Turning Point

When we started an independent union with the United Labor Unions thirty years ago (at the dawn of the Reagan administration), my fellow organizers and I were most captivated by the concept of strikes as tactical organizing weapons. We were energized and excited about Local 1199’s success at reviving the use of “recognition strikes” to short-circuit the grueling labor board election process and the increasingly harsh whip hand of management-side labor lawyers.

I can still vividly remember those days in the fall of 1980 when our contract cafeteria workers at Tulane University’s student center shut down the noon lunch hour rush with a rally to demand recognition: Union Now—Lunch Later! Months later, while bargaining with Professional Food Management, I realized to my horror that our enthusiasm, militancy, and, yes, ignorance could have led to the firing of every one of those workers who were clearly engaged in an unprotected strike, whether we realized it or not. Those memories roared back painfully as I read about the missteps and misjudgments of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organizational (PATCO) leadership that Georgetown University labor historian Joseph A. McCartin documents excruciatingly in his new book about the PATCO strike, Collision Course.

At the time, union organizers all had convenient ways to rationalize what we were reading and hearing about the PATCO debacle. In 1980, PATCO had endorsed Reagan for president. Who did that but the Teamsters or the Seafarers or other unions out of whack and in trouble? Somehow, the air traffic controllers thought they had a deal with Reagan. Didn’t they realize he was rabidly anti-union, despite having been the only former union leader ever elected president? Weren’t they federal employees? Did they even have the right to strike? The federal sector was one of the few areas where both sides were still supposed to come to a contract. All of these rationalizations were excellent forms of denial, and it is to McCartin’s credit—and our peril—that he so meticulously researches the history of PATCO and the consequences of the strike, and turns much of what we might have thought (or hoped) topsy-turvy, leaving us to rethink what we thought we knew about the whole affair.

Labor history is a tough field to plow during an era of labor’s decline. This is not the era of David Brody, Irving Bernstein, Melvyn Dubofsky, or Philip Foner, or even the great, iconoclastic, and recently departed David Montgomery. Nor is now the time when interest or egotism encourages each international union to contract for its own “history” along the lines of the shelf of books I have on the Carpenters, Hotel Workers, Hospital Workers, and others. For those of us who like our labor history inspiring, hopeful, and even exciting, it is unsettling to read McCartin’s work on PATCO, whose short history from 1960 until the early 1980s strike, and terrible dénouement, lacks any heroic period at all. Collision Course is a subtle warning that the coming generation of labor historians—if there is one—will be sober and surgical in its analysis and what it writes may not be pretty to read, especially for those of us who worked in these vineyards as organizers, leaders, or members of the allied trades. McCartin has seized on a rare opportunity to grab the strike’s living witnesses and vividly document the relative rise and rapid demise of a union, within a small thirty-year window.

No one emerges in the way one would have hoped. McCartin suggests that PATCO did not get a bad deal from the Reaganites, as they came into power after President Jimmy Carter, as much as PATCO got caught overreaching and its controversial endorsement of Reagan was embedded in a classic failure to achieve a “meeting of the minds.” In a telling passage, McCartin reveals the heart of the dilemma and its repercussions.

PATCO’s leaders endorsed Reagan in the belief that his election provided the only plausible...