"PATCO"

[Buck]

Where Was the AFL-CIO?



Where was the rest of the labor movement? The AFL-CIO offered rhetorical support but no substantive solidarity. The Machinists and Pilots unions, whose workers were closest on the job to the controllers, offered no support either.
The pilots’ position is most troubling, because McCartin makes clear that they could have refused to fly in a less safe air traffic control system. Such a move undoubtedly would have helped PATCO win, but the pilots viewed the strike as a threat to their jobs and declined to help. The isolation of PATCO was complete.
The repercussions were heartbreaking. Banned from the industry, strikers were forced to search for other work. PATCO lost its certification for violating the no-strike rule. The struggle turned toward getting the strikers’ jobs back, but Reagan was intransigent and refused. McCartin describes how Reagan’s public handling of the strike appeared to strengthen his presidency and enhance his reputation as a tough negotiator. The anti-PATCO stance became a Republican litmus test, and the anti-union plank became a central part of the Republican Party platform.
After this debacle, we would expect unionism to be dead among air traffic controllers, but after a few years controllers started to organize again. Proving the old adage that the boss is the best organizer, continuing frustrations with the FAA led the controllers to form a new union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, before Reagan left office.
McCartin makes a convincing case that PATCO’s downfall was not the cause of labor’s decline, although it reinforced labor’s many problems. The number of large-scale strikes dropped dramatically in PATCO’s wake, as the severe recession of the early 1980s set in and declining union militancy and increasing concessions became the norm.
Though employers had long taken anti-union stands, the 1980s and 1990s saw a resurgence of union-busting, with crushed strikes at Phelps-Dodge, Greyhound, Hormel, International Paper, the Decatur battles, and the Detroit News/Free Press.
Does the labor movement still suffer from “PATCO syndrome”? The air traffic controllers were a gutsy group, and PATCO’s early years show what’s possible when a strong union acts boldly. Yet their disastrous strike has left a lasting negative impact. McCartin makes an important contribution toward understanding this complicated legacy.

http://labornotes.org/blogs/2011/12/patco-syndrome

 

[700UW]

Where was Delle and AMFA?

 

[NYer]

PATCO violated the law and overplayed their hand. They were also given 48 hours to return to work, but chose not to. Unfortunately, Reagan opened the door for "permanent" replacements of strikers, which is what caused the decline and effectiveness of a strike. The lesson became that if we concentrate in breaking the law, instead of influencing the law..we will most centainly lose.

 

[Frank Szabo]

Where was Delle and AMFA?

[sharedmedia=core:attachments:9458]

 

[TWU informer]

Where was Delle and AMFA?

Not collecting per capita dues while sitting on the sidelines that's for sure.

That is reserved for the impotent AFL-CIO farce power.

 

[TWU informer]

On August 3, 1981, 15,000 members of the union of air traffic controllers in the US—the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO)—went out on strike against their employer, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). For years, employment levels and safety measures had failed to keep up with increasing commercial air traffic. Extreme stress forced a majority of controllers into early retirement. PATCO workers demanded a shorter workweek, increased wages and increased staffing.

Solidarity Day, Washington DC, September 19, 1981
Hours after they walked out, President Ronald Reagan, speaking from the White House Rose Garden, invoked the anti-strike Taft-Hartley Act to fire the strikers if they did not return to work within two days. The Reagan administration’s terms were simple: the ending of the strike and the total submission of the union to all White House demands. There would be no negotiations.
Air traffic controllers defied the back-to-work order en masse, with 12,000 to 13,000 remaining on strike. Yet in spite of their militancy and solidarity and deep support within the working class as a whole—expressed in the 500,000-strong Solidarity Day demonstration on September 19 in Washington DC—the struggle was isolated and betrayed by the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, which ordered members of other airline unions to cross the PATCO picket lines.

By the end of the year, it was clear that the air traffic controllers had been defeated. The Reagan administration and the courts outlawed the union, and all of the striking air traffic controllers were blacklisted from their profession for life.
The ferocity of the ruling class stunned workers. But Reagan’s ruthlessness—which included dozens of arrests and the jailing of four militant controllers in Texas—was enabled by the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. Though the threat posed by Reagan’s attack on the controllers to the entire labor movement was clear, the AFL-CIO steadfastly refused to authorize a broader working class mobilization, in spite of persistent calls for a general strike from workers. The unions instead sought to channel working class anger into support for the Democratic Party.

In reality, the union-busting operation was a bipartisan operation, carried out with the tacit support of the Democrats. The plan Reagan implemented for smashing PATCO, including the military scabbing operation known as the Management Strike Contingency Force, had been drawn up under Democratic President Jimmy Carter in 1980.

