(en) US, WSA, Ideas & Action - Lessons from the Air Traffic Controllers? Strike of 1981 by A.E. Martinez

?There are no illegal strikes, just unsuccessful ones.? ? PATCO slogan ---- August 3rd, 
1981: Approximately 13,000 air traffic controllers across the United States declare a 
strike through their union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers? Organization 
(PATCO). Their strike echoed the usual demands of the labor movement: better wages, better 
working conditions, a shorter workweek, and ultimately a greater voice for workers at 
work. Indeed, the PATCO strike was hardly remarkable in any way. In our own decade, we 
have seen public-sector workers walk out several times over grievances basically identical 
to those of the PATCO workers, whether they were Chicago schoolteachers in 2012, New York 
City subway workers in 2014, or Philadelphia subway workers again in the same year.

As public employees, PATCO workers were in an unfortunate position where their employer 
was the same body that writes and enforces the law. The state is predictably hypocritical 
when it comes to dealing with its own employees: while it maintains a general policy of 
non-intervention in allowing private-sector workers to strike, it does not extend the same 
rights to its own employees ? in 39 states, it is illegal for public-sector workers to 
strike. Clearly, the state sees no conflict of interests in an arrangement where the body 
responsible for administering workers? right to strike is also a body which employs workers.

Despite the rather routine pattern followed by the PATCO workers, then-President Reagan 
made it clear that his goal was to break the strike and crush the union. Speaking as both 
the employer and the state executive, Reagan ordered PATCO workers to return to work at 
the threat of termination, on the very same day they had walked out. With only 1,300 air 
traffic controllers heeding Reagan?s warning, the strike lived on. On August 5th, Reagan 
summarily fired the remaining 11,500 workers and called in military air traffic 
controllers to replace them. Finally, on October 22nd, the government formally stripped 
PATCO of the right to legally represent workers as a labor union.

What the State Gives, It Can Take Away

To be clear, the government did not destroy PATCO. It did not raid its union halls, arrest 
its leaders, or murder its organizers. It merely stripped PATCO of the legal title of 
?union:? PATCO could no longer be considered the legal representative of workers. Very 
simply, in the eyes of the state, PATCO was no longer a union. As such, PATCO was only 
?destroyed? inasmuch as it relied on legal recognition for its existence. PATCO as a labor 
organization dissolved not from the result of state aggression, but due to its own 
over-reliance on state recognition.

Labor law has transformed the landscape of labor organizing. Before labor law was 
introduced, labor unions relied exclusively on the collective power of workers to stop 
working. To ?organize? a plant was simply to gain a majority of workers to become union 
members. The union would then approach the employer and declare, ?Either give us better 
working conditions, or we will stop working until you do.? Labor unions were simply bodies 
created by workers to organize and coordinate their collective power. If the union was 
unable to initiate or enforce a work stoppage, it had no power at the bargaining table. 
The bargaining power of the union was thus totally dependent on the active participation 
of the workers.

Nowadays, most labor unions have abandoned the power of united workers for the power of 
the law. Today?s organizing drive has little to do with organizing. Rather, the union 
initiates an election campaign in which they convince the workers to consent to the Union 
?representing?

them. The government will then hold an election and, if the Union wins a majority of the 
votes, the Union is certified to be the legal representative of those workers. In this 
arrangement, unions rarely depend on inspiring workers to act collectively. Indeed, they 
do not depend on the worker or his/her power at all: their legitimacy is derived from 
government recognition, not from workers identifying the union with their interests.

What happens if, like in the PATCO strike, the government takes away the Union?s right to 
legally represent workers at the bargaining table? For a union that relies on the law?s 
power rather than the workers?, this means immediate destruction. But for a genuine union 
of workers, this would make little difference. Genuinely, a labor union is nothing more 
than a coalition of workers uniting to gain power in their workplace. Workers do not need 
state recognition to organize their collective ability to shut down production.

In an analogous situation, the lumber workers of the Industrial Workers of the World came 
to the same conclusion (in 1917, no less):

When workers sign an agreement not to strike, they sign away the only weapon they possess. 
Past experience has shown that employers only respect contracts so long as the workers 
have power to enforce them. When the workers have such power, contracts are unnecessary. 
When they lack power, contracts are useless, for the employers break them whenever it 
suits their purpose?

