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Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America
Oxford University Press
October 2011
On Sale: October 6, 2011
504 pages
ISBN: 0199836787
EAN: 9780199836789
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In August 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers
Organization (PATCO) called an illegal strike. The new
president, Ronald Reagan, fired the strikers, establishing a
reputation for both decisiveness and hostility to organized
labor. As Joseph A. McCartin writes, the strike was the
culmination of two decades of escalating conflict between
controllers and the government that stemmed from the
high-pressure nature of the job and the controllers'
inability to negotiate with their employer over vital
issues. PATCO's fall not only ushered in a long period of
labor decline; it also served as a harbinger of the campaign
against public sector unions that now roils American politics. Collision Course sets the strike within a vivid panorama of
the rise of the world's busiest air-traffic control system.
It begins with an arresting account of the 1960 midair
collision over New York that cost 134 lives and exposed the
weaknesses of an overburdened system. Through the stories of
controllers like Mike Rock and Jack Maher, who were
galvanized into action by that disaster and went on to found
PATCO, it describes the efforts of those who sought to make
the airways safer and fought to win a secure place in the
American middle class. It climaxes with the story of Reagan
and the controllers, who surprisingly endorsed the
Republican on the promise that he would address their
grievances. That brief, fateful alliance triggered
devastating miscalculations that changed America, forging
patterns that still govern the nation's labor politics. Written with an eye for detail and a grasp of the vast
consequences of the PATCO conflict for both air travel and
America's working class, Collision Course is a stunning
achievement.
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