Ronald Reagan fires 11,359 air-traffic controllers (1981) | Hacker News Reader

Ronald Reagan fires 11,359 air-traffic controllers (1981)

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200 pointsa_imho251 comments

> Richard Sharpe: "The strikers were often working-class men and women who had achieved suburban middle class lives as air traffic controllers without having gone to college. Many were veterans of the US armed forces where they had learned their skills; their union had backed Reagan in his election campaign. Nevertheless, Reagan refused to back down. Several strikers were jailed; the union was fined and eventually made bankrupt. Only about 800 got their jobs back when Clinton lifted the ban on rehiring those who went on strike. Many of the strikers were forced into poverty as a result of being blacklisted for [U.S. government] employment."

Class in American discourse is a weird thing. If they had achieved suburban middle class lives, what made them working class?

In England, you might say well if your dad was working class then you are working class for your whole life regardless of anything else. But the American notion of class isn’t generally thought of that way.

> If they had achieved suburban middle class lives, what made them working class

Did they earn their living by working? Then they are working class. If you make a salary or a wage, if you have a boss, you are working class.

Did they make their living by owning stuff (e.g. landlords, investors, etc.)? Then they aren't working class.

Edit: Surprised to see downvotes, Wikipedia defines it thus:

> "The working class (or labouring class) comprises those engaged in waged or salaried labour, especially in manual-labour occupations and industrial work."

White collar jobs are definitely working class folks.

This is a definition intended to push people towards your preferred ideology rather than a neutral description of how the phrase is used out in the wild.

No, this is the original definition of class struggle. Anything else ("middle class", "upper class") is just an attempt by bourgeois to divide people by trying to make them feel like they're part of a different, special group.

Appealing to originalism, accurately or not, still isn’t descriptivism.

Wikipedia disagrees? Yes, the colloquial usage often implies poor/lower class or physical labor, but it's not the only use of the term. (Just like the phrase 'Middle Class' has really fuzzy boundaries in the US.)

This just isn't what the vast majority of people mean when they talk about class. No one uses 'working class' in casual conversation to include doctors, hedge fund analysts and lawyers.

I think even in the UK definition, professionals like doctors and lawyers would be considered middle class.

Working class folks can also be middle class, they aren't mutually exclusive.

> No one uses 'working class' in casual conversation to include doctors, hedge fund analysts and lawyers.

Plenty of folks do. Yes, 'working class' is often synonymous with lower class in the US, but I regularly hear and use working class to mean "the class that is working". Engineers, farmhands, day laborers, doctors, grocery store clerks, analysts -- we all are working for a living, we are all working class.

I think you're just confused.

Wikipedia agrees with me? So it's hardly an outrageous position.

>Did they earn their living by working? Then they are working class. If you make a salary or a wage, if you have a boss, you are working class.

There's a pretty massive gulf between a heavy equipment operator who's making token contributions to retirement and would have a tough time with the mortgage if his spouse lost their job and a brain surgeon with maxed out retirement accounts, kids at ivy leagues and a vacation cottage on an exclusive lake.

They might work 500yd from each other but they are not the came classes of people. The arcs of their lives from birth to death are wildly different. Both depend on their wage to sustain their lifestyle. But the doctors (and the other people in their neighborhood) mostly wouldn't be caught dead living the way the heavy equipment operator lives (and the reverse is only slightly less true).

Referring to the latter working class is something usually only done before telling the former they need to stop drinking bud light, driving 30 cars, get the project boat out of the yard, vote a certain way, talk a certain way, etc, etc you catch the drift.

Working class carries a very strong implication of blue collar work or not significantly more than blue collar amounts of money. A social worker or paralegal is working class. An investment banker or law firm partner should find other words to use.

> There's a pretty massive gulf between a heavy equipment operator who's making token contributions to retirement and would have a tough time with the mortgage if his spouse lost their job and a brain surgeon with maxed out retirement accounts, kids at ivy leagues and a vacation cottage on an exclusive lake.

The only real difference between these two people is the number of missed paychecks they are away from bankruptcy. Sure, that number is probably small for the equipment operator and large for the surgeon, but it's still a number. Their wealth goes down when they're not working. In contrast to the class of people whose wealth goes up when they're not working.

This comment really comes across as if it's from someone who hasn't done manual labour for a living.

Drinking bud light? Probably because it's the best buzz/cost ratio(this is a guess) .

Project boat: it's the only way we would ever have a boat, certainly can't purchase a new one.

I've met many blue collar workers who walk and talk like white collar workers, mass assumptions do not help the conversation progresses.

It sounds like the division is really if you make a living from investments vs. from labor. In that case, a Doctor has invested a lot of time and money into certification and skill building, so they make a living more from investment and only partly from labor. Someone who owns apartment buildings is making an even higher percentage of their living from investments, however there is still a labor component to it (maintenance, management, etc). Which can be performed directly by the owner or it may be farmed out to others (which elevates the owner a bit higher in this class).

I think it implies some social mobility. So these people likely came from a working class parents to and achieved a suburban (read:upper) middle class life.

In the US the term "middle class" doesn't mean the same thing. In the UK it means above working class but below upper class. In the states, it means anyone that's not poor or rich. Mostly everyone likes to think they're "middle class" in the US whether they're blue-collar or white-collar.

Right. So I would say that people working (up until then) secure government jobs with good benefits and a high enough wage to live a good suburban lifestyle middle class, not working class (which in American usage implies manual labor and low to low middle wages, neither of which applied here.)

I think it's more education level in the states; "working class" => high-school graduate or less education.

The problem is the quote is mixing the Marxist notion of working class (someone tied to wage labor for survival) and the general American notation of middle class (comfortable but not rich, defined by income rather than family status)

As a brit I'd say it's kind of an education thing. If you are bricklayer that's working class and limited education required and if you get a law degree say and become a lawyer that's middle class even if your dad's a bricklayer.

what if you're sick of your lawyer career, and then become a brick layer? you're now an educated brick layer, so does that bust the class type?

I'd say that was a middle class person doing a working class job, depending on the details.

Churchill was an amateur brick layer in his spare time, I wonder where that left him.

We are the stupid class. We are the ones who regret our decisions 20 years later, because while our work is enjoyable, companions are fun and entertainment cheap, we realise our children won't have as many opportunities and that we should have offset our current enjoyment for our children's future

"Middle class" in this context refers to the level of their income and standard of living, where "working class" refers to their relationship to production (i.e. industrial wage workers).

But it wasn’t industrial. The work was cognitive not physical. It also wasn’t exactly for wages in the classic sense given that the federal government had holidays, vacation, and so on.

"Working class' is generally identified as a 'trade' job in terms of ATC it was a trade job back then because it did not require much to get the job in terms of experience or education, you were trained to do the specific job and it rarely changed over the course of your career.

I always thought "working class" means you make your living via your labour, regardless of what that labour is.

The difference would be people who make their living by owning things (stock, companies, property) that pay dividends. This is not to say that they don't work hard, but that their income isn't directly tied to their labour.

In this sense, someone can be both lower class (poor) and a part of the owner class. Someone else can be upper class (rich) and working class.

Parent should have used e.g. or ex rather than i.e. The not all working class are industrial workers. A good test is if one sells their labor for wages then they are likely working class.

I think you may be (or I may be) confusing "i.e." for "viz."; I intended to use "i.e.", as I was specifically referring to the ATCs as industrial workers.

It is industrial work, and industrial work is not purely physical; even working in a modern factory often requires cognitive work. Tire production is a great example, and if you visit a Goodyear factory you will notice a profound lack of Taylorism in the actual work of the employees (of course, not in the processes themselves).

>It also wasn’t exactly for wages in the classic sense given that the federal government had holidays, vacation, and so on.

Wages are typically understood as whatever price is paid to employees for their ability to work[1]; we may be operating under different definitions, though (I studied economics rather than business).

[1]: https://www.economist.com/economics-a-to-z/w#node-21529310

it's like there's really only two classes, the owner class and the working class I think a bearded dude wrote a book about it a long time ago, idk

The bearded dude doesn’t have such a great track record. Seemed like some good ideas but they didn’t pan out when they were tried. Not sure why people are still reading him.

lol https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1375942199066648582?...

It isn’t “weird”, it’s a different culture. Britain’s conceptions of class are not the baseline for the rest of the world.

"Middle class" is generally not a useful concept. The only two classes that matter to anyone but an academic are "working class" and "ruling class" (or as I like to call it, "owning class").

