Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America.

• Author: Osorio, Ivan
• Position: Book review

Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America

Joseph A. McCartin

New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, 504 pp.

President Ronald Reagan's firing of more than 12,000 illegally striking air traffic controllers in August 1981 is widely considered a defining moment both for Reagan's presidency and for American organized labor. For Reagan, it was the first of many lines in the sand he drew during his presidency. For organized labor, it marked an assault from an anti-union president determined to prevail against a Democratic constituency.

The reality, however, was more complicated than those competing narratives, as Georgetown University labor historian Joseph McCartin shows in his book Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers and the Strike that Changed America. The conflict between the federal government and the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) dated back over a decade before Reagan became president. In effect, Reagan inherited the federal government's conflict-laden relationship with PATCO.

PATCO was not a typical public employee union. While hardly politically conservative, its early membership consisted largely of military veterans. For them, a career in air traffic control presented a unique opportunity to put the skills they had learned in the service to remunerative civilian use, thereby starting on a path to the middle class. They saw themselves as members of a skilled elite professional class.

Yet there was only one employer who could make use of their skills: the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). This monopsony meant FAA air traffic controllers had few options to address any grievances they might have.

Their efforts to expand such options merely pitted one centralized entity--the FAA--against another--PATCO. Like two planes on a collision course, two expressions of the 1960s--large public sector unions, represented by PATCO, and the conservative movement, represented by Reagan--were headed for a clash. In the end, the collision greatly damaged the unions.

That may seem hard to believe today. A majority of union members work for government entities and the public sector's share of overall union membership keeps growing. Yet that trend, which gained strength during the 1960s and 1970s, temporarily halted after the PATCO strike debacle. Today, around a third of public sector workers in the United States are unionized. Without the PATCO...