In his 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan promised cooperation and support, should he be elected. “You can rest assured that if I am elected president, I will take whatever steps are necessary to provide our air traffic controllers with the most modern equipment available and to adjust staff levels and work days so that they are commensurate with achieving a maximum degree of public safety...I pledge to you that my administration will work very closely with you to bring about a spirit of cooperation between the president and the air traffic controllers.”
PATCO, one of only four AFL-CIO unions to do so, endorsed Reagan for President.
In gratitude, Reagan fired 11,000 striking controllers were fired. The head of the air controllers was put in chains. Not only did Reagan terminate their employment, but he also banned them from federal service for life. PATCO was decertified as a representative union.
Reagan had immediately denounced a strike by the air-traffic controllers as illegal and a "peril to national safety." Yet it was Reagan who was risking passenger safety. Joseph McCartin, writing for The New York Times wrote “Even his closest advisors worried that a major air disaster might result from the wholesale replacement of striking controllers. Air travel was significantly curtailed, and it took several years and billions of dollars (much more than PATCO had demanded) to return the system to its pre-strike levels.”
No significant federal job actions followed Reagan's firing of the PATCO strikers. By 2010, the number of workers participating in walkouts was less than 2% of what it had been when Reagan led the actors' strike in 1952. When Reagan led the Screen Actors Guild walkout in 1952, roughly a third of the entire American workforce belonged to a labor union. Today, about 12% of the workforce is unionized.
Lacking the leverage that strikes once provided, unions have been unable to pressure employers to increase wages as productivity rises. Inequality has ballooned to a level not seen since the 1920s. Corporate profits are at an all-time postwar high as a percentage of GDP, and wages as a percentage of GDP have fallen to an all-time low. The Dow Jones Industrial Average began what would be the longest and strongest secular bull market in its history a year after Reagan broke PATCO, producing real gains of nearly 700% from 1982 to 2000, even though real corporate earnings only doubled during the same period.
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