People often confuse the symbols of class for the class itself. Baz who grew up poor in a dilapidated tower block, speaks exclusively in east london slang, but now owns his own plumbing firm and drives a £100k land rover (with custom plates that say "working class") is not working class any more. He owns for a living. On the other hand a footballer who makes a huge salary is working class, because they have to work in order to get paid.

In the US and UK both this is deliberately obscured, but in different ways. In the UK, class is seen as inherited social status. In the US, class is seen as more or less a synonym for income or wealth. Both of these are wrong.

I think the dividing line in practice between "working" and "middle" is the four-year college degree, serving largely as a status signifier, and marking one a participant in cosmopolitan cultural aesthetics and norms. While a great many college graduates do genuine work, it makes one eligible for high-status "bullshit jobs" [0], in a way that even those in the high-paid working class (plumbers, electricians) are not. A subset of this middle class could arguably be defined as the "managerial class", engaged largely in performative busy-work, but ultimately only borrowing their power from owners.

That said, I think the "owning" vs. "working" model is incredibly valuable; and just as "lower class" has been redefined into "working class" (in a noblesse oblige of linguistic dignity!), I'll definitely be referring to the upper class as the "owning class" from now on. ;) (One complication, and arguably the reason that capitalism has proved resilient against its alleged contradictions: the middle class has managed to carve out some portion of ownership, in the forms of home ownership, stocks, etc. Not enough to carry substantive political or economic power, but enough to give them "skin in the game", and therefore a motivation to vote to preserve the ownership status quo, lest they lose their achievements of security and status.)

[0] https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/

Scott Alexander recently wrote a great piece about class in America: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on....

tl;dr: one of way of looking at class is that it's not one ladder, defined solely by economic status; rather it's three ladders (Working/Middle/Upper), which are largely independent, and which intersect both economics and culture. In this sense, Jeff Bezos is not actually upper class ("old money"), but the world's most successful middle class worker; and the reason Trump appealed to the working class despite exorbitant wealth, was an enthusiastic embrace of working class culture (baseball hats, fast food).

Wasn’t that Michael O’Church’s thesis? He (used to?) post here.

Huh, it's actually top of his blog right now [0]. Alexander is borrowing from the 80's book by Fussell, so it's apparently an idea that's been kicking around a while. O'Church's piece looks interesting, I'll dig in, thanks for sharing!

[0] https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2021/01/28/a-reply-to-a...

To be honest, they were asking for 35% raise, PLUS reduced working hours PLUS benefits. They were offered somewhat smaller raise which they refused, while participating in an illegal strike. From my experience, in most negotiations, you rarely get everything that you want, but you can get a good deal if you are willing to compromise. When you play hard, it can backfire.

> illegal strike

I genuinely can't tell if you're being sarcastic with your comment.

Some industries crucial to public safety have legal restrictions on the right to strike.

I imagine air traffic controllers spontaneously deciding to strike _here and now_ without prior warning would be quite dangerous.

But if an air traffic controller strike is announced, say, 24 hours beforehand, it can't be reasonably argued to be a public safety hazard.

Counterpoint: My wife has a medication that has short shelf life and isn't widely distributed so it needs to be flown via air.

Airplanes stop flying my wife no longer gets her medicine, she now dead.

That is true, but you cannot force someone to fly it regularly to her. The miracles of modern medicine allow people to live when this would not have happened 100 years ago, but cannot guarantee that. Take it as a gift, not as a given.

It sounds like quite an important job then. Maybe you should join in and pressure the bosses to give them the raise they need

Some great logic there.

Put it on the one party to give into anything the other wants, because they're said to be important.

Does it work the other way in your mind too? If we all agreed that air traffic or say, Amazon, were a critical resource and has to run efficiently and for the country's benefit, not individuals, that means that they get to put whatever conditions on labor they like?

This is the worst kind of approach to governing ever, if it can even be called that.

I can appreciate the irony of you posting this after seeing the post I was replying to. I hope you can appreciate it too!

The pilot unions are rent seeking from the man you are replying to. Why do you think he should support that?

EDIT: Just to clarify my point, my interest wasn't only in my wife, rather an anecdote about how these things can be vital to people's lives.

That being said, yes I agree we should be grateful for what we have and me an my wife regularly marvel that if she'd been born just 40 years earlier she would've been dead by the time she was 9.

Curiously, one of the things that gives pilots and airline workers such powerful bargaining leverage, is exploiting safety regulations. If an airline is playing hardball with the union, the pilots go out of their way to create flight delays based on safety double-checks or "concerns" (a form of "work-to-rule" [0] strike), which the FAA gives them wide latitude to do.

Unfortunately, this works against those who work directly for those government agencies. At the end of the day, bargaining power comes from holding value hostage; and we react differently to holding on-time flight arrivals hostage, versus holding public safety hostage. It's a wicked problem for anyone who works in service of the latter.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule

That was part of the deal when they willingly signed up for a well paying job.

Economic pressures didn't inform any of that, you think?

Most people (presumably you as well) have undergone at least one experience where they were forced to sign paperwork that they would not normally agree to, except under those specific circumstances (kid/family/rent/gadget etc.) Signing a piece of paper under such duress does not sign one's rights away exclusively.

It was an illegal strike so I am pretty sure he is not being sarcastic. They had "civil service" clauses in their contract that made them "Federal employees" and Federal employees could not strike (not sure if that is true today).

It absolutely is. The courts have their take on it, as expected, but the spirit of a strike remains consistent despite laws against it. A strike, by definition, cannot be illegal. That includes armed forces and every federal employee.

Whether existing legislation recognizes certain types of strikes as legal or not is irrelevant. Civil disobedience has deep roots in American history. This is an analogue to that, given that their rights to strike have been struck. (pun intended)

Could you explain how a strike cannot, by definition, be illegal?

Civil disobedience can be illegal.

All civil disobedience is illegal, yet you seem to adjust for some of it vs. others.

Extend that to all employment. Nothing illegal about not being forced to work. A contract is not a prison sentence, or I should hope so.

I will grant you certain conditions apply to armed forces that wouldn't otherwise apply to civilian employment, as that does actively put other's lives at risk. This isn't a conversation about desertion of duty, merely protesting or quitting. Even then there are laws that protect conscientious objectors .

>A strike, by definition, cannot be illegal. That includes armed forces and every federal employee.

Wrong. A strike, by definition, as actually defined in federal law, can indeed be illegal. That includes armed forces and every federal employee.

A strike, by definition, cannot be illegal. It's an established form of protest which may or may not lead to firing. Despite the results of the strike, the protest itself is not illegal, nor is walking out of a job. At least from both a moral standpoint.

*At least from a moral standpoint.

>A strike, by definition, cannot be illegal.

Wrong. A strike, by definition, as actually defined in federal law, can indeed be illegal.

>It's an established form of protest which may or may not lead to firing.

Wrong. It's an established form of protest which may or may not result in criminal fillings because it is illegal federally for federal employees.

>Despite the results of the strike, the protest itself is not illegal, nor is walking out of a job.

Despite the results of the strike, the protest itself is illegal, as is walking out of federal jobs (in a strike).

You literally can't be any more wrong.

Whether existing legislating recognizes a certain type of strike as legal is very relevant to whether or not it is an illegal strike.

I would argue that from a moral stand point, every strike is legal.

It's not clear from your comment, but I'm assuming you deem the term "illegal strike" oxymoronic. It isn't.

De facto or de jure

My wife is a member of a non-striking teachers union..

I've always wondered what their ultimate collective bargaining power is if the single thing that grants them their leverage (to strike) is off the table from day 1. Shes never been able to answer.

Its not shocking that they rarely even settle for a fraction of what is asked and are just "thankful" when the government and politicians are so kind to budget them raises.

Best part....Due to the policies put in place during the 08 crash, salaries and raises were severely restricted. The government last year decided to "make up for it" by changing the base salaries for NEW teachers. So now a brand new teacher just out of college makes about as much (within a couple thousand) as much as my wife, who has a masters and has been teaching for about a decade.

Thats the issue with people that are passionate about something. It happens in IT as well. Many will work for peanuts because they like it and "experience". And my companies have been put off that I describe myself as a mercenary. I work for money and have absolutely no emotional ties to team, company or organization.

Depending on how it's structured, she may be able to bounce to a different city/county/state (depending on logistics) for a year or two. Much like in industry, how leaving (and potentially coming back) can get you far more of a raise than staying.

> I've always wondered what their ultimate collective bargaining power

To be fair, unions don't exist solely as threats to employers. The ability to bargain collectively still results in better/fairer outcomes in most situations. Most of the time, employers want to compensate their employees in good faith. Most of the time, employees want to work for a team who get rewarded more or less fairly and not compete in a cutthroat arena where everyone has to bargain for themselves.

