There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  90 New York Times, Jan. 18 and Jan. 23, 1936.

  91 Daniel Berman, Death on the Job: Occupational Health and Safety Struggles in the United States (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), pp. 27–29.

  92 David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, eds., Dying for Work: Workers’ Safety and Health in Twentieth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 191–93.

  93 Ibid., p. 14; see also p. 204.

  94 Ibid.

  95 Robert Asher, “Organized Labor and the Origins of the Occupation Safety and Health Act,” Labor’s Heritage, vol. 3, no. 1 (Jan. 1991).

  96 Judson MacLaury, “The Job Safety Law of 1970: Its Passage Was Perilous,” U.S. Department of Labor website, http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/osha.htm.

  97 Daniel Berman, Death on the Job, pp. 31–32.

  98 Leopold, Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor, p. 272.

  99 John Stender, “Enforcing the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970: The Federal Government as Catalyst,” Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 38, no. 4 (Summer–Autumn 1974).

  100 MacLaury, “The Job Safety Law of 1970: Its Passage Was Perilous.”

  101 Today’s Health, Aug. 1972.

  102 Ibid.

  103 Ibid.

  104 Richard Rashke, The Killing of Karen Silkwood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), p. 7. See also Leopold, Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor, pp. 312–35.

  105 Rolling Stone, March 27, 1975.

  106 Ibid.

  107 Ibid.

  108 Ibid.

  109 New York Times, Jan. 7, 1975.

  110 Silkwood’s father and her children later won a $10 million court settlement from the firm, later reduced to $1.38 million on appeal. Karen’s allegations about negligence and fudging of records at Kerr-McGee received some confirmation when it was reported that a higher-than-normal percentage of rods produced at the Kerr-McGee plant were defective.

  111 Rolling Stone, March 27, 1975.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: A TIME FOR CHOOSING

  1 Garry Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987), p. 218.

  2 Some SAG members, out of lingering bitterness toward the Academy, threatened to boycott the 1936 Academy Awards ceremony. Frank Capra, one of Hollywood’s most respected directors and president of the Academy, averted the crisis by announcing that the awards event would be a salute to aging film pioneer D. W. Griffith, a tribute few in the film community could disrespect, regardless of union affiliation.

  3 Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 109.

  4 Ibid., p. 110.

  5 Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 249.

  6 Michael Round, Grounded: Reagan and the PATCO Crash (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), p. 82.

  7 Ronald Reagan, “A Time for Choosing,” in Reagan Talks to America, by Ronald Reagan (Old Greenwich, Conn.: Devon Adair Co., 1983).

  8 Reagan liked to render his political coming-of-age story as one in which he awakened as a conservative after years of staunch liberalism, but the metamorphosis was well under way as early as his days at the helm of SAG. Although he remained a registered Democrat until 1962, he had been active a full decade earlier in a group calling itself “Democrats for Eisenhower,” and endorsed Eisenhower against Democrat Adlai Stevenson in both 1952 and 1956. In 1960 he backed Republican and fellow Californian Richard Nixon for president and in 1962 finally switched his party affiliation, saying, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The Party left me.” See Los Angeles Times, June 6, 2004.

  9 New York Times, Aug. 16, 1981.

  10 John J. Corson, The Corson Committee Report: The Career of the Air Traffic Controller, a/k/a Senate Committee on Post Office and Civil Service, Air Traffic Controllers, 91st Cong., 2nd sess., Calendar No. 1016, Report No. 91–1012 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, July 9, 1970).

  11 Willis J. Nordlund, Silent Skies: The Air Traffic Controllers’ Strike (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998), p. 83.

  12 Ibid., p. 98.

  13 Corson, Corson Committee Report: The Career of the Air Traffic Controller.

  14 Richard W. Hurd and Jill K. Kriesky, “ ‘The Rise and Demise of PATCO’ Reconstructed,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, vol. 40, no. 1 (Oct. 1986).

  15 Nordlund, Silent Skies, p. 98.

  16 Katherine S. Newman, “PATCO Lives! Stigma, Heroism, and Symbolic Transformations,” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 2, no. 3 (Aug. 1987).

