On August 3, 1981, 13,000 members of the union of air traffic controllers in the US—the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO)—went out on strike against their employer, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Hours after they walked out, President Ronald Reagan, speaking from the White House Rose Garden, invoked the anti-strike Taft-Hartley Act to fire the controllers if they did not return to work within two days.
The air traffic controllers defied the back-to-work order en masse, with 12,000 remaining on strike. Reagan fired them all on August 5.
Yet in spite of their militancy and solidarity, and deep support for their struggle within the working class as a whole, the strike was isolated and betrayed by the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, whose member unions in the airline industry and ground transportation crossed the PATCO picket lines to ensure defeat. A decade of union-busting and plant closures followed the defeat of the PATCO strike.
The betrayal of PATCO signaled the collapse of the trade unions and their rapid conversion into agencies of the corporations and the state. The transformation of the unions into business entities was completed over the course of the 1980s. Central political lessons must be drawn from the bitter experience of the PATCO strike, to arm workers with the socialist perspective needed to ensure victory in the mass struggles into which they are entering today.