But yes: non-striking unions are absolutely not going to have the kind of corrective power in the face of genuine imbalance that real organized labor does.

"I've always wondered what their ultimate collective bargaining power is if the single thing that grants them their leverage (to strike) is off the table from day 1."

While they can't strike, they can do the absolute bare minimum, which is what happens in a lot of professions (police, fire) where they can't legally strike. I'm not saying it's as effective as an actual strike, obviously, but with how much extra time teacher give beyond normal working hours, cutting it down to just working during business hours makes a school noticeably worse.

I don't know the particulars of your wife's union contract but in my union (college faculty union) we can't go on strike while under contract. Our contracts are up for renewal every two years and when the old contract expires we can go on strike and we have in the past.

> non-striking teachers union..

These sorts of unions happen in health, nursing in particular. And then the members end up overworked, underpaid and exploited.

My profession has a strident and aggressive union which I have not always agreed with, but they have improved pay and conditions (and have organised strikes).

Air traffic controllers, like the army and certain other “essential to public safety” vocations, are not allowed to strike.

No one is allowed to strike. LOL

It's war, where all is fair.

I suppose in that sense, the question is whether the government is taking sides.

> Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act states in part, “Employees shall have the right. . . to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.” Strikes are included among the concerted activities protected for employees by this section.

From https://www.nlrb.gov/strikes

Does that supercede this?

> An individual may not accept or hold a position in the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia if he— > (3)participates in a strike, or asserts the right to strike, against the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia; or

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7311

I'm guessing no since the firing wasn't challenged.

Federal employees are not regulated by the NLRA but rather the FSLMRS. The FSLMRS explicitly denies the right of all federal employees from striking or even discussing a strike.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Service_Labor-Manageme...

You can have a contract that makes striking illegal and that you have to do arbitration instead when disputes arise.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. A good arbitration setup can be less combative and feel fairer than a setup where the threat of strike is the motivating factor.

A wildcat strike is what it is called when workers strike when their contract says they can't.

Air Traffic Control. It’s a matter of public safety. Strikes are not allowed.

Do you really expect us to believe that you don't know the concept of an "illegal strike"?

Then again, your profile picture is a soyboy face, and you're constantly spewing braindead leftist dribble, so, no one should be surprised by your glaring ignorance and naivety.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

HN does not value personal attacks like the kind you made.

Please consider that you could have elevated the conversation by actually addressing the idea of an illegal strike (what differentiates a legal one from an illegal one, for example).

We've banned this account. Creating accounts to break HN's guidelines will eventually get your main account banned, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> illegal strike

It's easy to win when you can change the rules of a game as you go.

Were the rules changed mid-strike?

I think the default rule to employment is that if you refuse to work, your employer can fire you and hire someone else to do the job, especially in a critical industry like air-traffic control

I'm sure many good justifications can be made for this, or for (e.g.) the Taft-Hartley act, but at the end of the day, there is no arguing that the last 75 years of US federal policy decisively kneecapped unions, and we are by no means better off for that.

In the past, the US gave unions a bunch of special "rights" that violate the rights of others.

It would take a decisive kneecapping to go back to parity.

Unions (and corporations, for that matter!) should have the same rights as any other group of people. No more, no less.

Labor organizers don't care about that, of course. Their "job" is to increase the power of "labor," by hook or by crook.

This. If union's had less rights than any other organization then you might argue they have been "kneecapped" but that's just not the case.

Let companies fire workers for unionizing, let them refuse to negotiate with unions, and in turn let unions do what they are intended to do, serve as a way for groups of workers to jointly apply pressure for their interests alone.

"Let companies fire workers for unionizing, let them refuse to negotiate with unions" This renders unions pretty much useless. There is already an imbalance of power in favor of the companies.

Most companies can't fire everyone all at once. If you didn't need your employees, you wouldn't have them in the first place. When both sides have something to lose, then finding acceptable compromise is in everyone's interest.

That's because unions don't represent workers, they represent their members. If their members are easily replaceable, they don't have much leverage.

If you can't fire a union worker for not working (on strike), then you take away all the leverage of not just the company, but of the unemployed who may wish to work and is not represented.

I think people white knight for unions all the time but don't look at all the people who couldn't get represented at all. They saw jobs go to people based on connections rather than skills. They applied and simply couldn't get hired -- and were still expected to support the unions politically.

So you say busting unions leads to higher employment? Did that actually ever happen? We have over century of experience, why not learn from it.

I'm very sceptical that changing "not everyone is represented" into "nobody is represented" is an improvement.

If you can fire workers on strike you remove the only leverage of a union. While on strike you don't get money from your employee and the employee won't make money from his company. So both sides benefit if a strike ends. If you can just replace workers on strike the unions have no power especially today when more workers than work exist.

BTW without unions you start a race to the bottom for the wages. But for everyone, even the employees, most of them just ignore that fact.

"BTW without unions you start a race to the bottom for the wages"

Is this why software engineers make so little on the US?

For every software engineer, there are tenfold logistics, customer service, house keeping and hospitality workers. You know, the people living on food stamps because their employers are anti-union. The difference between the former and the latter isn't unions, but "market value".

My understanding is that early unions (prior to the New Deal and labor law reform) didn't have much legal protection, and instead resorted to massive strikes. Companies fought back with firings and sometimes violence. Over time labor laws were built up because having major portions of your economy at war does not lead to a stable and productive society. As we disassemble those laws, we'll probably learn why they were created.

Those laws were put in place as a sort of olive branch to unions who were holding mass general strikes where entire cities were shut down. If you get rid of any restrictions on the employers, you better believe the unions are going to go scorched earth in return. You really want that?

What rights are you referring to?

Negative rights, i.e. rights that protect you from the initiation of force by others, i.e. rights that don't create a new obligation for someone else, i.e. what freedom or liberty actually is.

I get that labor organizers don't want a free society, and frankly, I don't know how to bridge that gap to convince them otherwise. We want different things.

can you provide a specific example of what you are referring to?

I don't really understand the question.

The fundamental right is the right to not have force initiated against you. All other rights are derivative. For instance, the right to have property, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, etc.

John Locke did good thinking on this, but I suspect a lot of his ideas were already implicitly enshrined in common law (but I'm not an expert on that).

More information: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/individual_rights.html

Public and private sector unions are very different beasts from a power point of view. The employer in the public sector case is not a profit maximizing capitalist but the workers’ fellow citizens. Moreover, it’s well known in political science that concentrated interests are more likely to have their policy preferences enacted than diffuse interests and the interests of workers in their pay and conditions are much more concentrated than those of taxpayers in general government efficiency.

> The employer in the public sector case is ... the workers’ fellow citizens.

How is a private sector employer not? Are you alluding to the difference in affluence?

In the private sector case it might be some fellow citizens, though it need not be, but that’s qualitatively different from all your follow citizens democratically represented. All the theoretical arguments for unions are predicated on the relationship between labor and capital that doesn’t exist in the public sector.

This comment is basically, "How dare they ?"

"illegal strike"

- For My Friends, Anything. For My Enemies, the Law

not working is illegal.

This was a time of the biggest inflation in US modern history. The treasury rate was >15%, double what it was five years earlier, and triple of 10 years prior.

These people were probably getting 4-5% annual raises at a time when inflation was going at over 10%. The 35% raise was probably just to bring them back up to their baseline.

For reference, using the BLS CPI calculator, $10,000 in 1975 was $17,000 in 1981. That's insane. And those are the official BLS numbers, which most of us feel undersell inflation.

I'm curious, do you also have the numbers for 1980-1990, 1990-2000, 2000-2010, 2010-2020? I can't place your number in perspective.

Yeah, good question, I should have cited these numbers:

I got the treasury yields here: http://www.fedprimerate.com/10-Year-US-Treasury-Yield-Histor...

For the inflation stats, I used the BLS Inflation calculator here: https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

And this thread of comments here lets us know that shallow narratives still perpetuate/ripple many decades later, hiding the detailed truth - which we're all prone to.

For completeness:

10000 USD in Start was worth Result at End:

Start-End: Result

1920-1930: 8860

1930-1940: 8128

1940-1950: 16906

1950-1960: 12468

1960-1970: 12901

1970-1980: 20582

1980-1990: 16375

1990-2000: 13249

2000-2010: 12837

2010-2020: 11905

For contrast

1990-2020: 20248

Yeah, the period you mentioned wasn't fun. I guess the last 30 years weren't so bad.

Kind of strange how things feel to get so much more expensive while money doesn't devaluate that much.

These demands are hard to evaluate without the prior status quo. How much did they earn before, how long were the working hours?

