Air
traffic controllers hold the trump card (pardon the expression) in upcoming
negotiations between Donald Trump and congressional Democrats over border
security.
That’s
because the president and the Republicans know that another shutdown would
likely cause a repeat of what happened last Friday, when so many of the
nation’s air traffic controllers called in sick that America’s air traffic came
to a near standstill. Hours later, Trump agreed to reopen the government
without funding for his wall.
Never
underestimate the power of airport delays to arouse the nation. Nancy Pelosi
deserves credit for sticking to her guns, but the controllers brought the
country to its knees.
Trump is threatening another shutdown if he doesn’t get his way by 15 February, when government funding will run out again. “Does anybody really think I won’t build the WALL?” he tweeted Sunday, after his acting chief of staff said that he was prepared to shutter the government for a second time.
But
his threat is for the cameras. If there’s no agreement this time around, the
controllers won’t work another 35 days without pay. Now that they understand
their power, they will shut down the shutdown right away. Trump knows this.
Ironically,
it was Ronald Reagan’s audacious decision in 1981 to fire and replace more than
11,000 air traffic controllers who were then striking illegally that
legitimized decades of union busting. It signaled to employers around the
country that unions – both public and private-sector – were fair game.
It
also unleashed political forces against unions, culminating last year with the
supreme court’s 5-4 decision in Janus v AFSCME, holding that
government workers can’t be forced to contribute to labor unions that represent
them in collective bargaining.
But
the decision last week by thousands of controllers not to come to work wasn’t a
strike, and it wasn’t initiated by a union. Beforehand, Paul Rinaldi, the
president of the controller’s union, the National Air Traffic Controllers
Association, even went so far as to announce that the union did not “condone or
endorse any federal employees participating in or endorsing a coordinated
activity that negatively effects the capacity of the National Airspace System”.
Controllers
simply stayed home. No federal law prohibits federal employees from getting
sick or calling in sick. And who’s to say it was coordinated? Today, the
internet can spread information about a voluntary walkout as quickly and
efficiently as any centralized coordinator.
The
larger story is that public workers who lack any formal power to strike – but
have the informal power not to work – are becoming a new force in American
politics and labor relations.
Look
what teachers accomplished last year by walking out of their classrooms in the
unlikeliest of places – West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Colorado
and North Carolina. Most of these are Republican “right-to-work” states that
bar strikes by public employees. In recent years, all have slashed school
funding and eroded teacher pay and benefits.
Like
the air traffic controllers, the teachers chose not to work rather than give in
to what they considered intolerable conditions. These unauthorized “wildcat”
strikes won gains in teachers’ salaries and funding for schools. (Not
incidentally, they also galvanized thousands of teachers to run for office in
the 2018 midterm elections.)
They
were especially powerful because they offered elected officials no union leader
or chief organizer with whom to negotiate a deal, who would then sell it to
rank-and-file workers. As with the air traffic controllers last week, officials
had to back down because the people they were dealing with were all
rank-and-file, and public pressure was mounting rapidly.
Not
all public workers can expect similar results by walking off their jobs. The
walkout has to cause a major and visible disruption. (A work stoppage by FDA
inspectors would hardly be noticed, at least until the public begins to worry
about toxic drugs and tainted meat.)
And
the public has to be supportive. By the fifth week of Trump’s shutdown, polls
showed the public highly sympathetic to federal workers who hadn’t been paid.
Likewise, most Americans have been on the side of teachers. National polls have
shown the public largely in favor of higher teacher pay and supportive of
teachers’ right to strike.
Finally,
it’s not a weapon that can be used often because it relies for its potency on
public frustration and inconvenience. If walkouts by public employees in France
and other nations are any guide, public patience eventually wears thin.
But
when elected officials in the United States abuse their power or take actions
that unnecessarily harm the public, walkouts by public workers can function as
an important constraint.
In
the age of Trump, we need all the constraints we can get.
Robert
B. Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of
California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing
Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for
which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries
of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books, including the best
sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and "Beyond
Outrage," and, his most recent, "The Common Good," which is
available in bookstores now. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect
magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality
For All." He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving
Capitalism," which is streaming now.