Where workers are organized enough to demand a union to be recognized as their legal 
representative, they do not need the law in the first place. Where workers are so 
disorganized to the point where they need legal recognition to force the employer to the 
bargaining table, they have no power at the bargaining table to begin with, as the only 
true power workers possess is their collective ability to stop or interfere with work.

By abandoning shopfloor-level mobilization of workers, we are surrendering the only power 
we as workers possess. Now that a union?s bargaining power is tied to state recognition, 
the unions must obey the law to remain ?legitimate? in the eyes of the government: if the 
state rules a strike illegal (as with PATCO), the Union must call it off or be 
decertified. The Union must further turn against its workers when they engage in 
collective activity which has been deemed illegal (sympathy strikes, boycotts and hot 
cargos, slow-downs).

Ironically, it was ?illegal? labor action like that of the PATCO strike which established 
these laws in the first place.

Labor Law: Comfort at the Expense of Power

Labor laws were not passed out of benevolence or good-will on the part of the state. Nor 
was it strategic political lobbying or campaign funding by unions which created these laws 
(no matter how much AFL-CIO leaders would like you to believe otherwise). No ? faced with 
an increasingly militant and powerful labor movement, the state was forced to create a 
system which reigned in unions? power. The laws that govern labor today, in every case, 
were introduced as emergency measure by business interests to halt the progress made by 
organized labor.

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (which is the foundational law for collective 
bargaining in the United States, and covers virtually all private-sector workers) is the 
most obvious example. 1934 saw a wave of militant work stoppages across the country: 
workers initiated a general strike in San Francisco while dockworkers up and down the west 
coast

collectively paralyzed shipping; commercial truck drivers shut down the city of 
Minneapolis (and 20,000 construction workers went on strike to support them), while 
factory workers in Ohio occupied their factories in a mass strike supported by leagues of 
unemployed workers.

In the summer of 1934 alone, 12 strikers were killed by police, the National Guard, and 
employer-hired militiamen. One police report from the Minneapolis Teamsters? Strike read 
plainly:

Police took direct aim at the picketers and fired to kill. [...] No weapons were in 
possession of the picketers.1

How did the state go from a policy of shooting strikers in 1934, to ?guaranteeing? their 
right to strike in 1935? In one year, the police and military lined up behind the 
employers; a few months later, the state proclaimed that it cherished workers? right to 
strike, and would defend that right from the employers. The National Labor Relations Act 
and other laws like it disarmed the labor movement and turned organizing into a 
stage-managed reenactment of genuine labor organizing. Thus, the state came to support 
striking, so long as these strikes were conducted within the parameters of laws which 
greatly reduced whatever threat was posed by organized labor to employers or politicians. 
Rather than gain the trust and confidence of workers, unions merely had to collect signed 
authorization cards; rather than rely on a mass work stoppage to enforce a contract or to 
oppose an unjust firing, unions need only to turn to the ?impartial? labor courts.

Labor law makes running a union much simpler for union executives, just as it makes 
dealing with unions much easier for employers and the state alike. Indeed, it would seem 
that labor law is beneficial for everyone except actual workers. Whereas labor law gives 
generously to employers, and concedes much (though conditionally) to unions, labor law has 
only curtailed the power of workers.

Though it may be tempting to make the case that the state will only respond with an iron 
fist to public-sector unions, the truth is that both public- and private-sector unions 
must deal with the price of state recognition. The state regularly breaks strikes in the 
private sector ? after all, it was the state?s iron-fisted response to private-sector 
strikes in 1934 which created these very laws! The trade-off between the comfort and 
security provided by the law, and the power it takes away from workers, is a price that 
all unions must grapple with ? whether they are public or private, and whether they 
operate under the National Labor Relations Act, the Railway Labor Act, or any other labor 
law. Without state recognition, does the labor movement have the degree of workplace-level 
self-organization to survive? Indeed, if we took away state recognition altogether, would 
there be any real ?labor movement? left?

1: 1934 Teamster Strike from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters? official website. 
http://teamster.org/about/teamster-history/1934