Clever lying by omission. This is the kind of dirty tricks FOX plays. They leave of crucial information to twist the truth. By not mentioning the sky high inflation existing at the time, you give the impression that the was completely unreasonable raise.

You count on the fact that people today are used to very low inflation, and will immediately be disgusted by the demands of these workers.

This sort of manipulation, is something conservatives have perfected over many years. Also classic conservative backstabbing. Reagan got these people to support him. He even had a past as a union representative. Yet when push came to shove, he didn't have their back. No, he stabbed them in the back instead, and reduced them to poverty.

Denying them employment in the future was classic vengeful pettiness which would have made Donald Trump proud.

> Denying them employment in the future was classic vengeful pettiness which would have made Donald Trump proud.

https://www.ft.com/content/d73b9541-f91c-4423-9353-1f6606f31...

But the consolidation, even expansion, of Mr Trump’s base rests on a more concrete achievement. For the first three years of his presidency, he produced steady growth (which a number of presidents have managed) in which a disproportionate share of the gains went to low-income workers (a rarer feat). Workers in the lowest quarter of incomes saw their wages rise almost 5 per cent. This was the first sustained downward redistribution of income and wealth since the last century, a vindication for voters in the forgotten parts of the country who voted for Mr Trump in 2016. It may account for the shock of this election: the gravitation of young Latinos and black men to Mr Trump’s candidacy.

the way I understand it was they govt actually agreed to a pretty healthy pay raise before the strike (inflation was high then and salaries did not go up). PATCO thought they could get more and Reagan went nuclear on them.

this seems like a good write up (dunno the accuracy) https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2796do/what_...

Genuine question...Can you have an illegal strike without slavery?

I didn't think a strike was a legal (having to do with the law) action?

> had achieved suburban middle class lives as air traffic controllers without having gone to college

This sounds almost surreal in today's market.

Nowadays:

> Candidates typically need an associate’s or a bachelor’s degree from the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative program. Other applicants must have 3 years of progressively responsible work experience, have completed 4 years of college, or have a combination of both

Not sure if you're speaking generally or only with regard to ATCs, but it's completely possible to make a good living doing IT work without having a college degree. If you're able to make the jump to software development it can become even more lucrative. The salary progression is more linear than a Stanford grad clearing $200k annually at Google straight out of college but making six figures in your 20s without a degree as a network/cloud engineer or sysadmin is pretty doable.

Worth noting that this mass firing is coming around for a second wave of hurt. They re-staffed most of the ATC force with military personnel who were around the same age, all at the same time. Now that block of people are hitting the ATC's mandatory retirement age (56) and last I checked they haven't had much success (arguably intentionally, but that's another story) in increasing their onboarding stream enough to compensate for the sudden loss. Current controllers are already working large (possibly unsafe) amounts of overtime and have limited ability to change locations or positions due to the shortage, which is only getting worse.

At some point, they'll either need to find a way to accept more trainees, retain employees longer, or reduce services/throughput.

EDIT: I may be out of date. Perhaps this second wave already came and went with little impact. My math says anyone hired in 1981 would be past retirement age by now. Not sure how they handled it.

where's the plucky upstart wanting to disrupt ATC with their AI trained system to automatically route airtraffic? The uber of ATC?

move fast and break things can't possibly go wrong in the ATC world.

Guessing this is humorous, but it does seem like a job that could one day benefit from being automated. The job is highly rules-based, and the rules are well documented requirements.

The biggest two problems that immediately come to mind:

1) Current ATC communication with planes happens by human voice over radio. Wouldn't want to trust an AI's speech recognition over that medium, so you'd probably have to mandate some kind of pilot-ATC interface that all planes would need to carry. You'd get huge pushback from the community of small planes. Probably from commercial pilots as well, since they'd have to train on the new system, and it would likely add to their cognitive load, at least short term.

2) We've put a ton of effort into producing a good radar picture to let controllers know where planes are, but it's far from perfect and requires some intuition. Radar waves bend due to atmospheric conditions, and it's difficult/impossible to distinguish real targets from various forms of clutter. The heuristics we currently use are pretty amazing, but you still get things popping up on ATC's radar scope that aren't really there.

> Guessing this is humorous, but it does seem like a job that could one day benefit from being automated

The tools ATCs use have evolved tremendously. Just three decades ago, not all major airports had ground radar for instance. Then there's ADS-B that's fully automated and does part of the job. The problem is that air traffic has increased a lot.

Even if automation goes much further, ATCs are needed for supervision of operation, compliance and backup in case systems fail. The evolution mirrors that of the job of pilots. Flight engineers have been rendered obsolete long ago, maybe copilots will be eventually replaced by a remote operators for backup at some point. Each ATC will be able to handle more and more traffic, as they already have, but someone's gotta be keeping an eye on the system.

> The job is highly rules-based, and the rules are well documented requirements.

Yes, so is actually flying a plane. However, MCAS let us see how badly things can go wrong following rules that were not well defined/understood/studied. Contributing to that was the system's method of knowing its environment came from sensors. If/when those sensors malfunction then the system is useless. At the end of the day, even if 100% of all instruments and sensors were to stop working, a human can still use its back up sensors (eyes,ears,brain) to continue flying where the auto system pretty much is game over.

My brother in law is an ATC. Didn't go to school for it, but studied and went through the training and passed the sequential tests required to get a seat in the building. He enjoys the job a ton.

Based on just observing him through the process, it seems like there's a combination of things that might keep younger people away from being an ATC. One might be the unfortunate politicization of government jobs at large, and especially how people like ATC's get affected during those pesky "government shutdowns". There's also, I think, the fact that being an ATC is more or less an "invisible job" to many people and especially college educated people. Also, the job itself can be stressful (but nothing like the horror story myths I've read about, apparently) and the exams to get in whittle down the herd pretty dramatically it sounds like.

There's no shortage of applicants. They get tons of applicants every year, but the FAA academy can only accept a limited number to their 3-4 month training program. Then they wash out roughly 50% of the trainees with their final exam, which is a set of ATC scenarios on a simulator. Existing controllers have to take the same exam to become a trainer at the academy, and roughly 1/3 of them also fail, so one could argue that the standards are set far too high. The survivors go on to their first posting, where they spend another year or two training before they can actually control live traffic on their own, and more wash out in this stage if they fail to certify.

I think it depends on your definition of "younger people" in this case. For the "off the street" hires like your brother in law, those postings require you to be under 31.

That said, there isn't really a good path to ATC for those 18-22 either. The off the street bids require something along the lines of "4 years progressively responsible work experience" to even be eligible to start the process. The Collegiate Training Initiative (CTI) schools exist, but have not provided much meaningful benefit to graduates since the FAA's changes to the hiring process in December 2013.

When I was offered a training slot 30 years ago, I was told they had better results the younger you were. 18 year olds could get in with the right test results. I suspect the establishment and CTI relationships intended to close up the rate of younger onboarding as the post-Reagan guard got older.

Back then journeymen controllers in Chicago were making $150K.

I get the impression that whatever the FAA intended with the CTI schools, it didn't work out as they wanted. I attended a CTI school in 2013-2014 but left when they modified the hiring process to essentially devalue the CTI path. In recent years it looks like the CTI schools have clawed back a little bit more preferential treatment when it comes to weighing ATSA results, but it's not like it was before.

I don't resent it though - it sounds like at the time CTI students weren't much more successful than off the street hires at the academy, nor were the different CTI schools very consistent in their quality and curriculum. I went to a good one, and was sad to leave as it was a ton of fun, but I've heard stories of some CTI programs being little more than a few lecture-based classes and a certificate.

One of my friends was a hired courtesy of Reagan's actions. He retired in the middle of last year (mandatory retirement). I know 2 other ATCs that retired in the last year. I bet you're right.

I find the whole situation really interesting for so many reasons. The fact that the strike was against the law is one of them. However, the most interesting part to me is that it highlights the core dynamics involved in a union. Specifically, the idea behind a union is that it changes the power dynamic; by organizing and working together, the employees try to level the power imbalance between employer and employees.

A strike is a particularly clear manifestation of that idea; the employees are saying "give us this, because if you don't we won't work... and you can't just fire us all as it will be catastrophic for you". And it is a powerful manifestation of that, and has a history of working well for the employees.

However, in this case, the "employer" has nearly unlimited resources. And the answer to the statement of "you can't just fire us all" was.. "You are incorrect. You did not put enough thought into your position in all this. You are fired... and blacklisted". Regardless of the side you fall on as to whether the reaction was appropriate or not, it did shine a spotlight on the fact that every union is in a different position, and all factors must be considered before resorting to a "might makes right" action (which is what a strike is, even if it was right before might is taken into consideration).