The AFL-CIO gave the Reagan administration assurances that it would do nothing in response to government strike-breaking and union-busting. In the face of pressure from workers calling for broader strike action in support of PATCO, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland said early in the struggle that he opposed “anything that would represent punishing, injuring or inconveniencing the public at large for the sins or transgression of the Reagan administration.” So confident was Reagan in the acquiescence of the labor bureaucrats, he delivered his August 3 back-to-work ultimatum even as the AFL-CIO Executive Council was meeting in New York City.

The government-organized destruction of PATCO was a signal to big business to launch a massive assault on the entire labor movement. Over the next decade, strike-breaking and union-busting operations were carried out in virtually every sector of the economy—air and ground transport, auto, steel, the mines, retail. Methods not seen since the 1930s were revived to crush the bitter resistance of workers to wage cuts and other concessions. The 1980s saw the reemergence of company goons, armed private police, labor frame-ups and violent attacks on picket lines. Every major strike battle was deliberately isolated and betrayed by the union leadership. The United Auto Workers, the AFL-CIO and virtually every other union adopted the policy of corporatism—the complete subordination of the working class to the corporations and the establishment of joint union-management structures to suppress the class struggle.

Thus, the betrayal of PATCO marked the collapse of the trade unions and their rapid transformation into agencies of the corporations and the state.

The Workers League, predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party, played a prominent role in the PATCO strike. Its defense of arrested workers earned the Workers League the support of many PATCO members. Reporters for the Bulletin, the newspaper of the Workers League and a forerunner of the World Socialist Web Site, interviewed dozens of strikers and their families in cities across the country.

The Workers League persistently called for widening the struggle to encompass the entire working class. It insisted that the conditions for expanding the strike could be achieved only through a political struggle against the union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party. The Workers League raised the demand for an emergency Congress of Labor to bring together unionized workers and unorganized sections of the working population for the purpose of establishing a Labor Party based on the unions to fight for a workers’ government and socialist policies. Without the initiation of such a struggle, the party declared, the PATCO strike could not be won. If the PATCO strike were allowed to be isolated and defeated, the Workers League warned, this would set the stage for an assault on the entire working class.

Detroit PATCO strikers at the 1981 Labor Day rally
While a strong sense of solidarity prevailed among workers—along with a desire for a showdown with the Reagan administration—the need for socialist political conceptions to guide the struggle was not broadly understood. This was itself a product of long historical processes. By the 1980s, decades of anti-communism promoted by the AFL-CIO had blocked many workers from knowledge of key historical experiences, including the decisive role socialists had played in building the industrial union movement in the 1930s.

The PATCO defeat sets off two distinct periods in US history. From the 1930s through the 1970s, the trade union movement in the US commanded significant authority in the working class. The victories of the industrial unions in the 1930s, the mass upsurge of the working class at the end of World War II, the persistence of large-scale strike activity through the 1950s and the 1960s, and the strike wave of the late 1960s through the mid-1970s—these had managed to wrest significant concessions from the American ruling class, which feared the emergence of working class revolution led by socialists, as had taken place in Russia in 1917. The epoch saw major improvements in living standards, the expansion of democratic rights to black workers in the South, and the creation of a limited welfare state.

The PATCO defeat established a pattern for every strike that followed in the 1980s and through the early 1990s. At Phelps Dodge, Greyhound, United Airlines, AT Massey, Hormel, Caterpillar, etc., workers carried on militant and bitter struggles. It was not for lack of fight that these and other strikes in the period went down to defeat. Rather, in each case the union bureaucracy consciously worked to isolate, demoralize and defeat the strikers.

Troops at the Phelps Dodge mines, Morenci, Arizona, July, 1984

Since the crushing defeats of the 1980s and 1990s, strikes have virtually disappeared in the US. The lack of organized resistance by the working class has whetted the appetite of the bourgeoisie, reflected in the staggering concentration of wealth in the US that has taken place since the 1970s. Steadily, the gains of the 20th century have been reversed, a process that has accelerated since the financial crisis of 2008 and the coming to power of the Obama administration.

The erosion of the membership rolls of the trade unions—down to their lowest share of the private sector workforce in more than a century—and the ongoing decline in the wages and wealth of working class Americans has not been reflected in a decline in the income and wealth of the union bureaucrats, thousands of whom award themselves salaries of more than $100,000 per year, and hundreds of whom take home upwards of $200,000. The unions have only deepened their integration into the Democratic Party, each election cycle funneling tens of millions of dollars to “friends of labor” who at every turn side with the corporations and the banks.

