A Disastrous Bet: The Air Traffic Controllers Walk

When 13,000 air traffic controllers failed to report for work 25 years ago today, they were going for broke in a high-stakes poker game. They thought they had a good hand: Without their skills, American aviation would be virtually grounded. They thought they knew their White House opponent: As a candidate the previous October, Ronald Reagan had pledged his support for their cause. They were wrong on both counts. The outcome of the strike that began at 7 a.m. on August 3, 1981, was to haunt organized labor for a generation.

The federal government had assumed responsibility for guiding commercial planes into and out of the nation’s airports back in 1936. The Federal Aviation Administration, which came to oversee this service, had a reputation for autocratic management, poor communication, and unwise cost cutting. As air traffic increased, the duties of the controllers became increasingly stressful. Often relying on antiquated equipment, they continuously juggled flights, anticipated trajectories, and reacted to ever-shifting contingencies, all with the knowledge that a mistake might mean catastrophe. A 1978 study found a high level of hypertension and burnout among controllers, the result of a hostile work environment as well as of the job itself.

President John F. Kennedy had issued an executive order in 1962 giving federal employees the right to organize and bargain collectively. It didn’t give them the right to strike, though, and that was clearly banned by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. Still, frustrated by job stress that ended the careers of 89 percent of their members before retirement age, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization was willing to gamble. As negotiations with the FAA faltered in the spring of 1981, 95 percent of PATCO’s members voted to authorize the union’s president, Robert Poli, to call a strike. On August 3 about 13,000 controllers walked out.

President Reagan’s reaction was swift and unexpected (PATCO had been one of the few unions to endorse him during the campaign). He declared the strike illegal, a breach of the controllers’ “solemn oath.” The man who had assured Poli in October that “my administration will work very closely with you to bring about a spirit of cooperation” now threw down the gauntlet on national television. “If they do not report for work within 48 hours,” he declared, “they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.”

Aviation did not grind to a halt as union officials had anticipated. Having formulated careful contingency plans, the FAA kept planes flying using supervisors, non-strikers, and military controllers. The first day of the strike, 60 percent of normal flights continued. Four days later, almost 80 percent were operating. The government put in place a system to smooth peaks of traffic—it was a system that PATCO had proposed and the FAA had rejected during their negotiations. Though the airlines had to reschedule and cut back flights, the industry was inconvenienced rather than crippled.

Reagan would not give an inch. He immediately moved to decertify the union and banned the strikers for life from being rehired as government controllers. Union officials had planned poorly for the strike, and they proved inept at presenting their members’ case to the press. “The air controllers have no right to hold up the nation,” The New York Times editorialized. They had not even consulted with other unions. The AFL-CIO issued a statement of support but did nothing.

Once Reagan’s ultimatum had expired, the termination of 11,345 air traffic controllers became effective, and the government began to hire and train another cadre of workers. The FAA, whose mismanagement and refusal to negotiate working conditions had been largely responsible for the strike, ignored needed reforms. Several independent studies and a Congressional investigation during the 1980s found that conditions for the new controllers were as stressful and alienating as they had been for PATCO members. In 1987 these controllers formed a new union to press the old demands for better working conditions.

The failure of the PATCO strike was the beginning of a dismal decade for organized labor in America. Ever since World War II, many large employers had deferred to unions rather than risk strikes. While they could legally replace a worker who struck for economic reasons (but not if the strike was over unfair labor practices), few companies dared risk the public opprobrium that might result from mass layoffs.

The Reagan Administration established a new climate. After PATCO, employers regularly wielded replacement workers as a weapon in labor disputes. Management shunned negotiation in favor of bare-fisted confrontation. Union busting became a billion-dollar business for consultants and lawyers who advised companies on how to thwart organizers. The National Labor Relations Board, formerly a neutral body that oversaw the nation’s labor practices, turned overtly anti-union under Reagan, studiously ignoring labor-law violations by corporate managers and letting cases linger for years without resolution.

Unions were intimidated. From 1947 to 1980 there had been an average of 300 strikes a year. During the 20 years that followed, the number fell to 47. “We have nothing to bargain with now,” a union official said. “Labor has an empty gun.”

Organized labor had been facing serious problems for a decade before the PATCO strike. Globalization and the decline of the industrial economy played a role. Unions had long shunned grass-roots organizing in favor of ever more lucrative contracts for members. Solidarity had waned. Union membership, which stood at 30 percent of the workforce in 1970, dwindled to 12.5 percent by 2005.

In 1993 President Bill Clinton reversed the order banning the PATCO strikers from being rehired as federal controllers, but the gesture was largely symbolic, and only a handful were rehired. Today, with many of the controllers hired during the early 1980s reaching retirement eligibility, issues such as staffing shortages, equipment failures, and working conditions are again being raised, this time by the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. A NATCA official recently complained about the FAA’s “systematic failure to keep our air traffic control technology up to date,” and “air safety being compromised by the FAA’s attitude toward its workers.”

The issues are far from trivial. It’s always worth keeping in mind that the bland phrase “air safety” refers to the life-and-death fate of the passengers who ride the nation’s airlines.

—Jack Kelly writes often for American Heritage magazine and is the author of Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics—A History of the Explosive That Changed the World (Basic Books).