Im not a lawyer but I dont think unions work as you describe. Specifically " and you can't just fire us all as it will be catastrophic for you". In terms of game theory the only way a union can really work is if it is illegal to fire a union employee for simply being part of the union (or being on strike).

In the cases where the law does not provide such protections union will take physical action against the employer.

Can you explain more? I thought employers always had the right to terminate employees, union or not.

After Peter's reply, I looked into it a bit. This page has some useful information on it

https://employment.findlaw.com/wages-and-benefits/labor-stri...

Unions often will not allow termination via the contract. If the company doesn't like someone they need to take it up with the union. If the union likes the "bad person", then you are probably stuck as everyone else in the union will walk off the job if you try to fire that person. If the union hates someone that you like, the union can refuse membership to that person (I've never heard of this happening, though unions often do refuse membership to someone unknown to you who might or might not be good)

Of course each union contract is different, but it is very common for it to be impossible to fire a bad union employee as the union won't let you. (and in fact the union often won't even let you collect data that shows how bad they are).

None of the above applies to every case. If you don't show up for work, then you are out: no union will defend someone who can't even be bothered to show up. If you do something illegal you are out. These days sexual harassment is something the union won't defend (in the past that wasn't true) and so you will be fired for that. Each contract has different fine print.

I wasn't aware of that, so thank you for pointing it out.

It is worth noting that it doesn't change the underlying thought I was getting at, though. When a union decides to strike, the options other than "concede" (that's a simplistic way of putting it, obviously, since most strikes result in some sort of compromise) that are available to the employer need to be considered.

The employer might have had practically unlimited resources in terms of money but it did not have unlimited resources in terms of qualified air traffic controllers and this is where the leverage normally is. Replacing employees in most jobs has a cost and so strikes hope to leverage an economic cost/benefit analysis as well as public & media sympathy. In this case anti-union ideology overrode the cost/benefit of this strike. It sounds like proper staffing levels for air traffic controllers weren't restored for about 10 years, so there was a substantial cost.

> and all factors must be considered before resorting to a "might makes right" action (which is what a strike is,

It's interesting that you characterized putting down your tools and stopping work as "might makes right" but not using the military for the purposes of strikebreaking.

I didn't speak about the military breaking the strike at all, except as to note that I wasn't really talking about which side was right in this particular instance. Yes, calling the military in to break the strike is very much "might makes right"; it just wasn't what I was commenting on. I was commenting on the dynamics of how strikes work and the fact that this event highlighted certain facts that tend to be ignored.

I think there's a major issue with unions - if I'm paying tax dollars to fund said union, then they're part of the "general good".

I don't think public unions are acceptable because it's essentially the government (union employees) to extort money from the citizens. In many places, we call that corruption.

Private unions I think are alright, I'm not opposed to (as an employer) having to negotiate with my employees. However, protections should be limited, because my shareholders are also entitled to their opinions as owners.

From your stance it looks like you're a US citizen. Many, many people lived through horrific times to give you the privilege of workers' rights. Before that, the environments were terrible for them. Now you propose reversing that because (presumably) you are wealthy and you feel that you're entitled to power.

I'm just not sure why you'd say that out loud, is what I guess I'm really curious about. It really speaks very poorly of a historical (or even current time) sense of empathy to look at employees in this way.

The distinction between public sector unions and private unions is important here. I'm very strong on unionization in general, but opposed to public sector reasons. Primarily for a reason you state in your comment:

> ...you feel that you're entitled to power.

I do. Yes. This is a democracy, and the people are supposed to hold the power to determine how government allocates resources. When a police union decides that the dirty cop will keep his job, against the will of the people they're supposed to protect and serve, I find it objectionable.

Collective bargaining in government service substitutes the employees’ power for that of the voters’. In the private sector, they even the playing field when owners (who seek profit) face off against labor (who seek wages). In the public sector, it's a fight between the taxpayer and the earner about how the taxpayer's dollar is spent.

I think it's ironic that a lot of people hate on Reagan for this but ignore that FDR was a huge critic of public unions. I personally am for private unions but do not believe public unions should exist. Police unions for instance are one of the single biggest obstacles to police reform, and the same is true of teacher unions and education reform. Public unions and general stake holders in the status quo makes reform incredibly difficult, if not impossible. Unions in Germany and other countries operate very differently than in the US as well, and that is often ignored.

To be fair, there are more reasons to hate on Reagan than this. Severely restricting mental health care to those who could afford it, and leading to an explosion of homelessness to save the upper 5% of earners a tax break wasn't very popular either. Trickle down economics was/isn't a popular economic policy to all but, again, the top 5% of earners.... Granted, these strategies are wonderful for garnering political donors, but there are plenty of reasons to hate on Reagan's policies (and FDR's really).

You could make the same argument for any sort of negotiation the government engages in with a private citizen or corporation. I really don't see the difference between a worker employed by the government and one employed by a private corporation. Both want to pay the worker as little as possible. Both want to provide as little protections in the workplace as possible.

As an employer, I like as many protections as possible; more protections mean less lawsuits, higher work satisfaction (in many cases) and less knowledge loss. There's a long-term incentive to have protections.

Regarding pay, I think competition takes care of that as well. That's why it's fine for a private business, they have a good metric for negation because they need "profit". It's why many auto manufacturers who had unions had to leave the states, but Toyota who was able to negotiate later in the union era is able to out-compete.

In contrast, the government has no metric for how much is too much pay for a given job. Further, the government union is essentially going to take more money from the constituents at the point of a gun (government's main purpose is a monopoly on force). I don't think that's appropriate.

By org is silly. Public vs private is semantics. It allows divide & conquer, defeating the whole point.

The Correct Answer™ is sectoral collective bargaining. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_collective_bargaining

Totally disagree. If you have a job, whether public or private, you can be subject to exploitation, bad treatment, shitty salary, unreasonable demands etc. You have as much need of a union as anybody else. Especially since a state is more powerful than any company.

You are twisting logic in a crazy way here by suggesting anyone employed in the public sector is the government. The administration of the country and those doing it are very different from somebody being a public sector worker. A public sector worker has no more power over those running a country than you as a person employed in the private sector.

I think the most fair system would be if workers got to elect 50% of the board and shareholders the other 50%. That would mean both parties get equal say. It is the money of the shareholders but it is the workplace and life of the employees. It would also encourage cooperation towards the common good of the company.

> You are twisting logic in a crazy way here by suggesting anyone employed in the public sector is the government. The administration of the country and those doing it are very different from somebody being a public sector worker

Am I?

The teacher, fireman, police, etc are all directly employed at the state, city, county level. Ultimately they are employed at our behest. The issue with collective bargaining is I have no alternative option. Do I trust the administrators we elect to fire bad teacher? Well they can’t because they have a union. The union will also help elect who ever will give them raises - It’s called “open bargaining”.

There are alternative approaches as you suggest. One such suggestion would be allowed tax dollars to be applied at any school of your choosing. Thus there’s a repercussion for poor teaching or school management.

Police officers would be more accountable if they could be fired for a bad job and not protected by a union, etc

This is a deeply unempathetic position. Any group of people being taken advantage of by their employer should use collective bargaining to improve their position.

We can and should argue about what just compensation and treatment is, but saying that an entire class of workers can't get together to fight for that just compensation? That is morally bankrupt.

I think this makes sense, and I might have agreed before I married someone working in a public sector union and saw how awful working in the public sector is compared to private (for many, but not all, professions). My perspective has been challenged over and over again by her experiences and now that point of view is just not compatible with the reality of how things work.

So I'm going to make the case for why public unions are _more_ necessary than private union--public unions are needed to make it possible to provide competent, professional public services--, and rather deflect the conversation to a bigger question (with to me, a very clear answer), which is whether there should ever be non-market-driven revenues.

There are some very hard-to-believe dynamics that occur in a public sector job. For teachers, air traffic controllers, police, etc, there is no competition in the labor market. If your boss is abusive, if you don't get paid fairly, etc, your only option is to change your career or leave your community. You cannot go to another employer. Management does not have the resources to provide relief when its objectively needed. Government effectively has a monopoly on that job, and if there are other jobs, they usually pay even less because of a compensating wage differential for the workplace being more tolerable (private schools, for example)

There is also no profit motive. Good, effective leadership does not have a natural system for "floating to the top" like you find in for-profit settings. It doesn't happen just by chance, but as bad as leadership is in large corporate environments, its even worse and even less accountable in the public sector. Nevermind that good leadership is expensive--the best leaders do not go into public service, unfortunately, because it pays a lot better in the private sector.

