PATCO Strike

The August 1981 strike of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) resulted in the termination of thousands of federal employees for engaging in a work stoppage. Undoubtedly the most important federal employee strike in the second half of the 20th century, it is widely regarded as the commencement of virulent attacks on the U.S. labor movement by both private and public sector employers. On the morning of the strike's first day, August 3, President Ronald Reagan announced on television that any striking controllers who did not go back to work within 48 hours would be fired. Two days later, on August 5, after only 1,300 controllers returned to their towers, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) terminated 11,345 strikers, approximately 90% of the 13,000 controllers who walked out. At the time, Secretary of Transportation Drew Lewis proclaimed that these dismissals effectively ended the strike and that none of those discharged would be eligible to work in the future as air traffic controllers.

At first, PATCO's militancy and obstinacy in its strike against the federal government might appear incomprehensible in light of the union's political support for Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign and the political conservatism of a workforce many of whom were patriotic Vietnam-era veterans. The strike was years in the making, with controllers expressing significant hostility in response to more than a decade of authoritarian FAA management practices.

The roots of PATCO date to the implementation of President John F. Kennedy's 1962 Executive Order 10988, which allowed public sector unions to organize and required federal agencies to negotiate with them. At that time, controllers at various airports began to form either independent local unions or similar organizations under the sponsorship of the Air Traffic Controllers Association and the National Association of Government Employees. After successful job actions during 1967 by Chicago and Los Angeles controller organizations led to pay increases, a meeting was held in Newark (New Jersey) among controllers from Atlanta, Chicago, Newark, Philadelphia, and Kennedy Airport (New York) to discuss strategy for obtaining wage raises from the FAA. At this gathering, the attendees also realized the necessity of establishing a nationwide organization of air traffic controllers.

Taking the lead in this initiative was the Metropolitan Controllers Association, created in 1967 by controllers at the four New York City area airports. Enlisting the aid of F. Lee Bailey, the well-known criminal defense lawyer, PATCO was formed with 600 controllers from 22 states attending the organization's first general meeting on January 11, 1968. Within 1 month, 4,000 controllers had joined the new union.

Because of its concern over safety in the skies, PATCO launched Operation Air Safety, a work-to-rule job action designed to slow down the nation's air traffic, from early July through the end of August 1968. After the resulting chaos, the FAA asked to negotiate with PATCO for the first time. In exchange for abandoning its job action, the union requested three things from the FAA—the reclassification of wage levels and the upgrading of wages when deemed necessary, the reopening of the FAA's Oklahoma City Academy so that new controllers could be trained to eliminate the understaffing of the air traffic controller system, and the exemption of controllers from civil service rules so that they could earn time-and-a-half pay for overtime work. By November 1968, all the union's demands had been achieved. The FAA upgraded salaries at a number of major airports, Congress had granted $14 million in new appropriations to reopen the Oklahoma City Academy and for the hiring of 1,000 new controllers, and Congress approved legislation exempting controllers from civil service overtime guidelines.

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