Thirty years on, it is clear that PATCO was one of a series of international events that signaled a global ruling class offensive against the working class. It presaged not only the collapse of the American trade unions, but of all the labor bureaucracies and political parties internationally that based themselves on nationalism and class compromise. The process that has culminated in the conversion of the American labor unions into business enterprises akin to labor syndicates was mirrored in the decision of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s to complete its counterrevolutionary mission by liquidating the property relations established by the 1917 October revolution.

The far-reaching implications of the smashing of PATCO were well understood by the American ruling class at the time. Writing only days after the beginning of the strike, the Wall Street Journal editorialized that Reagan had to prevail over the air traffic controllers “for all sorts of far-reaching reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with relations between the Federal Aviation Administration and PATCO.” The more important issues, the editorial declared, were “commitments to rebuild military strength, to restore the dollar to soundness, to cut taxes and regulations, to resist Soviet imperialism, and to curb the wild ascent of federal spending.”

The Bulletin commented on August 11, 1981: “In short, the ruling class considers the destruction of PATCO as inseparable from its overall capitalist policy of defending the profit system with a program of unrestrained militarism internationally and savage austerity for the working class within the United States.”

Rosa Luxemburg said of the working class that “historical experience is its only school mistress.” She continued: “Its thorny way to self-emancipation is paved not only with immeasurable suffering but also with countless errors. The aim of its journey—its emancipation depends on this—is whether the proletariat can learn from its own errors.”

Drawing out the lessons of past defeats is a life-and-death matter for workers today. With PATCO, history exposed as unviable and bankrupt a labor movement that based itself on anti-communism, defense of the profit system, and nationalism. The aim of this review of the PATCO struggle is to extract the central political lessons of that experience in order to arm workers with the socialist perspective needed to insure victory in the mass struggles into which they are entering today.

 

[700UW]

Still no mention of AMFA, hmm, was Delle at the grocery cutting meat as he was a butcher and not a practicing A&P?

 

[aapitbull]

Where was Delle and AMFA?

AMFA was not collecting dues and preaching strength in numbers but I would bet my last dime that if a general strike had been called AMFA represented mechanic's would have walked inlarge numbers even though they were not part of the AFL-CIO but it was the leaders of the large industrial union likethe IAM/TWU/IBT that failed to force the leadership of the AFL-CIO to act.

 

[TWU informer]

Still no mention of AMFA, hmm, was Delle at the grocery cutting meat as he was a butcher and not a practicing A&P?

So now even the PATCO debacle was AMFA's fault.
Unreal how these pathetic industrial unionist blame AMFA for every negative force on the planet.

 

[700UW]

I didnt say that, dont put words in my posts.

People criticized the IAM for not doing anything in regard to PATCO, I just threw it out there, where was AMFA and what did they do to help PATCO.

Guess the truth hurts, and you and others cant comprehend.

 

[TWU informer]

I didnt say that, dont put words in my posts.

People criticized the IAM for not doing anything in regard to PATCO, I just threw it out there, where was AMFA and what did they do to help PATCO.

Guess the truth hurts, and you and others cant comprehend.

There is no truth that Delle-Femine or AMFA had any responsibility for the PATCO debacle.

You just "throw crap out there" to deflect attention from what is really true.

Good news, everyone here can see right through it too.

 

[700UW]

Do you not know how to read and comprehend?

Show me where I posted that they were responsible for the PATCO fiasco?

People were blaming the IAM for not doing anything, and all I asked was what did AMFA and Delle do?

Seriously take the time to read and understand what is posted.

 

[whoop whoop]

I didn't say that, don't put words in my posts.

People criticized the IAM for not doing anything in regard to PATCO, I just threw it out there, where was AMFA and what did they do to help PATCO.

Guess the truth hurts, and you and others cant comprehend.

Your really a number aren't you. AMFA was not even in the picture, so why do you bring them up? Don't tell me, I know, to divert attention from the corporate loving, inept AFL-CIO unions including your SCAB iam.

It's your industrial union loving philosophy about strength in numbers right, where was it during PATCO, exactly where it will be if the A&P needed you, NO WHERE TO BE FOUND!!!!!!!

Not only are your beloved iam SCABS, they are weak as well. Same for your buddies the ibt and twu.

 

[whoop whoop]

700, the more you try to put a bad light on AMFA, the more ridiculous you and your discussions are...

 

[700UW]

And yet none of you can explain why AMFA didnt help, but yet throw stones at the IAM.

Hypocrites.