No profit motive also means that there isn't a single metric that aligns workers and management. Amazon may be abusing workers, but at least they can respond to clear issues by giving raises or bonuses. At least when a business succeeds, someone is getting paid and its about who should get that money. School teachers and police officers don't get more revenue if they succeed. Administrators and management don't get more money when they succeed, or when their workers succeed. Success does not feed success, in a financial sense (with exceptions, of course). If they fail, there is not a natural incentive structure that reflects that.

Ultimately, revenue and accountability for public sector work is driven by voters, many of whom don't feel like they benefit from the service directly (whether they do or not is a separate conversation). Voters want to minimize costs and maximize services, but there is not a market mechanism that defines the equilibrium there. Voters (like you) don't know what it takes to deliver the quality of service demanded, and the systems don't naturally align themselves in a way that efficiently executes on those demands anyways. Public services will always be less efficient than you would expect--but many times they're the only way to provide the service in the first place.

So you have poor leadership. You have totally decoupled funding from performance, and therefore compensation from funding from performance. Since there isn't a profit motive, aligning individual workers with the mission is a challenge. You have cost-sensitive, captive, and hostile benefactors and service users who have a dual demands: high quality of service, and lowest possible cost.

This is the perfect environment for abusive leaders to make unreasonable asks to people who provide services at a rate well below its social value, using resources that don't reflect the real cost to provide the adequate, competent services desired.

Unions are the only mechanism that exists for these people to protect themselves from that. Not only does the market have no power, it doesn't even exist.

---

So yes, public unions serve the interests of workers, and "extort[ing] money from the citizens". Public unions cause some very obviously challenging circumstances--but the alternative is that public service workers are being asked to work in offend difficult, degrading circumstances where they are resourced in a way that sets them up to fail, asks them to make professional commitments to an employer who serves whims of public opinion rather than direct stakeholds are invested the complexities of their job, and which ultimately leads to a cycle of cynicism and further removal of resources. Nevermind that the nature of their work is inherently highly regulated and high-stakes.

How do you run a public institution successfully in the long run with these core dynamics?

This is an inherently messy world, and there is not a singular, cathartic solution for providing low cost, high quality, individualized, egalitarian public services. There needs to be some mechanism for finding a balance. The market is not an option. Privatizing all large scale government services doesn't change many of these dynamics, unless you remove any requirement for equal access or standards for quality of services provided.

Public unions are the best on a field of bad options.

> A strike is a particularly clear manifestation of that idea; the employees are saying "give us this, because if you don't we won't work... and you can't just fire us all as it will be catastrophic for you". And it is a powerful manifestation of that, and has a history of working well for the employees.

It's worth noting that it was catastrophic for air travel to fire all those people. It had long-term knock-on effects as well, since all the new people hired to replace the people who had been fired later retired within a narrow window of time, creating a staffing crisis.

Since there's a mandatory retirement age, this is likely to be a cyclical thing, although there's been recent legislation proposed that would appear to make working past the mandatory retirement age an option for workers. Maybe some workers will jump at the chance to continue in a highly stressful, safety critical position well into their sixties...

Well, as a counter example, a similar thing happened in France in 1973. ATC went on strike, and they were replaced by military controllers.

This was a direct cause of a mid-air collision[1], which resulted in the government folding, and the start of French ATC terrorising European skies. To this day, ATC unions are really strong, and their compensation/working conditions are crazy good compared to their European neighbours.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Nantes_mid-air_collisio...

Note that, regardless of the ethics of firing them en masse, the strike they were engaged in was, in fact, illegal. It's still in violation of the US Code for government employees to strike or even to claim the right to strike [0].

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7311

In some ways it is strange they had a Union at all if the Union was toothless. It was a pleasant fiction that was utterly crushed the instant it tried to fight for its members.

This feels very counter-productive.

Sure, an argument could be made that certain services are essential to keep running for the public good.

But the people working in these kinds of sectors are usually very aware about that fact and will compensate for it by keeping a minimum level of service running even during a strike.

While denying them their right to strike, in these essential sectors, is a recipe for steadily underfunding them without even having the "coal canary" of strikes happening to warn of it being underfunded and thus endangering the proper function of these essential sectors.

Just like breaking segregation rules in the South was Illegal or for blacks and whites to marry during segregation in South Africa.

I agree that laws matter, but I think people get too hung up on laws at times and don't take into account the profound importance of civil disobedience to advance society forward and get rid of immoral and unethical laws.

A thousand times this.

Agreed. I wasn't saying that I think that the law is right. The original article phrases it as Reagan "called the strike illegal", which makes it sound like that was just his opinion. The law as written is pretty unambiguous.

If you want to effect change in the law, you first have to acknowledge that Reagan acted in line with the law as written, rather than according to his own whims. What made the civil Rights demonstrations work was that MLK and others showed just how bad the law was by breaking it and accepting the consequences. They were deliberately drawing attention to the law, rather than focusing on the enforcers of it.

the revolution that the founding fathers of this country took part in was also illegal

Arguably calling in the military to break the strike is what drove the steady climb of income inequality up to today's levels as the private sector followed suit:

"Reagan's firing of the government employees encouraged large private employers, like Phelps Dodge (1983), Hormel (1985–86), and International Paper (1987), to hire striker replacements instead of negotiating in labor conflicts.[17] Comparatively, in 1970 there were over 380 major strikes or lockouts in the U.S., by 1980 the number had dropped to under 200, in 1999 it fell to 17, and in 2010 there were only 11.[18] "

http://www.the-crises.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/gini-in...

The military and police have a long history of being deployed against workers in the US. In at least one case firing upon striking coal workers.

Companies like the Pinkertons have been using violence against striking workers for a long time, (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike ) and are still in operation and used to quell labor organizing today. Amazon hired the Pinkertons, for instance, to spy on their workers.

Why police unions are not part of the American labor movement

https://theconversation.com/why-police-unions-are-not-part-o...

The modern concept of police essentially started from the strike breakers in the late 1800s

And slave patrols (in the South, at least).

I thought the origin of the modern concept of police, famously, was the establishment of The Met by Robert Peel in 1829. Is that what you're referring to?

The concept of uniformed police like we know them definitely originated around that time. The Met concept spread through the US, starting in the Northeast, where it was predominantly used to protect capital (protecting warehouses, merchants, etc.). In the South, similar uniformed police organizations started from the perspective of ensuring slaves didn't run away. (And the stories from the 'police' of that era are truly, truly horrifying.)

Over time, the two US concepts merged into the modern US Police organization, and yes, the Met among other things in the mid to late 1800s were part of the ancestry of modern police in America.

Companies in the US used to hire hitmen to murder union leaders (I guess they still do, at least in South America). When that didn't work they sent in the national guard to mow down the strikers with machine guns.

Reagan was a master of politics.

Here's the warm, friendly letter he sent, before getting elected, to the union union of Professional Air Traffic Controllers (PATCO), promising to improve their working conditions if elected President of the US:

https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8422/7536594466_92b4d4e020_z....

The letter ends with Reagan making a promise to work together in harmony: "I pledge to you that my administration will work very closely with you to bring about a spirit of cooperation between the president and the air traffic controllers. Such harmony can and must exist of we are to restore the people's confidence in their government."

Instead, once Reagan assumed power, he became a ruthless adversary of the union.

Sources:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2012/7/9/1107835/-Rememberi... /

https://www.npr.org/2006/08/03/5604656/1981-strike-leaves-le...

Do you really think that linking to dailykos, which considers Reagan only slightly worse then Bin Ladin is really a good link?

You can argue what Reagan wanted, but there is also no doubt that the union dramatically overplayed it's hands. This was not unusual in the aviation business at the time. There was a major carrier that went to the union and claimed they needed concessions to reform their business to deal with deregulation. The union said, sure, we will do it if you open all your books to us and prove it. The company did, then asked for ratification of the pre- negotiated contract. The union looked at the books, decided that the companies was in fact doomed without them. However, the union represented not just workers at that carrier, but other carrriers as well, and since the union was also present in other carrier theydemanded a top of the market contract to bleed the company dry (and force other carriers to match the contract) figuring that if the company was on it's way it, it should take as much as possible as it could before they went down.

(The union/corporate battles at this time are insane. Both the union leaders and the executives were forbidden from exercising leadership ever again - see Frank Lorenzo, Jack Bavis, Charlie Bryan).

> Do you really think that linking to dailykos, which considers Reagan only slightly worse then Bin Ladin is really a good link?

I don't see how that interpretation is that wrong, except maybe for offending some American sensibilities.

