Been a while since I posted. I am working on a large set of posts about Reagan and all his fuckery on my main site Sweaty’s Corner. If you want to check them out, this is the page where the posts will appear: The Fulcrum
So I’m at the Lanes, nursing a White Russian made with half and half that smelled like it had seen things, and Maude slides a piece of paper down the lane at me. Not a score sheet. A chart. About strikes, man. In a bowling alley.
It wasn’t even a good chart, but there was a line on it that sat on the floor for decades and then went pretty goddamn vertical right around 1981. I’ve been staring at it for three days.
“Before 1980,” Maude says, flat as a lane, “employers used permanent replacements in fewer than two percent of strikes. In the 1980s, more than fourteen percent.”
“Okay,” I say. “So what changed in 1980?”
“The law didn’t.”
“Then what the fuck did?”
“Mackay Radio, 1938. The Supreme Court mentioned, in passing, that an employer could hire strikebreakers and wasn’t required to fire them when the strike ended. Forty-three years sitting in a drawer.”
A tool in a drawer, man. Like that thing under the sink you’ve never used, and then one day somebody uses it on a pipe and it works, and suddenly you realize you’ve been living next to a wrench the whole time.
The Rules
What happened in 1981 is this. About thirteen thousand air traffic controllers went on strike on August 3. Reagan gave them forty-eight hours to come back. They didn’t. He fired more than eleven thousand of them.
Here’s the thing that gets me. Nine and a half months earlier, he’d written their union a letter, promising “a spirit of cooperation.” A spirit of cooperation, man. That’s the same energy as telling me the rug really ties the room together and then watching a stranger piss on it. And technically he never promised not to fire anybody. A promise with no handles. You can’t pick it up, so you can’t hold it against him.
That’s when Walter, who has been standing there the entire time doing his Walter thing, loses his shit.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Dude! They broke the goddamn law! Federal employees can’t strike. They took an oath. These people keep airplanes from hitting each other, you stoned son of a bitch. Coolidge did it to the Boston cops in 1919 and Reagan hung the guy’s picture in the Cabinet Room. This is not ‘Nam, Dude. This is the sky. There are rules.”
And the annoying part is, Walter’s right. The strike was illegal. The union guy, Poli, made a terrible bet that the government would flinch, and the government did not flinch. If that’s all this was, it’d be a story about a bad bet.
But that’s the thing about Walter. He’s right about the wrong rule. The law explains why Reagan could fire them. It doesn’t explain the ultimatum, or the rehire ban that lasted until Clinton lifted it in 1993, or the fact that every boss in America took notes.
“What’s a permanent replacement?” Donny says.
“Donny, you’re out of your fucking element.”
“It means the job isn’t yours when the strike is over,” Maude says. “That’s the whole thing.”
“Oh,” says Donny. “That’s fucked up.”
“That’s different, Donny,” Walter says. “That’s private sector. Those air traffic guys worked for the government. Different goddamn rules.”
“Is it, though,” I say.
Maude has the numbers. Hormel. Phelps Dodge. International Paper. Greyhound. Employers who used the tool, one after another, and a Phelps Dodge president who put the whole thing in a sentence, according to the historian who wrote the book on it: “Suddenly people realized, Hell, you can beat a union.”
Union membership was 20.1 percent of workers in 1983. Seventeen point seven million people. Today it’s 10.0 percent. “Not all of that is PATCO,” Maude adds. “Trade. Factories closing. But the permission structure changed.”
The permission structure, man. The law never changed. Somebody just went first, and nothing happened to him.
That’s the thing with the rug. It’s not the first time somebody pees on it. It’s the second time, after nobody does anything about the first, and now it’s just a rug people pee on.
I don’t know what that says about America, man. I’ve got a chart and a headache, and I’m out of half and half. The guys who got fired didn’t get rehired for twelve years. Nobody’s brought back my rug either.
The Dude abides.