Joseph McCartin: "Collision Course"
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-09-07/joseph-mccartin-collision-course
“A free labor movement is essential to the preservation and expansion of free enterprise.” That’s what President Reagan wrote in a letter dated November 12, 1985. As president of the screen actors guild, he led a successful union strike. As governor of California, he supported the rights of government workers to unionize and bargain collectively. But in the early days of his presidency, he decided to break a strike by the air traffic controllers union. A labor historian describes the unique circumstances behind Reagan’s confrontation with PATCO and the consequences for American workers and politics.
Guests
Joseph McCartin
associate professor of History at Georgetown University and author of "Labor's Great War."
Comments
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Please have your guest give his opinion on the action President Obama did when he unilaterally froze Federal worker's pay WITHOUT union input/negotiations.
I was married to a French air traffic controller in the mid 1980s. He used to visit various air traffic control facilities in the US and was appalled at the conditions: archaic equipment, way too much traffic being handled by individual controllers, ridiculous hours (the international standard is a 32 hour week), not enough real breaks during the work day. His criticisms made me wonder how unsafe it made our skies and airports.
I was 27 years old and spent 4 years as an Air Controlman in the Navy. Hired into the FAA and achieved FPL status at a level 3 facility. Worked tower and approach control. I grew up in a small coal mining town near Pittsburgh, PA. It would have been, to me, morally wrong to not honor the strike. I still have people say to me, flippantly, that I should have "just gone back to work". They still don't realize that their high wages today are a result of unions of the past.
I find it exceedingly strange, and hypocritical, the Regan, who hated "big government" used the power of government to destroy a popular movement. Can your author comment on this apparent contravention of his personal political philosophy?
If there is time can you discuss the collision course that is happening now with public sector unions and all tax payers, local and federal. Address the union money laundering schemes involving union dues and the funding of democratic party candidates. Lastly, how local public unions have dishonestly twisted the debate as a problem between the rich and corporations versus the unions instead of the real problem of public unions versus the middle class homeowner and taxpayer.
I was flying from Copenhagen to JFK when Reagan fired the controllers. There were many nervous moments as we approached the landing, and the announcements from the cockpit stopped when passengers most needed reassurance. In the final moments we suddenly heard the engines start to roar and the 747 pulled up and flew around to make another approach -- finally capped with a smooth landing. That night I watched a TV news report about the air traffic situation and saw my plane being waved off to make a new approach. A dicey moment caused by a reckless president, in my view.
Excellent program. Could your guest comment on the fact that federal employee "collective bargaining" is restricted over provate sector since under the federal system there is no right to strike AND no right to bargain over wages and/or working conditions and has extensive rights retained to management and not open to bargaining. There is also the fact that federal employee political rights were and are heavily restricted by the Hatch Act.
We experienced the strike first hand. It was not just losing their jobs lot of things the government did to those controllers. They blackballed them . No one could get a job to support their families if the company had government contracts.
Yes, there were many underhanded things that occurred following the announcement of the strike. The public was not knowledgeable of all the venom that was directed at the controllers by the government, the media and the public. Washington National Airport will never be referred to by the name of Reagan National Airport. How ironic that an airport should be named after him.
The FAA called my home and offered me a job 16 years after the strike. I took it and went back for 4 years before I retired. The sad part of the whole thing is that the agency never learned a thing from the strike. Different voices still voice the same complaints about radar coverage, frequencies, hardware, software, and personnel issues. In order for them to hire somebody in automation the person had to be 60 years old to be familuar with the software which was, at the time, BAL and JOVIAL. When I left they were talking about upgrading to C which is another antique; amazing. It is still crisis management at best. They still do not hire for attrition among other things and it takes 3 years at least to train a full performance controller. Go figure !
how are people, individuals with relatively no voice or leg to stand on, have any ability to protect themselves without representation from Unions?
I am a small business owner, but have been employed as a union member when I was a teenager, as a non-union worker and now as an employer. People need to have a voice and that voice is through their union to protect themselves and their families.
Why is this so demonized?
Dr. Tom Czyz
Phoenix, AZ
John Van de Water, who was President Reagan's first Chairman of the NLRB by recess appointment, and who could not win Senate confirmation in the face of all out AFL-CIO lobbying against him, wrote a lengthy "Dear Ron" letter to Reagan strongly urging him not to fire the air traffic controllers. Ironically, organized labor then failed to defeat Reagan’s next appointee as Chairman, who in case after case did all he could to weaken unionization, collective bargaining, and the NLRB itself. At that time I was serving the remainder of my term as (an often dissenting) Member of the NLRB, being President Carter’s last appointee to the agency.
Clarification:
Maybe back before '81 Controllers worked Days, Nights, and Mids over 5 or 6 weeks. But as it stands today, Controllers work a "fall-back" schedule where we start with night shifts, have our generous 9 hours (yes, they added 1 whole hour to our crew rest in response to the sleeping) then go back into day and mid shifts. That isn't over a few weeks, that is in 1 week and EVERY week. The schedule promotes fatigue and a circadian rhythm is impossible. The flying public would NOT want to know how many Air Traffic Facilities work mandatory 6 day work weeks because of the short staffing that is about to get much much worse.