  17 New York Times, Aug. 13, 1981.

  18 Newman, “PATCO Lives! Stigma, Heroism, and Symbolic Transformations.”

  19 Reagan to Robert E. Poli, Oct. 20, 1980, letter published in New York Times, Aug. 16, 1981.

  20 New York Times, Aug. 16, 1981.

  21 Round, Grounded: Reagan and the PATCO Crash, p. 37.

  22 Hurd and Kriesky, “ ‘The Rise and Demise of PATCO’ Reconstructed.”

  23 Herbert R. Northrup, “The Rise and Demise of PATCO,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, vol. 37, no. 2 (Jan. 1984).

  24 New York Times, Aug. 2, 1981.

  25 Washington Post, Oct. 13, 1981.

  26 New York Times, Aug. 16, 1981.

  27 Daily Labor Reporter No. 127, July 2, 1981, in Nordlund, Silent Skies, p. 94.

  28 New York Times, Aug. 2, 1981.

  29 Ibid., July 30, 1981.

  30 Reagan, An American Life, p. 282.

  31 Newsweek, Aug. 17, 1981.

  32 New York Times, Aug. 4, 1981.

  33 Ibid.

  34 Newsweek, Aug. 17, 1981.

  35 New York Times, Aug. 4, 1981.

  36 Ibid., Aug. 7, 1981.

  37 Ibid.

  38 Newsweek, Aug. 17, 1981.

  39 Nordlund, Silent Skies, p. 10.

  40 The Nation, Dec. 26, 1981.

  41 New Republic, Aug. 22 and 29, 1981.

  42 The average base pay for a controller was $33,000, with those who worked at busy centers earning $39,000 and even as much as $50,000.

  43 New York Times, Aug. 16, 1981. Some in-kind and financial support for the strikers came from other federal unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Treasury Employees Union, and two large postal unions. This help took the form of legal assistance and babysitting for picketing PATCO workers, as well as financial aid for strikers’ families struggling with household expenses.

  44 Katherine S. Newman, Falling from Grace: Downward Mobility in the Age of Affluence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 170–71.

  45 New York Times, Aug. 16, 1981.

  46 Ibid.

  47 Ibid.

  48 Ibid.

  49 Nordlund, Silent Skies, p. 2.

  50 Northrup, “The Rise and Demise of PATCO.”

  51 Reagan, An American Life, p. 283.

  52 New York Times, Aug. 16, 1981.

  53 Nordlund, Silent Skies, p. 14.

  54 Ibid., p. 8.

  55 New York Times, Aug. 4, 1981.

  56 Newman, Falling from Grace, p. 146. They were forced to scrounge work elsewhere, as clerks, salesmen, construction workers, usually at salaries well below what they had previously enjoyed. This came with a related toll in divorces, homes lost, college educations denied, and several suicides. Conservative by nature, the former controllers adjusted with difficulty to being perceived as unpatriotic, even criminal. As one controller lamented, “One of the saddest parts of this tragedy is that a group of people whom I know to be decent and generous will forever be branded as irreverent malcontents.” See Newman, Falling from Grace, pp. 151–53.

  57 Nordlund, Silent Skies, p. 14.

  58 New York Times, Aug. 14, 1981.

  59 Ibid., Sept. 6, 1981.

  60 Thomas Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back (New York: New Press, 2004; originally published 1991), p. 46.

  61 New York Times, Sept. 1, 1981.

  62 Ibid., Aug. 30, 1981.

  63 Ibid., Sept. 7 and 8, 1981.
<
br />   64 Ibid.

  65 New York Times, Sept. 20, 1981.

  66 Washington Post, Sept. 20, 1981.

  67 New York Times, Sept. 20, 1981. In addition to Lane Kirkland, speakers included Coretta Scott King, widow of the slain civil rights leader and cochairman of the Full Employment Action Council; Benjamin L. Hooks of the NAACP, Vernon Jordan of the National Urban League, Bayard Rustin, chairman of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, and Eleanor Smeal, president of the National Organization of Women. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York was also in attendance.

  68 New York Times, Sept. 20, 1981.

  69 Ibid., Sept. 19, 1981.

  70 New Republic, Aug. 22 and 29, 1981.

  71 Nordlund, Silent Skies, p. 11.

  72 Ibid., pp. 178–79. As early as the late 1980s there was talk at the FAA of experimenting with what is called “free flight,” the concept that in the future the role of ground-based air traffic control will be diminished as more responsibility for charting courses and avoiding collisions is delegated to pilots.

  73 Nordlund, Silent Skies, p. 201.

  74 New York Times, Sept. 20, 1981.

  75 Ibid., Nov. 19, 1981.

  76 Washington Post, Nov. 18, 1981.

  77 Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 2.

