Will the Teachers Take Control?
No group is better positioned than organized teachers to force Washington to develop a national plan to deal with the pandemic.
On August 3, 1981, federal air traffic controllers in the United States launched an illegal strike, grounding flights from Guam to Puerto Rico. President Ronald Reagan walked into the Rose Garden that morning to deliver an ultimatum: unless they returned to work within forty-eight hours, the controllers would be fired. While few contemporary observers immediately grasped its significance, that confrontation soon led not only to defeat for the controllers—who were permanently replaced when they defied Reagan’s order—but to disempowerment for American workers generally. Following Reagan’s example, private-sector employers made the 1980s synonymous with strikebreaking and union-busting, initiating a decades-long labor retreat.
We might soon witness a similarly momentous showdown. Today, thirty-nine years to the day after the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike began, teachers across the nation are staging a National Day of Resistance demanding safe schools. Their protest is every bit as audacious as the 1981 strike, yet the teachers’ strategy, and the context behind their protest, could not be more different. The differences indicate both how much public-sector unions have learned from history and the crucial role their members are poised to play in pushing our leaders to finally deal seriously with this raging pandemic.
The controllers’ strike, even many of its most ardent supporters later conceded, was poorly conceived. It was an illegal walkout whose most important demand was a large across-the-board wage increase—a demand levied during a recession in which other unions were offering concessions. PATCO not only challenged a popular president, it made no effort to cultivate allies even in the AFL-CIO, after alienating union leaders by endorsing Reagan’s election a year earlier. Controllers believed they could win their fight alone—that they would CONTINUE READING: Will the Teachers Take Control? | Dissent Magazine