But the Reagan Doctrine was really not that different from what OBL did: Finance and support subversive elements in other countries for the sake of overthrowing the established political order, to replace it with one more aligned to that of the perpetrator.

These similarities get even more blatant when looking at incidents like Iran-Contra: Using drug trade to finance such operations, which is really not all that different to what a lot of terrorist groups are doing.

Heck, there's even somewhat of a direct link when accounting for the US support that flowed to the Mujaheddin to oppose the Soviets and what later became of that.

Again: I realize this interpretation might be offensive to some Americans, but for a moment try to see it from the PoV of those countries and people that were directly, and often very negatively, affected by that kind of foreign policy.

Please don't attack a strawman. I linked to that dailykos page because it happens to be the only one that had a copy of Reagan's letter on DuckDuckGo's first page of search results for "reagan letter to patco". For what it's worth, when I first read that letter years ago, I remember being in awe at Reagan's mastery of the political arts.

If I may quote Jeffrey Pelt from The Hunt for Red October: "Listen, I'm a politician, which means I'm a cheat and a liar, and when I'm not kissing babies I'm stealing their lollipops. But it also means I keep my options open."

That's not masterful, that's just setting them up for some backstabbing. The masterful part happened later, when he sold it to the American people and largely convinced a generation of workers that they'd certainly be better off without unions.

He did offer them improved working conditions, and then they went on an illegal strike and he fired them. Boo hoo.

I'm no Reagan apologist either; He was responsible for an incredible amount of CIA evils against the world. And I don't buy for one second the "strategy" of massive increase in military spending forced the USSR into bankruptcy - That is just the natural conclusion of socialism.

It's almost as if electing actors/celebrities to potus isn't a great idea.

> The FAA had initially claimed that staffing levels would be restored within two years; however, it took closer to ten years before the overall staffing levels returned to normal.[1]

> Reagan's firing of the government employees encouraged large private employers, like Phelps Dodge (1983), Hormel (1985–86), and International Paper (1987), to hire striker replacements instead of negotiating in labor conflicts.[17] Comparatively, in 1970 there were over 380 major strikes or lockouts in the U.S., by 1980 the number had dropped to under 200, in 1999 it fell to 17, and in 2010 there were only 11.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...

I think it's good someone stood up to them. I'm French, we have endemic transportation strikes here, and it will turn your nice city/country into a shithole. The government should do what it takes to maintain infrastructure, transportation, and public services. That is, in fact, the main purpose of the government IMO.

Doesn't really work out in Britain and the US who pretty much demolished the unions, it's actually worse.

The unions are not the cause of it being worse. You can even make the argument that they are one of the causes of things being worse. There is no reason to pay $200/hr to dig tunnels, but New York does. There is no reason to have 3 union employees on a train, automation can do most of their jobs better. These are two that I see transit advocates bring up in the US as to why our transit is so bad. (They are not the only reason, nor even the biggest, but they are factors hurting our transit)

No unions is the cause of it being worse. Unions doesn't mean it's good, but no unions means it's getting worse. The UK demolished unions and privatized public transport like the railways. It got so worse the government had to buy the tracks back to repair them because the owners didn't care despite fatal accidents.

You didn't prove anything. Owners not caring about maintenance doesn't mean unions are good.

It proves no unions is worse. Shitty service vs deadly service.

That is because the whole US system is broken. Put yourself in the shoes of those workers. You have no skills apart from the one you got from doing the same job for 20 years. No prospect for decent future employment. Shitty unemployment benefits. No job retraining offers.

Why do we not have these problems in e.g. Nordic countries? Because we are superior blonde Aryans? Because we have no black people? Because we are so "homogenous"? Yes... plenty of possible racist explanations.

But the much simpler reasons is that there is a system that takes care of people. E.g. a country like Denmark spends 10x as much as the US to retrain a laid off worker. Higher education is free. Vocational training and crafts are baked into the high school system. Unemployment benefits are generous and you get a lot of help to get a new job or retrain for another one.

Perhaps more importantly you don't have really narrow skilled jobs to begin with. E.g. in the US factories tend to hire people with almost no skills to do a very narrow job. In Nordic countries you go through extensive vocational training programs giving you a broad set of skills. When you work in factory you will be doing a much wider variety of tasks, thus blue collar workers retain a broader set of skills. This means when they are fired, they have a lot more options even without retraining to find other jobs.

The Anglo-Saxon approach utterly lacks long term thinking. It is all about slotting a guy into a task as quickly and cheaply as possible. Only problem is that if that is the only thing that guy can do and the only thing he has learned, he will hold onto that job for dear life.

Sorry, if this comes across as negative. I don't really want to diss America and brag about us being better. I just feel it is deeply unfair how low skilled simple workers always have to get all the blame in America. It is always their fault. There is never a will to look at the bigger picture. To see the structures that trap people. My purpose isn't to brag about Nordics but to try to stand up for the American blue collar worker. I think they deserve some more sympathy and understanding.

Note that US union workers tend to fight the idea that they should learn new skills so they can get a better job. Don't ask me why.

> The government should do what it takes

If you have the courage to imply it you should say it out loud: You feel the government should ruin the lives of strikers if them striking inconveniences you.

If the government fails to provide basic services the government and everyone working in it deserves to be replaced and have their 'life ruined'

"you" being the 67 millions citizens that are not train conductors but need to move around, yes.

This is too simplistic. You just go "unions bad," when really it is about the legal framework and system. France, Britain and the US all have very low unionization rate yet all had lots of problems with unions.

Meanwhile in Germanic countries: Germany, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark etc it has often for decades been close to 80-90% of the population in unions, yet society works. Why does nobody ever stop and ask why that is?

You can be a racist and suggest Brits, Americans or French are somehow inferior to Germanic people, or you can be open minded and start looking at the different legal frameworks and practices.

In the US the law explicitly states a company only exists to produce money to the share holders. In German law in contrast about companies it emphasizes that a company exist to serve multiple purposes of with generating value for shareholder is just one of them. In my native Norway, worker participation and influence in the workplace is baked into the constitution.

My country has had coal workers, road workers, electricians and other simple people as prime ministers. Sweden currently has a former welder as prime minister. The working class themselves have held the power and been able to shape union laws. They have made sure that workers have strong representation in companies. In Germanic countries workers can vote on something from 33% to 66% of all the board members. I don't know about France but I know it is 0% in the US and the UK. Workers have no power at companies. They are not part of decision making or long term planning.

That is the key difference. In Germanic countries workers are used to being given responsibility and take part in planning. This foster a stronger culture of cooperation: taking and giving. In Anglo-Saxon countries it is completely conflict driven. It cannot be anything else, because worker have no say in anything. They are treated as dumb monkeys to be bossed around.

And no offense but it does not seem to be much better in France. All all countries run be elites. The common folks never have a say. When Norwegian companies send people down to France to do various work, they often have to invent titles for them, because their French counterpart will refuse to work with them if they don't have a fancy enough title.

I remember an important technical demonstration being held up in France because a junior developer was present and the French refused to get a demonstration by a junior developer. It had to be someone with a fancier title. They preferred to waste the whole day waiting over letting the junior developer do a crucial demo.

Norwegian companies experienced the same taking over UK shipyards. Norwegian management invited the workers to participate to plan how to turn the shipyard around. The British workers thought it was a clever trick and refused to show up. Never in the decades they had worked there had management EVER asked their opinion on ANYTHING.

So don't just blame unions. An arrogant and elitist leadership culture both at companies and politically combined with a broken legal framework is a major source of these problems.

But I suppose it is always easier to kick the guy lying down than to hold those in power accountable.

Yes, I remember this, I was quite yong then. The USPS was on the verge of striking (my parents and many relatives worked there) and there were deeply worried (terrified) about this. The firing stopped that strike from happening. But yet again these union members voted for Reagan in 1984.

I believe this was the start of union busting trend.

> I believe this was the start of union busting trend.

Union busting is at least as old an American pastime as baseball.

There is a term - Reagan Democrats. Many of whom were/are union workers.

And a lot of these people still bleat that the party left them behind in the 90s. I wonder why.

I worked with a man who was fired due to this. He told me that he did not think Reagan would do it (nor did his co-workers). He said that many of his colleagues had to switch careers.

And he probably voted for Reagan.

It was curious then how such rational workers did not understand Reagan’s ideological bent. It’s not like he hid it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...

Worth reading. Apparently Reagan was right:

"In striking, the union violated 5 U.S.C. (Supp. III 1956) 118p (now 5 U.S.C. § 7311), which prohibits strikes by federal government employees[...]"

"Right" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Reagan was correct that the strikes may have been illegal, but I wouldn't say that Reagan was "right" to fire all the workers.

