re: #71 Dark_Falcon

Reply to one of the points Robert Sobel made:

SNIP

I’ve got another rebuttal but I need to take a breather and make a call first.

8. To ascribe the 1981 confrontation between the Professional Air Traffic COntrollers union (PATCO) and the Reagan Administration to a “war on unions” is just plain untrue. PATCO had in fact endorsed Reagan the year before and the Reagan Administration had been generous in its contract negotiations with the union. However, the union’s loathing of the Carter Administration had led its leadership to play up how much the union would stand to gain from a strike, and the rank and file of the union believed this so much that they thought they’d gain even more than what had been offered with a strike. Thus PATCO’s membership voted down the Reagan administration’s contract offer against the advice of the union’s leadership.

A strike still might have been avoided but a House investigation led by then-Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro (D, NY), launched to examine whether the administration’s contract generosity was a quid pro quo for PATCO’s electoral support, eliminated the White House’s ability to grant additional concessions to PATCO to avert a strike. Thus Ronald Reagan found himself with three choices:

A. Make concessions anyways, knowing he might not be able to get the additional money from Congress and in trying burning most of his political capital with the Democrats, and also looking like he was guilty of giving the union payola for its endorsement.

B. Play hardball and threaten to fire any air traffic controllers who walked off the job, thereby likely keeping the nation’s commercial aviation running but likely firing thousands and burning the bridges he had tried to build with organized labor.

C. Let PATCO strike and at least partially shut down commercial aviation in the US. The result would have been serious economic damage at a time when (for reasons explained in my previous post) the nation could ill afford any additional disruption to the economy. Keep in mind here that if PATCO had been allowed to strike, the House investigation likely would have made any strike a prolonged affair, as the Reagan administration would have found it very difficult to come up with additional concessions to woo the strikers back to work.

The 1981 Air Traffic Controllers Strike was not Ronald Reagan’s malice but instead PATCO’s tragedy. Reagan’s firing of the striking controllers was the ‘least worst’ of three bad options.

Note: The website about the book from which much of my understanding of the PATCO Strike is derived is here.