PATCO 1981, the strike that ended with 11,000 controllers fired

Imagine you sign a piece of paper promising not to do a thing. You sign it as a condition of a good federal job. You then do the thing, in the middle of a summer, at the busiest time of the year, and you are astonished, shocked, absolutely flabbergasted when the government says, "Well, you promised."

That is the short version of what happened to the air traffic controllers in August 1981. The slightly longer version is a story that every worker, every employer and every elected official in America absorbed whether they knew it or not. Let me tell it, folks, because the coverage at the time, and the folklore since, tend to get the order of events backwards. The President did not wake up one morning and decide to crush a union. The union walked out, in violation of the law, and the President held it to the deal it had made.

The law the controllers had signed

Start with the rule, because everything else follows from it. Federal employees have no legal right to strike. That is not a Reagan rule. It goes back to the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which made it unlawful for federal workers to strike, and the same prohibition now sits in the United States Code, in Title 5, at section 7311. The law bars a federal employee from participating in a strike against the government of the United States. It also bars membership in an organization that asserts the right to strike against the government.

On top of the statute sat an oath. Federal employees swear, as a condition of employment, an oath to support and defend the Constitution, and air traffic controllers had also signed an affidavit stating that they would not strike. So when we talk about what the controllers did, we are not talking about a grey area. We are talking about an open, deliberate breach of a statute they had personally promised to obey.

I say that without any pleasure. The controllers did a hard, stressful and important job, and I will get to the grievances in a moment. But the point of an oath is that it binds when it is inconvenient.

What PATCO wanted

The union was the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, PATCO, founded in 1968. It had, in its history, been a rather good fit for a certain kind of story: a small professional group of highly skilled people whose work was nerve-wracking, and who felt that the Federal Aviation Administration treated them badly. They had staged sickouts before, in 1969 and 1970, and the union had come away without lasting consequences. A lesson learned, or so it seemed.

Here is the part of the story that surprises people. PATCO endorsed Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election. It was one of the few federal unions to do so. The union took Reagan's candidacy as an opening.

Its demands, as widely reported then, were large. It asked for an across-the-board raise of ten thousand dollars a year for every controller, a shorter work week of thirty-two hours over four days, and improved retirement terms. It also complained of the strains of the job and of outdated equipment. The government's counter-offer was smaller, around a total package that the union rejected. Negotiations broke down.

Some of the complaints about stress and equipment were real, and I do not think a fair account should sneer at them. But the means the union chose were out of proportion. You do not get to fix a workplace problem by shutting down the nation's air system.

August 3, 1981

On Monday, August 3, 1981, about thirteen thousand controllers walked off the job. They did so knowing the law. Flights were disrupted across the country, although far less than the union had predicted. The union had bet that no President would dare to run the airways without them.

That morning, in the Rose Garden, Reagan gave a statement that has since become a fixture of the history books. He said that the strike was a violation of the law, that the oath had been taken, and that any controller who did not report for work within forty-eight hours would be treated as having forfeited the job and be terminated. He said he was not an enemy of labor, and that if they appeared at their posts before the deadline they would face no penalty. The deadline passed on the morning of August 5.

Notice the structure of that statement. A forty-eight-hour offer is a generous one. Anyone who returned could keep a job. It was a conditional mercy, and it was refused by thousands of people who thought that Washington was bluffing.

The firings and the rebuilding

When the deadline expired, roughly eleven thousand controllers had not come back, and they were dismissed. The government then banned the fired controllers from federal rehire, and the Federal Labor Relations Authority moved to decertify the union, which it did in the fall of 1981. PATCO, deprived of its legal standing, was eventually bankrupted.

Meanwhile the system kept running. The FAA drew on controllers who had stayed on the job, on supervisors who stepped back to the consoles, on military controllers, and on non-striking staff, and for a time it ordered airlines to cut the number of flights so that the thinned workforce could handle them safely. Traffic was reduced at first and then gradually built up. The agency began hiring and training new controllers, a process that took years, and the system took some years to return to full strength. It was not painless. The coverage at the time emphasized every delay and every complaint, which was fair enough, though it was less eager to report how well the substitute system worked.

I would add one thing as a matter of fairness. The rebuilding of the controller workforce was slow, and critics of the decision pointed, and still point, to the years of strained staffing that followed. That is a real cost, and the defenders of the decision should state it plainly. The question is whether the alternative, in which an illegal strike by government employees succeeds and invites the next one, would have cost more. I think it would have, and so did the President.

Clinton lifts the ban

The ban on rehiring the fired controllers lasted twelve years. In August 1993 President Bill Clinton lifted it, which let former strikers apply to return to FAA jobs. Few did, since a dozen years had passed and most of them had built other lives. It was a gesture of closure, and it is a reminder that the dispute did not harden into permanent bitterness. The law was enforced, the penalty was served, and the country moved on.

