In the aftermath of the midair crash over D.C on January 29, and Trump's racist response, Frann Michel looks back at the 1981 strike by PATCO, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization. This commentary considers the problems faced then and now by Air Traffic Controllers, the damaging legacy of Ronald Reagan's union-busting, lessons from the strike, and the importance of workers' exercise of collective power going forward.
Public domain image: "PATCO Pinback Button" is marked with CC0 1.0. A blue pinback button with white lettering says "Bust Reagan Not Unions: Support PATCO September 19, 1981."
Text/transcript (scroll down for audio):
As I compose this, we still don't fully know what caused the midair collision over Washington DC at the end of January. But Donald Trump didn't let the lack of information stop him from immediately blaming diversity, equity, and inclusion.
That is, as Jamelle Bouie and others have noted, he's blaming Black people--and other people of color, and women, and people with disabilities and others who have historically been excluded from power or from the recognition of their merit--as part of his project to resegregate the federal government and the nation.
In response to those comments, the president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) stressed the rigorous training standards all certified controllers must meet and said (quote) "The proud men and women that comprise the national aviation safety professionals bear the immense responsibility of ensuring the safety and efficiency of the national airspace system, while working short-staffed, often 6 days a week, and in facilities long overdue for modernization.” (end quote)
Short staffing, long hours, and outdated facilities have been recognized as problems for years. Two years ago the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) held a “safety summit” prompted by a string of near misses during takeoff or landing.
A 2023 study by the Department of Transportation Inspector General's Office found that less than one percent of FAA facilities were fully staffed, and over three-quarters of the busiest sites were critically understaffed. The FAA had no plan to address the staffing shortage, and instead, was mandating extended overtime just to maintain that inadequate staffing.
In 2024, the General Accounting Office (the GAO) reported that most of the FAA's equipment was becoming unsustainable because of underfunding and lack of maintenance.
The New York Times has reported that congressional lawmakers have repeatedly added more flights to the DC airport, despite repeated warnings that it would increase the risk of accidents.
And, despite the longtime understaffing of Air Traffic Control, all controllers last month received Elon Musk's deceptive letter prompting federal workers to resign.
So these problems--understaffing, overwork, inadequate equipment, poor administration, and terrible morale--have been getting worse. But they are not new. Indeed they sound a lot like the problems that prompted the air traffic controllers' strike of 1981, which turned out to be a key event in labor history.
As historian Joseph McCartin tells it in his 2011 book, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America, Air Traffic Controllers had been demanding changes for years before they managed in 1968 to organize PATCO--the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization.
The 1970s were an era of rank and file action in the United States, with over 5000 work stoppages, involving 3 million workers, just in 1970 alone.
The number of unionized workers reached an all time high in 1979. And although strikes by government unions were technically illegal, several had managed to declare strikes without incurring penalties. As a PATCO slogan had it, “There are no illegal strikes, just unsuccessful ones.”
When PATCO began contract negotiations with the FAA in early 1981, their demands included reduced hours and increased pay, but also, centrally, included demands for better safety, increased staffing, improved equipment, and changes in FAA management. The mere threat of a strike won them some concessions, but the membership wanted more. They believed they could get it, and they voted to strike.
I had a cousin who was an air traffic controller at the time, and what I recall hearing from him was not about pay but about stress and safety, under-staffing and overwork. Ninety percent of air traffic controllers left the job before retirement age, half of them seeking medical care for stress-related illness.
In 1978, President Carter had overseen the deregulation of the airline industry, which led to a huge expansion in the number of flights.
PATCO had actually endorsed Ronald Reagan for president, perhaps because he had been no obstacle to a firefighters strike when he was governor of California.
But this time, Reagan invoked the Taft-Hartley Act to declare the strike illegal, giving workers 48 hours to return to work or be fired.
But the strike was unsuccessful in winning popular support or shutting down air travel.
PATCO had failed to build solidarity in the community or across unions. In the past, they had crossed the lines of other airline unions, and their strike was not supported by airline pilots or other airport workers--or by the AFL-CIO.
As Justin Harrison describes it in an article on Socialist Alternative, a small but significant minority of controllers crossed the picket line, and "By using supervisors, scabs, and military controllers, the FAA was able to keep traffic at 60% of pre-strike levels .... In order to break the union, the FAA kept the planes flying without regard for public safety."
When the 48-hour ultimatum expired, Reagan fired over eleven thousand strikers, permanently replacing them with managers and military controllers, and banning them from ever working for the federal government again.
"Federal Marshals and the FBI were used to hunt down strikers. Their phones were tapped and their families were harassed. Strikers were arrested, fined, and jailed. The union's strike fund was seized by the courts and.... The union ... decertified."
Replacing striking workers had been legal since 1938, though employers had rarely done it. But Reagan's strikebreaking gave employers the green light, and in the decade following the PATCO strike, private employers increasingly replaced workers or threatened to do so.
Major strikes, involving more than a thousand workers, declined precipitously in the next decade, from an average of 300 every year throughout the 1970s, to just 16 annually by the 2010s.
Since strikes are a major tool for workers to exert power, this contributed to the decline in real wages, and thus to the "explosion of income and wealth inequality."
As McCartin has argued in recent articles following up on his 2011 book, Reagan's crushing of the PATCO strike, and the "neoliberal attack on public services he helped spearhead" has had broad political consequences.
McCartin notes that the PATCO debacle "disabled what was once a vital instrument for building and maintaining social solidarity and for directing inevitable class tensions and social conflict toward democratic and egalitarian ends." The "continued erosion of a robust tradition of workers’ collective action" left a power vacuum that encouraged white supremacy and the January 6 insurrection in 2021, and that now threatens the functioning of government.
The exercise of workers' collective power is central to public safety--in transportation but also in the safety of our water and food, breathable air, and public health, and more. It's also central to resisting the resegregation of America and to moving us back toward the democratic and egalitarian aims that have been a longstanding - if never yet achieved - aspiration of people in the United States.
It takes time and organizing and solidarity to build a successful strike. But the number of strikes in the US has been increasing in recent years, and increasingly drawing on the model of bargaining for the common good, building solidarity with communities as well as other workers.
The United Auto Workers have called for unions to align their contract expirations for May first, 2028. Conversations moving toward this alignment are reportedly in the works among the rank and file in unions of teachers, postal workers, electrical workers, healthcare workers, and more. Calls for a general strike in the US are building, and although it's an ambitious goal, it's commensurate with the challenges we face.
So, keep supporting all the workers you know, and are, and depend on. Walk picket lines, don't cross them. Get active in your union, or join a socialist organization, or read up on labor history. Do what you can. We are all on a collision course.
- KBOO