Georgetown Panel Examines Wisconsin Uprising
A year ago, thousands of Wisconsin workers filled the statehouse and streets of Madison protesting Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) attack on their collective bargaining rights. The battle reverberated beyond the borders of Wisconsin, triggering a nationwide dialogue on collective bargaining.
On Wednesday, Feb. 15, the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, will hold a special discussion focusing on what the Wisconsin protests mean a year later; the history, law, and politics of collective bargaining in the public sector; and what these public sector labor struggles mean for the country more generally.
The discussion will run from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the Georgetown Law Gewirz Center on the 12th floor.
Georgetown University professor and Kalmanowitz Initiative Executive Director Joseph McCartin will lead the panel. Panelists include Craig Becker, a former National Labor Relations Board member, Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin (IAFF), Joseph P. Rugola, executive director of the Ohio Association of Public School Employees (OAPSE/AFSCME) and Newsweek and Daily Beast contributor, Eleanor Clift.
50 Years Ago, JFK Opened Door for Federal Employees to Join Unions
Fifty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order opening the door for 2 million federal employees to join unions. His action set the stage for expanding these rights under Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter—a bipartisan recognition that federal employees should have a voice on the job.
Executive Order 10988 “might be the least known of the string of significant events that made the 1960s such crucial years in American history,” writes Georgetown University history professor Joseph McCartin—but it contributed to a wave of public-sector unionization that grew tenfold between 1955 and 1975, topping 4 million by the early 1970s.
It’s fitting that on this key anniversary, when we acknowledge the decades-long efforts of public employees to work for passage of laws such as EO 10988, that public employees and workers across Wisconsin have today sent a strong signal that they will never give up the struggle for their rights to bargain collecitvely for a middle-class life.
Read McCartin’s full op-ed here.
Reagan’s Union-Busting in PATCO Strike Reverberates Today
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Jim Morin was a former Air Force air traffic controller when he joined the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 1977 and was assigned to one of the busiest airports in the nation, New York’s LaGuardia, where he became secretary-treasurer of the PATCO local.
But even as air traffic was growing and the air traffic control system was working at near capacity, the FAA was cutting staffing numbers and forcing controllers to work longer hours, especially in the spring and summer when thunderstorms would back planes up across the country.
We’d get hammered. So many planes and so few places to put them. It just wore you down, especially if you worked swing shift [3-11 p.m.]. The fatigue factor was huge and a lot of suggestions we made just fell on deaf ears.
In 1981, Morin says controllers knew they were risking their jobs when 12,000 went on strike after negotiations broke down. But they stuck together in solidarity. President Ronald Reagan followed through on his threat and fired the controllers and busted PATCO. That’s still reverberating today, says Morin.
The major ramification for organized labor today is that employers are no longer hesitant to go ahead and hire or threaten to hire replacement workers and workers and unions are very hesitant to use it [strike] now. As far as conservatives are concerned, they point to the strike and the firings as a shining moment in labor history.
Morin was part of a forum at the AFL-CIO today in Washington, D.C., where Georgetown University associate history professor Joseph McCartin, author of the definitive book on the PATCO strike, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America, explored the strike’s impact on the labor movement and its connection to the erosion of collective bargaining as a path for workers to get to and stay in the middle class. Read the rest of this entry »
Special AFL-CIO Event Will Explore 30-Year Impact of PATCO Strike
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Thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan fired the nation’s air traffic controllers after they walked out on strike, signaling an escalation in the war on workers and the middle class that is still being waged three decades later.
On Wednesday, Dec. 14, at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., Georgetown University associate history professor Joseph McCartin will discuss his new book on the PATCO strike, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America.
McCartin will be joined by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Kenneth Moffett, who headed up the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service during the strike, as well as several former PATCO members.
The event is free and gets under way at 2:30 p.m. EST. Copies of Collision Course will be available for sale and a book signing will follow the event.
Click here to RSVP.
PATCO Strike Changed America, Sheds Light on U.S. Today
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When 12,000 U.S. air traffic controllers went on strike 30 years ago, Ronald Reagan threatened that if they were not back on the job in 48 hours, they would be fired. Two days later, 11,000 of them, all members of PATCO, were terminated and permanently replaced. The PATCO strike not only changed the lives of those involved, who were unable to ever work again in their field, it proved to be a key turning point in this nation for workers seeking a voice at their workplaces, according to Georgetown University professor Joseph McCartin.
Speaking last night as part of a Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor panel at Georgetown, McCartin said the PATCO strike resulted in a fundamental shift in workers’ ability to utilize the strike, widely recognized as workers’ most effective tool in seeking a fair shake on the job. After PATCO, employers were emboldened to replace strikers and, in turn, workers waged fewer and fewer walkouts. By 2010, there were only 11 strikes involving 1,000 or more workers, compared with 222 such strikes in 1960—a 95 percent drop in walkouts. As the ability to successfully strike decreased, so did workers’ strength at the workplace and their numbers in unions. As McCartin summed up:
Ever since a Supreme Court ruling in 1938 in the Mackay case, private-sector employers knew that they had the legal right to replace workers in most strikes. But until 1981 few were willing to risk the conflict and public disapproval that might come from doing so.
Reagan’s firing of the PATCO strikers, which the public initially strongly supported, helped break that barrier of reticence.
McCartin, author of the newly published book, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers and the Strike that Changed America, was joined by several former PATCO Read the rest of this entry »
Georgetown University Workers, Students Build a Union and Community
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Seth Newton Patel at the Kalmanovitz initiative for Labor and the Working Poor sends us this report on the organization’s first in a series of Kalmanovitz Initiative events exploring the state and future of collective bargaining, the Collective Bargaining Project.
Georgetown University Aramark workers, students and faculty joined in a panel this week to describe their successful campaign to organize a union of Aramark food service workers with UNITEHERE. Two workers from the union organizing committee, two student activists and Georgetown History professor Michael Kazin (who wrote a piece on the campaign in The New Republic) spoke on a panel moderated by the Kalmanovitz Initiative’s Executive Director Joseph McCartin.
Georgetown University Grants Highest Honor to President John Sweeney
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It’s rare for a major university like Georgetown to grant honorary degrees. But rare are individuals like AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. Last night in a formal robe and gown ceremony followed by a celebration with Archbishop Donald Wuerl in Georgetown’s elegant Riggs Library, Georgetown University President John DeGioia conferred upon Sweeney the degree, Doctor of Laws, honoris causa.
Sweeney has dedicated his life to improving the lives of America’s working families, motivated in large part by his religious faith, one infused with the social justice teachings of the Catholic Church. Recognizing how Catholic doctrine influenced Sweeney’s life-long quest for justice and fairness for working people, DeGioia explained the importance of honoring Sweeney:
For many years, John Sweeney has worked to champion the dignity of workers—and work. And we at Georgetown take seriously the Catholic commitment to social justice for working people that has inspired John Sweeney’s remarkable career. That commitment has recently led us, with the help of the Kalmanovitz Charitable Foundation, to inaugurate a new effort here, the “Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor,” which we will formally inaugurate later this fall—and in whose work we hope to engage many of you in the years to come. Through its work, we hope to contribute, in our own way, to the tradition that John Sweeney has so well exemplified.