It's not "doing a lot of heavy lifting" to use the word unambiguously in one of its many defined meanings. Clearly the parent was referring to Reagan being correct about the illegality of the strike (given that they cited the specific statute), not speaking about any moralistic righteousness.

>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's not clear that this was the only sense in which the word "right" was being used. Language is sometimes ambiguous like that, regardless of the intentions of the author.

A slave owner disciplining his slave used to be legal. It was never right.

And yet you are right about it being legal at the time. The word has multiple meanings, one of which is as a synonym for "correct". This is how it was used in the context above as the commenter made no reference to morality.

Morally wrong, legally correct. ethically grey. but a really black shade of grey.

"Right" and "legal" are two different things. Especially as a person with the authority to change laws or direct enforcement.

The parent was not commenting on morality and only pointed out that Reagan was correct about the strike being in violation of Federal law ("correct" is one of the many meanings of the word "right").

This is what should be done with Police departments in some places.

I think the idea of a Union for any public position creates a perverse incentive structure within government

It's unfortunate in situations like this, but strikers have to take on some degree of risk when they strike for any of this to work.

I was entirely unfamiliar with this event, and I haven't done enough reading to understand the nuance yet - from pure emotion I can say, as a private pilot, whatever we pay our ATC's isn't enough.

Illegal strikes are a complicated topic, and in a safety oriented role such as ATC there is a certain responsibility to both push back on unsafe conditions, while also maintaining as much functionality as possible. Slowdowns, walkouts, sickouts, etc, all make sense to me, but a general strike seems like a serious escalation that raises the safety stakes to an unacceptable level.

I don't think there's a safety issue if there's a reasonable advance notice.

The article makes the action seem unpopular, but I remember it differently. To my blue-collar family, the air traffic controllers were holding up travel and were demanding even more money. The author sees it from a different angle, I think.

It's worth noting that 3 years later Reagan won re-election by winning 49 of 50 states. He lost only Minnesota, where he did not campaign. (He thought it would be unsporting and mean spirited, having seen the way polling was going.)

A couple of years later - Thatcher had a similar confrontation with the miners striking against the government in the UK. Note that miner strikes had taken down the previous government and obtained a lot of concessions - so the Thatcher government was actually prepared and had stockpiled coal / prepared a PR campaign for when the strike would actually take place.

Honest question. What's the leverage of a union where it is illegal to strike?

Depends. They have a lot of workers and can pull tricks without actually striking. Make every airplane circle one extra time before landing (when not otherwise in an emergency where this would be unsafe) can make a point without doing harm.

When dockworkers (IIRC in LA) decided to strike, but were not allowed to, they just came to work but they slowed work by driving forklifts at the 5mph that was in the handbook as the top speed instead of the faster speed they had been driving before. This backfired for them though, when the strike was resolved management took a firmer stance on the speed limit of forklifts because of how much safer everything was.

That's called "work to rule", and it's a common option for union members to be able to vote for, as an action short of a full strike.

If you don't mind the ideological aspect, this article from 2006 is rather relevant to this historic event: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/08/patc-a03.html

"The smashing of PATCO marked a turning point in class relations both in the US and internationally. It signaled the definitive end of the policies of liberal reformism and relative class compromise that had predominated in the post-World War II period and the onset of a ruthless capitalist offensive against the working class that continues to this day.

It also foreshadowed the collapse of the American trade unions and all of the old, bureaucratized labor organizations and parties internationally, which were based on nationalism and class compromise. Reagan’s assault on the PATCO strikers—an attack without precedent in modern US history—provoked massive opposition among working people both in the US and around the world. One month after Reagan fired the PATCO strikers, more than 500,000 workers converged on Washington, DC, in a “Solidarity Day” demonstration—the largest protest ever in the US—to express their outrage and opposition to the Reagan administration."

But as I already noted, Reagan was re-elected in 1984 and a lot if his supporters were union members. IIRC, the leadership did endorse the Dem. candidate, who I do not even remember who he was.

Mondale.

I don't disagree with this, just like I don't disagree with the fact that many people who stood to lose from Brexit voted for Brexit.

I think the conclusion here could be that these are both true at the same time: Reagan's actions did had a largely negative effect on workers' rights and that many people who were to be affected (or were already affected) by his actions voted for him.

I will forever be amused that an airport (DCA) was subsequently named after Ronald Reagan.

How did they handle the next day? I was young, but don't recall a paralyzing of the industry...

As I recall, in addition to administrators, they made use of the military.

It seems amazing to me that you could replace all the air traffic controllers in one day with no impact on service. I mean even if military ATCs are available and qualified, it seems like you wouldn't have the numbers, and it seems like the kind of job where you would need a significant onboarding to learn the specifics of the airport where you're working

There was an impact on service. I can't remember the levels (I was 10), but I'm sure someone must have studied it somewhere. It would be a really interesting piece of history to dig into and dissect.

There was an impact at the time, and there was a somewhat lesser, but still quite serious, impact a few decades later, as all the new hires reached mandatory retirement age in the same narrow window of time. There's still something of a cycle there which will be recurring.

i’m guessing one or more of the following happened 1) the traffic was not back to 100% instantly and they ramped it up over a longer period of time 2) they offered the people that were fired the option of temporarily keeping their job while they figured out their “new careers” 3) they started training asap and they also relaxed some of their standards/requirements when it came to hiring.

It probably was not as swift and badass as it’s portrayed now.

I would do same with vaccinated teachers refusing to teach children in classroom.

Note he fires them while supporting the union movement Solidarity in Poland. Totally sick. The beginning of the capitalist destruction of democracy.

More like its revival as an "open" movement, which had been operating somewhat quietly behind the scenes since the early 20th century.

Don't think this is true. From wikipedia it seems like this was a pretty straightforward dispute over pay and conditions.

I misread the GP comment that way too.

IIUC, GP says that Reagan is inconsistent: firing US air-traffic controllers on strike, but supporting foreign workers on strike.

Poland was yet another proxy activity pushing back the Soviets and communism. As Regan showed, it's never about the workers.

The destruction of an entire union by a former union president (Screen Actors Guild). That's some irony for you.

It's odd to equate supporting Solidarity in Poland with the destruction of democracy. I seem to recall the effect was in the other direction.

The Great Communicator, in action.

What a piece of shit that man was.

I have to agree. Looking back and having the public face and the non-public actions laid out on the table I am blown away at how much lying was going on. Like Nixon, listening to his public address makes him seem so trust worthy and benevolent and right-mknded. Peel back the covers and you have punk racist gangsters running amuck.

Ronald Reagan is in large part responsible for many of the problems we face today. Him and Margaret Thatcher instituted a radical neoliberal revolution, for the benefit of the affluent and upper middle class. The result is an angry and bitter working class which you see in many countries especially in the US, who are looking for someone to blame.

Some realize that somebody like Bernie Sanders could bring back some of their former glory while others blame minorities , immigrants and foreign countries. The vote on Trump.

But both have a sliver of the truth. The free trade extremism of neoliberalism brought every worker in direct competition with low paid labour all over the world.

At the same time the neoliberal destruction of unions deprived them of an ability to fight for their rights, wages and benefits.

I ended up working a few ex-controllers in my IT career. They has some interesting stories to tell.

Illegal strike was illegal. Government employees are not allowed to go on strike.

Can you imagine if police or military were allowed to go on strike? The potential mayhem has no upper bound.

That's a very harmful assertion to make without supporting evidence.

Police go on strike in other developed nations occasionally without major issues. In countries with healthy labor relations the union and employer sometimes negotiate about maintaining critical operations during a strike as well.

Military strikes don't necessarily seems that harmful either considering the majority of military personnel is not on active deployment at any given time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot

There are numerous examples of mayhem when police go on strike. In most cases, the military, guard, or militia are brought in to maintain some semblance of order. There is a reason police strikes are illegal.

They are illegal in US, differently from many of the civilised countries.

Most countries in the world have restrictions on striking. Including Canada, Mexico, UK, France, Spain, Germany, South Korea, Japan, and others. Most of our allies. I guess none of these countries are civilized.

> Can you imagine if police or military were allowed to go on strike

Both parties are heavily invested in beating and harassing strikers, so you would have to assume their internal culture doesn't have a whole lot of space for the concept of going on strike.

>Both parties are heavily invested in beating and harassing strikers

That is some impressive hyperbole right there. Police have attempted to strike throughout US history, but the ensuing mayhem caused legislatures to change the laws.

And where it's illegal, there's always "blue flu". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_flu

Police have gone on strike before. Results were exactly as GP predicted.

https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/1969-montreals-night-of-te...

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