The Cost of Defying the President

The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization or PATCO was a United States trade union that operated from 1968 until its decertification in 1981 following an illegal strike that was broken by the Reagan Administration. According to labor historian Joseph A. McCartin, the 1981 strike and defeat of PATCO was "one of the most important events in late twentieth century U.S. labor history".

"The moment the strike was called, the President, armed with several contingency plans, replaced striking controllers with a skeleton crew of military personnel, F.A.A. brass, new hires ushered through training, and, of course, controllers who had chosen not to strike. Rumors abounded that the skies were plagued with near-misses and flights rerouted to alternative airports, but no deaths were ever reported. (It was ruled that the crash of Air Florida Flight 90 into the frozen Potomac, on January 13, 1982, which killed seventy-eight, was due to errors by the pilot and crew.) The public suffered an inconvenience on the magnitude of a gas shortage or a natural disaster, and for that inconvenience, by and large, the public blamed patco. Although diehards continued to picket for weeks, the strike officially ended on its third day, August 5, 1981, the day that striking controllers were terminated. The Reagan Administration won an order decertifying patco altogether on October 22, 1981, and rewarded scabs handsomely for their loyalty. Many of their rewards mirrored patco’s original demands."