The Air Traffic Controllers Even the Score

[turbinetree]

HAROLD MEYERSON JANUARY 25, 2019

Reagan fired their predecessors for striking in 1981. Today, they got sick, stayed home, and forced Trump to end the shutdown.

On January 14, the Prospect ran a piece by Georgetown’s Joe McCartin, one of the nation’s leading labor historians, recommending that federal workers start staging sickouts as, perhaps, the one way to compel our deranged president to end the government shutdown.

McCartin was uniquely qualified to offer such advice: As the author of Collision Course, he had written the definitive history of the air traffic controller strike of 1981, which ended calamitously when President Ronald Reagan abruptly fired the strikers, busted their union (PATCO), and hired permanent replacements, thereby encouraging many American corporations to lock out their workers and fire them as a way to bust their own unions. Since strikes by federal workers are forbidden by law, Joe suggested that sickouts from strategically situated federal workers who were compelled to work without pay would be a way to force President Trump to end the shutdown.

And lo and behold, it was air traffic controllers at LaGuardia who did just that—essentially taking their airport out of commission this morning by refusing to show up for work, thereby wreaking havoc all across U.S. air travel. (Yesterday’s comments by their boss, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, encouraging them to take out loans, surely pushed some of those controllers over the edge.) Within hours of the LaGuardia shutdown, and battered by public opinion, Trump caved.

Thirty-eight years after the failed PATCO strike, the air traffic controllers have finally evened the score. Good for them!

https://prospect.org/article/air-traffic-controllers-even-score

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. They had to call in sick. FAA rules require air traffic controllers, like pilots,

not to work when they are fatigued, no questions asked. So they had legal protection from being accused of a collective work slow-down, which would have been illegal.

[unblock]

2. Evened the score? Not even close.

A tiny down payment on payback to republicans for the incredible damage they did, not just to patco, but to all unions and all workers!

[sdfernando]

5. This!

[2naSalit]

6. Yes!

[WhiteTara]

8. Not to mention that we have the same outdated

instrumentation. That was what PATCO was striking for -- safety. I have never forgiven Raygun for that.

[RobinA]

9. Neither

have I. It was a scummy move on its face and it did irreparable damage to the country.

[WhiteTara]

10. And they revere that pos that was

so alzheimered his wife's astrologer was running the country for awhile.

[LongtimeAZDem]

3. Reagan and the right to strike

"The law is very explicit. They are violating the law. And as I say, we called this to the attention of their leadership. Whether this was conveyed to the membership before they voted to strike, I don't know. But this is one of the reasons why there can be no further negotiation while this situation continues. You can't sit and negotiate with a union that's in violation of the law."

- President Ronald Reagan, on firing the PATCO Air Traffic Controllers, August 3, 1981

"Solidarity symbolizes the battle of real workers in a so-called workers' state to sustain the fundamental human and economic rights they began to win in Gdansk in 1980—the right to work and reap the fruits of one's labor, the right to assemble, the right to strike, and the right to freedom of expression."

- President Ronald Reagan, Proclamation of Solidarity with illegal strikers in Poland, January 20, 1982

[Ferrets are Cool]

4. Typical repug hypocrisy. nt

[WhiteTara]

11. Oh that speech for Gdansk was sometime before

he allowed a truck bomb to kill 284 marines in Lebanon. No one seems to remember that.

[HAB911]

7. Question is, will they do it again IMMEDIATELY next time

just cut to the chase, shut it down