  78 Ibid., p. 3.

  79 New York Times, Jan. 14, 1986.

  80 Ibid., Sept. 30, 1986.

  81 Ibid., May 29, 1985.

  82 Ibid., Feb. 20, 1986.

  83 Ibid., Feb. 18, 1986.

  84 Ibid., Feb. 1 and 16, 1986.

  85 Ibid., Feb. 21, 1986.

  86 Ibid., Feb. 14, 1986.

  87 Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz, We Will Be Heard: Voices in the Struggle for Constitutional Rights (London: Merrell, 2000), p. 184.

  88 New York Times, April 7, 1992.

  89 Ibid., April 16, 1992.

  90 Stephen Franklin, Three Strikes: Labor’s Heartland Losses and What They Mean for Working Americans (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), p. 108.

  91 Ibid. See Harter Equipment Inc. and Local 825, International Union of Operating Engineers; Case 22-CA-11527; Decisions and Orders of the National Labor Relations Board, vol. 280 (1986).

  92 New York Times, May 6, 1993; see also Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On? pp. 310–11.

  93 Michael Ballot, Labor-Management Relations in a Changing Environment (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), p. 418.

  94 New York Times, Aug. 21, 1994.

  95 The executive order, termed a “misguided presidential directive” by conservatives, was seen as a mostly symbolic act, an effort to win back unions’ favor by a president who had signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which organized labor had opposed. See Newsday, March 9, 1995.

  96 Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, “A New Labor Movement in the Shell of the Old,” in A New Labor Movement for the New Century, ed. Gregory Mantsios (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998).

  97 New York Times, Aug. 11, 1997.

  98 Ibid., Aug. 7, 1997.

  99 Ibid.

  100 New York Times, Aug. 17, 1997.

  101 Ibid., Aug. 5, 1997.

  102 Ibid., Aug. 17, 1997.

  103 Brecher and Costello, “A New Labor Movement in the Shell of the Old.”

  104 New York Times, Aug. 1, 1997.

  105 Ibid., Aug. 20, 1997.

  106 Ibid.

  107 Ibid.

  108 New York Times, Nov. 18, 2009.

  109 Ronaldo Munck, Globilisation and Labour: The New Great Transformation (London: Zed Books Ltd., 2002), p. 190.

  110 Stanley Aronowitz, From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor and America’s Future (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), pp. 7–8.

  111 Ibid.

  112 New York Times, Jan. 23, 2010; See also Barbara Shailor and George Kourpias, “Developing and Enforcing International Labor Standards,” in A New Labor Movement for the New Century, ed. Gregory Mantsios (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998).

  113 Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On? p. 246; see Inland Steel Co. v. National Labor Relations Board, 170 F. 2d 247 (7th Cir. 1948); and W. W. Cross & Co. v. National Labor Relations Board, 174 F. 2d 875 (1st Cir. 1949).

  114 Steven Greenhouse, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (New York: Anchor Books, 2009), p. 285.

  115 Ibid., pp. 96–97.

  116 Time, March 1, 2009.

  117 Keith Bradsher, High and Mighty: The Dangerous Rise of the SUV (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), pp. 69–70.

  118 See Bradsher, High and Mighty, pp. 25–26, 62–64, 252–53.

  119 Jay Mazur, “Labor’s New Internationalism,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 79, no. 1 (Jan.–Feb. 2000).

  120 Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography, abridged ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 340.

  121 Brecher and Costello, “A New Labor Movement in the Shell of the Old.”

  122 Mazur, “Labor’s New Internationalism.”

  123 Gregory Mantsios, “What Does Labor Stand For?” in A New Labor Movement for the New Century, ed. Gregory Mantsios (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998).

  124 Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On? pp. 222–26.

  125 See Wall Street Journal, Oct. 12, 2009.

  126 New York Times, Jan. 23, 2010; conservatives and business groups have also reacted negatively to a proposal by the administration of President Barack Obama to award government procurement contracts based in part on how well companies treat employees in terms of pay and benefits. According to the New York Times, administration officials perceive it as “a way to shape social policy and lift more families into the middle class.” Those opposed decry the plan as “a gift to organized labor.” See New York Times, Feb. 26, 2010.

  127 Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 575.

  128 See “Renewing an Old Idea: Common Good,” New York Times, March 17, 2010.

  129 New York Times, Sept. 28, 2007.

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