The numbered argument: why enforcement mattered

Let me give you the reasoning in order, because I think the story is best understood as a chain of five links.

1. A promise is a promise. The controllers had accepted a job on the condition that they would not strike. A worker who takes the benefits of a deal and then breaks it has no complaint when the other side holds him to his word. That is not anti-labor. It is the minimum standard for any contract.

1. The employer here was the public. A strike against a private company is a dispute between a union and its owners. A strike by controllers is aimed at the traveling public, at the families on the planes and at every business that depends on the airways. The government is not the controllers' enemy. It is the people's agent.

1. A law that is not enforced is a suggestion. If the government had met an illegal strike with a quiet settlement, every other federal union would have drawn the obvious conclusion. Postal workers, prison guards, soldiers' support staff: any group with leverage could have struck, with the same hope of a pass.

1. Deterrence works by being believed. What made the 1981 decision famous was that Reagan said what would happen, set a deadline and then did it. Threats that are never carried out teach people that threats can be ignored. This was the opposite.

1. The market, not just the law, was a witness. Private employers watched. In the following years, the willingness of employers to hire permanent replacements during strikes became more common, and the number of major work stoppages in the private economy fell. Historians and economists dispute how much of that change was caused by PATCO, since the decline in union power had many roots. But nobody serious says the episode did not matter.

The objection, stated fairly

Here is the strongest case against what Reagan did, in words the union's defenders would accept.

The controllers were highly trained professionals doing a stressful job in a dangerous environment, the argument goes. Their working conditions were real problems, and the government had been unresponsive. Workers have a basic right to withhold their labor, a right recognized in a free society, and the ban on public strikes is an anachronism. Firing eleven thousand people in a single stroke was disproportionate, it ruined careers and it damaged a trained workforce that was hard to replace. A President could have negotiated. And the broader result, a weakened labor movement, hurt American workers.

That is an argument to be taken seriously and answered, not sneered at. The answer is that the right to strike is a right against a private employer, who can choose to settle, and that the law denies it to those whose strike would hold the public hostage. The controllers knew the line, crossed it with open eyes and were offered a way back. The proportion of the response was set by the size of the offense: an illegal, nationwide work stoppage in a safety-critical industry.

What the coverage left out

Let me indulge a little in what I enjoy, which is the way the story gets told. In the folk version, a lone hero or a lone villain, depending on who is telling it, takes on a union and wins or loses. Left out of that version is the sequence. The union struck first. The union broke the law first. The union rejected an offer and a deadline. The decision to fire came last, and it came with an off-ramp.

Also left out in some tellings is the very ordinary character of the rule that was enforced. If you or I took a job with a company that had a no-strike clause, and then struck, nobody would be surprised at the result. When a government does the same, the headlines suddenly wonder how a President could be so harsh. It is the sort of coverage that treats an enforced rule as a shocking surprise and an ignored rule as perfectly normal. The people who wrote those pieces did not mean to be funny, but I will take a laugh where I can get it.

What it teaches about public-sector unions today

The lesson is not that unions are bad. The lesson is structural. A public employee union holds leverage against the government that no private union holds against a business, because the government cannot go out of business and cannot move its operations. That is exactly why the law denies it the final weapon, and why a President who enforces the denial is protecting the public and not attacking the worker. The wider argument is laid out in Public-sector unions, and why FDR doubted they could bargain at all, and the private-sector side of the debate in Should conservatives make peace with private-sector unions? Two views.

Think of the Founders' great project: a government of laws and not of men. In Federalist No. 51 Madison writes that ambition must be made to counteract ambition, and that if men were angels no government would be necessary. A rule that applies to everyone, including the powerful and the sympathetic, is what keeps a republic a republic. If the law against a strike can be waived for those who are loud enough, the law is a decoration.

There is an earlier chapter of the same story in In re Debs and the 1894 Pullman Strike That Made the Labor Injunction. The method differed, a federal court injunction in the nineteenth century and a firing deadline in the twentieth, but the principle was the same: the government must be able to keep the nation's essential systems running.

The case in brief

1. Federal employees may not strike. The ban dates to Taft-Hartley (1947) and appears in Title 5, section 7311 of the United States Code, and the controllers signed an affidavit pledging not to strike.
2. PATCO struck on August 3, 1981, over pay, hours and working conditions. President Reagan gave controllers 48 hours to return and fired about eleven thousand who stayed out.
3. The union was decertified, the FAA cut flights and rebuilt its workforce over years, and the cost of that rebuilding was real and should be admitted.
4. Enforcement mattered because a public strike holds the public hostage, and a law that is not enforced teaches the next group to ignore it.
5. Clinton lifted the rehire ban in 1993. The lesson for public-sector unions stands: leverage against a government is limited by law for good reason.

What you can do: read Title 5, section 7311 of the United States Code on the House's law revision site, then ask your own state's labor department which public employees in your state may and may not strike.