failure to follow a presidential directive to return to work…. There will be PATCO scars on the American labor movement for many decades to come.”73
LABOR WAS WAKING UP with a headache each morning, and an antiunion White House was only one of the sources of the discomfort. Social and economic adjustments under way since the Second World War had accelerated—suburbanization, the transition from manufacturing to service jobs, the decline of large urban manufacturing centers, and the growth of trade unions into mighty business enterprises. Looming over all such changes was globalization—the dispersal of the world’s trade and finances through advances in shipping, air freight, telecommunications, and computerized banking and money exchanges, which allowed U.S. businesses access to lower-cost workers and production overseas—a trend that accelerated when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, bringing down the iron curtain and opening new markets as well as cheap labor to global producers. This development was exacerbated by the surging economies of China and India, which offered the world new consumers as well as legions of less expensive workers. American unionists facing contract negotiations or contemplating a strike were now dealing with factors utterly beyond their control.
Nor was the “barren marriage” between the labor movement and the Democratic Party, as author Mike Davis has termed it, proving to be of much help. Despite Lane Kirkland’s advice to organized labor to rally around Democratic candidates in the November 1982 midterm elections, the long alliance between the two had for the past decade seemed more a stopgap than a fulfilling collaboration. Certainly many Democrats still had their hearts in the right places. Senator Edward Kennedy accused the Republicans of trying to “dismantle our federal government and all it stands for,”74 and laid into Reagan for pursuing “the discredited and disastrous ideas of the 1920s,”75 while House Speaker O’Neill spoke wistfully of the New Deal, when “together the Democrats and labor made a middle-class America … thirty of the greatest, fruitful and beneficial years that a democracy ever had.”76 But the Party of Roosevelt had long ago ceased being a reliable companion. When the Democrats split over civil rights in 1948, the labor movement found itself tied to the liberal wing of the party and ultimately on the losing end of the conservative wave that crested in 1968 with the election of law-and-order candidate Richard Nixon. Jimmy Carter, a Democratic president with control of Congress, had faced such stiff conservative opposition from within his own party that even his mild labor program had been largely nullified, and after twelve years of further retrenchment with first Reagan and then George H. W. Bush in command, labor—left with “only a token role in setting party policy”77—watched as President Bill Clinton led the country into international trade agreements harmful to domestic labor and, under pressure from congressional conservatives, curtailed welfare for the country’s poorest demographic.
For a movement that knew in its bones the vital necessity of having leverage with which to bring opponents into line, labor came to occupy a position in which it had almost none. It had linked its fate to the activism of a political party that was far from activist, that largely took labor’s support for granted; there seemed little real pressure on the Democrats to deliver for labor when it knew, everyone kn
ew, that labor had nowhere else to go.
To a degree labor had become a victim of its own success, lulled for a generation by the view that the struggle for worker dignity and decent hours and conditions had ended, that victory had been secured by heroes with names like Gompers, Powderly, Jones, Lewis, and Reuther. With the securing of fat contracts in major industries, and the abandonment of class-based politics by even the most liberal unions, many workers seemed to have become complacent and comfortable. Some looked back ruefully at the labor movement’s decided anti-Communism of the 1940s and 1950s. “Had organized labor resisted joining the Cold War consensus,” scholar Kevin Boyle muses, “had it refused to accept a formal position in the Democratic Party, had it continued to promote a social democratic agenda, perhaps it might have won enough political and economic power to have withstood the conservative onslaught of the Reagan years.”78 But even had that come to pass it would have still been hard for labor to anticipate and prepare adequately for the seismic changes in the global economy and the impact they would have on the American corporation.
So it was that after PATCO labor seemed to settle into what might be termed a managed retreat. Increasingly it negotiated not for better terms but for tolerable adjustments—wage concessions, early retirements, and reduced benefits—that were believed necessary to help employers stay afloat and keep jobs viable. Meanwhile, the increasing use of replacement workers was soon joined by other nefarious personnel “innovations” such as the large-scale hiring of temporary and part-time employees, as opposed to full-time employment with benefits, which management defended as a cost-saving measure but that hindered both collective bargaining and member recruitment. All the issues confronting organized labor—from globalization to the use of these “contingent” workers—would factor in pivotal confrontations at Hormel Foods in 1985–1986, Caterpillar in 1994, and United Parcel Service in 1997. One would play out as a painful community melodrama pitting neighbor against neighbor, one would become a prized, exceptional victory; all were significant in revealing labor’s disorientation before large baleful market forces. What was remarkable, however, was that they gave evidence of a pulse—a sign that at some elemental level labor retained its healthy insurgent heart and a capacity for sacrifice and principle.