Ronald Reagan's War on Labor

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.dickmeister.com/id89.html

Amidst the continued outpouring of praise for Ronald Reagan, let's not forget that he was one of the most anti-labor presidents in U.S. history, a role model for the virulently anti-labor George W. Bush.

Republican presidents never have had much regard for unions, which almost invariably have opposed their election. But until Reagan, no GOP president had dared to challenge labor's firm legal standing, gained through Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the mid-1930s.

Reagan's Republican predecessors treated union leaders much as they treated Democratic members of Congress -- as people to be fought with at times, but also as people to be bargained with at other times. But Reagan engaged in precious little bargaining. He waged almost continuous war against organized labor.

He had little apparent reason to fear labor politically, with opinion polls at the time showing that unions were opposed by nearly half of all Americans and that nearly half of those who belonged to the unions had voted for him in 1980 and again in 1984.

Reagan,in any case, was a true ideologue of the anti-labor political right. Yes, he had been president of the Screen Actors Guild, but he was notoriously pro-management, leading the way to a strike-ending agreement in 1959 that greatly weakened the union and finally resigning under membership pressure before his term ended.

Reagan's war on labor began in the summer of 1981, when he fired 13,000 striking air traffic controllers and destroyed their union. As Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson noted, that was "an unambiguous signal that employers need feel little or no obligation to their workers, and employers got that message loud and clear -- illegally firing workers who sought to unionize, replacing permanent employees who could collect benefits with temps who could not, shipping factories and jobs abroad."

Reagan gave dedicated union foes direct control of the federal agencies that were designed originally to protect and further the rights and interests of workers and their unions.

FULL story at link.