PATCO 25th Strike Anniversary

[Omaha Steve]

Full article: http://lnn.laborstart.org/more.php?id=758_0_1_0_M

PATCO 25th Strike Anniversary

PATCO Controllers still “Locked Out” and discriminated against by the FAA.

PRESS RELEASE – July 14, 2006

PATCO 25th Strike Anniversary

Convention/ Reunion, August 2-3, 2006

Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino

Hollywood, Florida

The Reagan Administration Order: “Return to work or you’re Fired!”

They were labeled criminals, traitors, oath breakers and lawbreakers by the Federal government, but that was the Governments spin to distract from the real issue of what was happening behind the scenes with the professionals who worked in one of the most stressful jobs in the world…Air Traffic Control. The government’s intent was never to resolve, or seriously negotiate the working conditions of the PATCO Controllers, but to get rid of them. Their offer of “Return to Work or You’re Fired!”, was the Reagan message to organized labor that has echoed for over a quarter of a century.

Twenty five years ago, on August 3, 1981, and after several months of extensive fruitless contract negotiations with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Union (PATCO) was forced to call a nationwide strike in its efforts to try and improve the working conditions for Air Traffic Controllers. President Reagan’s, union busting, response to the strikers was to arrest and jail hundreds of them, fire over 11,541 highly skilled professionals, and ban them, for life, from ever returning to their profession. In the few months that followed, the government’s final kill was to decertify and destroy the union, PATCO.