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30 Years Ago: The Day the Middle Class Died

On August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired every member [11,345] of the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) who’d defied his order to return to work and declared their union illegal. They had been on strike for just two days.

Reagan had been backed by Wall Street in his run for the White House and they, along with right-wing Christians, wanted to restructure America and turn back the tide that President Franklin D. Roosevelt started — a tide that was intended to make life better for the average working person.

But Reagan could not have pulled this off by himself in 1981. He had some big help: The AFL-CIO.

The biggest organization of unions in America told its members to cross the picket lines of the air traffic controllers and go to work. And that’s just what these union members did. Union pilots, flight attendants, delivery truck drivers, baggage handlers — they all crossed the line and helped to break the strike. And union members of all stripes crossed the picket lines and continued to fly.

Reagan and Wall Street could not believe their eyes! Hundreds of thousands of working people and union members endorsing the firing of fellow union members. It was Christmas in August for Corporate America.

And that was the beginning of the end. Reagan and the Republicans knew they could get away with anything — and they did. They slashed taxes on the rich. They made it harder for you to start a union at your workplace. They eliminated safety regulations on the job. They ignored the monopoly laws and allowed thousands of companies to merge or be bought out and closed down. Corporations froze wages and threatened to move overseas if the workers didn’t accept lower pay and less benefits. And when the workers agreed to work for less, they moved the jobs overseas anyway.

And at every step along the way, the majority of Americans went along with this.

Read on.

i was eleven. i don’t recall his words at the time, but i distinctly remember my dad, a nixon republican but also a union airplane mechanic (with a manufacturer, not an airline), shaking his head and muttering a lot, with this sideways look on his face that he still gets when contemplating things, like the passing of a friend, that are as fucked as they are inevitable. fatalism.

i also remember my dad being periodically “on strike” throughout my childhood—my understanding of the phrase didn’t extend much beyond the fact that he would be at home to have lunch with us during the week. i asked him recently how he’d felt about his union, and he said pointedly, “without the unions, the companies would’ve shit all over everyone.”

when i suggested that that’s basically what’s happened over the course my lifetime and why we’re at where we’re at now as a country and society, the crossways look came back. archie bunker father and pinko commie son agree!

I reblogged this when it was posted but figured it was worth another reblog for Labor Day. My penance for the day is thinking about ways in which I am complicit with anti-Union sentiments and how to correct that.

1981

Ahhhh my birthday…. Bleeechh