PATCO dismissals in 1981 dealt savage blow to U.S. labor

08/10/2006

More unionized firms have demanded concessions, and working families pay the price.

Charles J. Whalen
Washington Post
Published: August 10, 2006

This month marks the 25th anniversary of one of the most devastating strikes in modern U.S. labor history. On Aug. 3, 1981, more than 12,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization walked off their jobs.

It was not the first illegal strike by public-sector workers, but conventional means of resolving such cases failed to impress President Ronald Reagan: He discharged and permanently replaced those who would not promptly return to work.

The U.S. labor movement has never recovered, and working families across the nation continue to pay the price.

In the immediate aftermath of the PATCO strike, many observers reported that Reagan’s action marked a turning point in U.S. labor relations.

History has shown this assessment was right on the mark. If it is true that the strike is labor’s “only true weapon,” as some unionists suggest, then practically the entire movement has been disarmed. This also indicates that the legal right of workers to organize and bargain collectively has little real meaning.

In 2005 American labor disputes led to 22 major work stoppages, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. From the end of World War II until 1981, the annual number was about 10 times that—and sometimes much higher. A major reason for the sharp decline: Reagan’s headline-grabbing dismissal of PATCO workers emboldened employers across the nation. Overnight, it became legitimate to threaten striking employees with permanent replacement.

Private-sector companies have had the right to permanently replace workers during bargaining disputes since 1938. Until 1981 few employers took advantage of this option. In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, there was only one documented use of permanent replacements for about every 80 major work stoppages, according to a calculation by Joseph A. McCartin of Georgetown University. In the first 10 years after 1981, however, there was one documented use of permanent replacements for every seven work stoppages.

In the wake of Reagan’s action against PATCO, a number of unionized firms demanded major concessions and threatened permanent replacement as the alternative. Many unorganized workers quickly got the message, and employers have often driven home the point during organizing drives. The result has been downward pressure on workers’ wages.

There are also more visible costs. The use of permanent replacements during a 1987-88 strike against International Paper by its union in Jay, Maine, “tore the community apart,” according to research by Julius Getman of the University of Texas law school. After the strike was broken, some union members returned to work alongside their replacements, and even years later, area residents on all sides of the dispute felt surrounded by hatred and bitterness at work and in the community. Getman reports that eventually even the company’s chief executive concluded that replacing strikers “was a major mistake that cost the company more than a billion dollars.”

The labor movement has, of course, taken the biggest hit. In 2005, 12.5 percent of U.S. workers were union members, according to the Labor Department. In 1983, the first year for which comparable data are available, the membership rate was 20.1 percent.

Through the International Labor Organization, governments around the world have declared that the right to strike is part of the freedom of association. In short, it is a human right. The ILO has also found that the U.S. permanent-replacement doctrine undermines that right.

In the 1990s, efforts to outlaw the use of permanent replacements were defeated by opponents who painted the bill as “special interest” legislation. Yet, just as labor’s gains long benefited many more than those who were unionized, labor’s losses since the early 1980s have adversely affected a much larger share of the workforce than that belonging to unions.

Labor watchers knew the PATCO episode was a watershed, but it’s unlikely that even the most pessimistic witnesses expected it would cast such a long, dark shadow.

Charles J. Whalen is a labor-market economist and editor of Perspectives on Work, a journal published by the Labor and Employment Relations Association. He wrote this article for the Washington Post.