PATCO on Steroids, Joe Allen

**Yard Dog** · 04-18-2025, 10:13 PM

I was 10 in 1981

**WTF891** · 04-19-2025, 11:59 AM

Based on your comments not much has changed.

**AlJackson1962!** · 04-22-2025, 03:17 PM

My then girlfriend, Solangel (now my wife), and I rode a train from Boston to DC for the Solidarity Day Rally late September 17, 1981. I was a Local 25 member working at Metropolitan Petroleum in Chelsea, Mass. The train was chartered by the event organizers /supporters. It was packed to the gills. I recall that Lane Kirkland, then AFL-CIO leader, was quoted in The Boston Globe responding to a question: If not the mass firing of PATCO members, what circumstances would result in the AFL-CIO's call for a general strike? Lane Kirkland answered to the effect: "If there was a Coup d'Etat in the USA, that would justify a call for a general strike." Are we there yet?

There was a TDU contingent at the rally. I remember Carol Paff being there. The irony of PATCO endorsing Reagan, because he feigned support for their key demand of a shorter work week as a health and safety issue; a classic double-cross. European air traffic controllers as I recall, worked a 30 hour week or thereabouts at that time - recognizing the highly stressful nature of the job.
But, like O'Brien today, PATCO leaders should have known what to expect from Ronnie Ray-Gun.

Solangel and I brought our TDU Boston Chapter banner and detoured from the rally briefly, to stand in front of Teamsters headquarters on 25 Louisiana Avenue, NW. It was quiet at The Marble Palace - it appeared to be closed - no support offered to the half million people protesting the most anti-union action of the federal government (since Taft Hartley got passed in 1947?). Whereas, when we got to DC in the wee hours before the rally, we were given cots to sleep on in a building trades union building.

I look back on that rally as the sort of action that the Teamsters should have been using to fight trucking deregulation that was just starting to decimate the unionized freight industry. The IBT had over 2 million members then and could have organized mass rallies around the country demanding job security for the hundreds of thousands of NMFA covered members that would lose their union jobs in the years to come.
So, yes there are parallels to Trump/MAGA. That action set the tone for the 80's and even the 90's for organized labor. Bill Clinton barred photographers from his Oval Office signing of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), although he invited some union leaders for the signing. The War On Workers went into full scale with the PATCO firings. Employers started threatening and using "permanent replacements" much more readily as a result. This had a huge impact on bargaining, just like Joe Allen writes in the above article.

I posted the attached on my Local 251 bulletin board.

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