Ronald Reagan’s response to the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike in 1981 has come to be seen as a seminal event for both his administration and in labor history. As Joseph McCartin notes in his history of the strike, Reagan’s dismissal of the striking air traffic controllers has come to be seen as a signpost in the decline of organized labor in late 20th century America. Yet, as McCartin demonstrates, the strike and the dismissals was as much a culmination of a series of events as it was an indicator of things to come, one that can only be understood within a much broader examination of PATCO’s history and the work of its members.

To that end, McCartin begins by chronicling the origins of the union in the 1960s. A product of growing concern by controllers over air safety, the early efforts by controllers to develop a unified voice evolved into a union by the end of the decade. Here McCartin spends considerable space describing working conditions, recounting a hierarchal environment where controllers’ concerns, particularly those regarding their workload and occupational stress, often went unaddressed. Upon its establishment in 1968, PATCO set out to redefine working conditions so as to reduce some of the pressures of the job and the toll it took on its members, winning a number of key concessions in their initial negotiations with the federal government.

PATCO’s focus changed with the economic problems of the 1970s. With inflation eroding their members’ salaries, PATCO started requesting increased pay and benefits in their contract talks. Here they faced successive Republican and Democratic administrations anxious to reduce inflation, yet conscious of the controllers’ ability disrupt air travel in any labor dispute. In the 1981 contract negotiations the Reagan administration offered a number of unprecedented concessions, but the controllers – whose increasing militancy was fueled by a long list of workplace grievances and a belief that previous contracts had delivered less than was possible – felt that a strike would win further concessions to their demands. Once the strike began, however, the administration took control of the narrative, redefining it as a challenge to the government’s power and rallying the public to its side. After giving the controllers 48 hours to return to work, Reagan fired the strikers, destroying PATCO and setting a new tone that has defined relations between organized labor and management ever since.

Written with sympathy and insight, McCartin provides a comprehensive account of both PATCO and the 1981 strike. By providing the context of the strike, McCartin sets it within the larger context of the labor, economic, and political history of America in the latter half of the 20th century, showing the larger forces at work and how the strike shaped subsequent developments. The result is an oftentimes tragic account of dedicated, hardworking people in stressful jobs on the losing end of a changing economic and political environment, one that remains relevant even three decades later. This is likely to be the definitive account of the strike, and can be read with profit by anyone interested in understanding the plight of the American worker today. ( )