New Styles in Union Busting

Mr. Reagan, like his hero Cal Coolidge, turns out to be an accomplished union buster. (Was ever a union more skillfully finessed than the Professional Air Traffic Controllers? The adroitness of it all may be comparable to that of Silent Cal when he roused himself from his congenital torpor long enough to break a policemen’s strike in Boston.) Reagan was once a union official in Tinseltown, his natural home. Then and there Le Cowboy must have been transformed into Le Grand Simplificateur that he is today. Long years on the corporate lecture circuit supplied him with the rhetoric he will never stop using. PATCO endorsed Reagan in 1980, and thought it would enjoy a quid pro quo when the time came to negotiate. Instead, 13,000 controllers—all those who refused to scab—were fired. The Great Communicator had sent his message: such a strike “against the government” was as reprehensible in this country as it was laudable in Poland.

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