Lethemeul Wrote:Quote:He was a consummate union-buster.
He was the President of SAG. He believed in unions. PATCO (which is the event your referring to, I'm sure) threatened to strike if they did not get a 100% pay increase. Their request came well before economic recovery. It is/was federal law that federal employees were not allowed to strike. They did, in violation of that law. Reagan fired them. Seems like he did the right thing to me.
I'm not a labor lawyer, but my understanding is that under normal circumstances, it is illegal for a business to fire a worker simply for going on strike.
If business is slow once the labor dispute is resolved, the business can opt not to bring back all of the striking workers right away. Also, I don't think the business is under any obligation to get rid of replacement workers to bring back strikers.
Typically, a list of striking workers is created, and the business is required to draw from that list when openings occur.
That's normal practice. And, sure, those legal requirements went out the window when PATCO called an illegal strike.
But keep in mind that the PATCO strike was hardly the first illegal strike of federal workers. My understanding is that there been a couple dozen during the 1970s involving postal workers, GPO workers and the like.
Reagan didn't have to fire those workers. He chose to do that -- and in doing so he nuked 11,000 careers. Suddenly, a whole bunch of men and women who had spent years learning their trade couldn't get jobs anywhere in America doing what they had been trained to do.
Imagine a teacher getting fired in an illegal strike -- and then being told he could no longer get a job anywhere in America as a teacher.
From the fired workers' perspective, that's what happened. They were blacklisted from a career.
It didn't have to be that way.
On a side note, I don't agree at all with the idea that Reagan believed in unions.
Yet, he was at one point president of the Screen Actors Guild -- and at the time, considered himself a Roosevelt Democrat. At some point during the 1950s, Reagan underwent a radical transformation and swung well to the right of the American mainstream. (America moved in Regan's direction during the remainder of his life, and Reagan himself played a role in that).
I'd invite other people to clarify Reagan's true feeling on unions -- but I don't think he had any patience at all for them by the time he was president. His handling of the PATCO strike reflected that, I think.