Lessons from 1981
For as long as 90 seconds on the afternoon of April 28, air traffic controllers at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey lost contact with the planes they were supposed to be guiding.
The moments of radio silence have led to a cascade of problems at one of the nation’s busiest airports, with flights getting delayed, diverted, and cancelled. United Airlines halted dozens of daily flights from the airport, citing the shortage of air traffic controllers causing safety concerns and disruptions.
The calculated shortage of air traffic controllers is a decades-old problem.
It dates back to 1981, when President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, who had been agitating over the previous decade to make the system safer. Their union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), had endorsed Reagan.
He refused to rehire the workers even under public pressure and a massive Solidarity Day march in September, which in the short term caused major staffing issues. It also caused a long-term problem, where controllers become eligible for retirement in “waves” dating back to the mass firings from Raegan, causing periodic shortages.
Air traffic controllers face even worse threats under Trump’s cuts and attacks on the federal workforce than they did under Reagan. In 2017 Trump attempted to privatize air traffic control and replace union workers. In February, he cut the jobs of hundreds of Federal Aviation Administration workers, including those who support air safety. Controllers are strained and exhausted due to shortages.
“Organized labor was caught flat-footed by Reagan’s breaking of PATCO,” writes historian Joseph McCartin, who wrote a book on the air traffic controller’s strike. Labor can’t make the same mistake this time, McCartin says.
And some forces are on our side, he writes: “Unions are riding a wave of popularity they have not seen since the days when Reagan was a Democrat. Unlike Reagan, Trump was not elected by a landslide, nor is he broadly popular. The public has none of the animosity toward federal workers today that many felt toward PATCO members, whom many saw as arrogant. While the public blamed controllers for flight delays, those whose federal contracts, grants, and services are being sacrificed amid these cutbacks have only Trump and Musk, a multi-billionaire who cares more about occupying Mars than addressing the concerns of everyday Americans, to blame. Public opinion is not clamoring for the complete dismantling of our government that is now underway.”
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