President Ronald Reagan speaking at a rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1982. Reagan was in fact an enemy of organized labor throughout his presidency. (Photo: Michael Evans)
On Thursday, Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta announced that former President Ronald Reagan will be entering the Labor Department’s Hall of Honor, joining the ranks of luminaries ranging from Mother Jones to Eugene Debs.
In his announcement, Acosta cited Reagan’s tenure as the president of the Screen Actors Guild, along with a series of personal anecdotes, to explain that the Gipper was a friend of the working class. However, one does not have to be a history scholar to understand that Reagan was in fact an enemy of organized labor throughout his presidency.
To start, we can look to his firing of over 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981. “More than any other labor dispute of the past three decades, Reagan’s confrontation with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or Patco, undermined the bargaining power of American workers and their labor unions,” Joseph A. McCartin, a professor of history at Georgetown University, wrote for the New York Times in 2011.
Reagan was enraged after thousands of air traffic controllers walked off the job — the result of the Federal Aviation Administration refusing to meet the bargaining demands of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization. The union wanted a wage increase for controllers and a slightly shorter workweek. Reagan responded by firing the controllers when they refused to return to work.
Richard Wolff, a professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, claims that unions never really recovered from the blow Reagan delivered in 1981. “The labor movement until that time had come to believe that it was strong enough that, even if it had a rough battle, it could work a compromise and salvage certain basic safeties, such as not replacing people during the strike,” Wolff tells In These Times. “All of these…