The PATCO Strike and the Decline of Labor

In 1981, US President Ronald Reagan decisively broke the illegal strike of the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic controllers, which had been organized by their union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). Because of its timing, its notoriety, and its impact in encouraging private sector employers to follow Reagan’s example and break strikes, the PATCO debacle contributed significantly to the continuing decline of the labor movement in the decades following 1981. The breaking of PATCO took place at a crucial inflection point in US labor history. Changing political, ideological, and economic trends made unions vulnerable as the 1980s began. In this volatile context, the PATCO strike garnered unprecedented attention and enormous influence. The walkout, which started on August 3, 1981, took place in every US state and territory, and Americans watched it play out in real time on live television. They saw President Reagan warn strikers that since they were government workers their walkout was illegal, issuing an ultimatum that they would be fired in forty-eight hours if they did not return to work. Then they saw Reagan fire more than eleven thousand strikers who defied his order, replacing them with military controllers and hastily trained substitutes, all with strong public backing. This event shocked rank-and-file unionists, frightened union leaders, and encouraged private sector employers to emulate Reagan in their own dealings with unions. Thus, following the PATCO strike, numerous private sector employers took advantage of weak protections for strikers in US labor law to break strikes in their industries. Workers’ willingness to strike in order to advance or defend workplace standards plummeted thereafter. Declining labor militancy in turn exacerbated the continuous decline in union membership after 1981, leaving the union movement in a deepening crisis by the early 21st century.

Citadel of Labor

This chapter surveys the role of Civil War memory in the construction of labor patriotism in the American Federation of Labor. Mirroring its anti-revolutionary leadership, notably Samuel Gompers, the AFL moved increasingly away from labor militancy and electoral strategy. The rise of national blue-gray reconciliation paralleled the Federation’s maturation, as well as the establishment of Jim Crow unionism. Labor Day, Decoration Day, and Fourth of July marches were incubators of nationalist pageantry in which white workingmen venerated the veteran alongside the industrial soldier and the union label alongside the American flag. By World War I, the Federation had used Civil War memory to embrace class conciliation and nationalism as leaders, and “respectable” workers complied with government repression of the labor left.

A culture of informality?

Despite a history of labor militancy in past decades, Nepal’s large construction sector remains unorganized and lacks social protection, prompted by high levels of informality. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among construction laborers in Kathmandu, this article argues that labor subsumption to capital in the construction industry takes place through a systemization of expertise through which access to work is negotiated. I show how this “culture of informality” shapes labor relations and creates a semblance of transparency and justice in otherwise chaotic and fiercely competitive labor communities. Drawing on concepts from political and urban anthropology to probe how informality indexes forms of power, I argue that authority and status become distributed through processes of distinction and thereby extend and deepen inequalities permeating contemporary industrial relations.

Framing labor militancy and political exchange in a Spanish Catholic trade union: the Autonomous Union of the Vine in Jerez (1979–1987)

This article examines the evolution of the Autonomous Union of the Vine (Sindicato Autónomo de la Vid [SAVID]), a radical wine industry union that operated in the Jerez area (Spain) between 1979 and 1987. The SAVID was born as a result of a series of internal conflicts and splits in the trade union Unión Sindical Obrera (USO), which was founded by Christian groups that were influenced by self-management ideas in the province of Cádiz during the 1970s. Drawing on the life stories of two union members, this article analyzes the creation, evolution, and decline of the SAVID labor union of the sherry wine industry in the Jerez area, which can be categorized as a paradigmatic case of “militant particularism.” The biographical narratives of the union members make the identification and analysis of factors involved in both the rise and the decline of this trade union possible. These narratives will also help in contesting the dominant narratives on the role of the trade union movement and the radical Left during the Spanish Transition by providing empirical evidence of labor militancy on a local scale.

“Notre Petite Amie”

In 1900, composer and philanthropist Gustave Charpentier founded the Oeuvre de Mimi Pinson, an association providing the workingwomen of Paris with free theater tickets, and free music and dance classes. What began as an effort to provide occasional free entertainment to female workers became a multifaceted conservatory, charity, and social network. The men (and some women) who organized and administered the OMP did so by relying on the trope of the gay, seducible, and tasteful young garment worker. These assumptions defined not only the work of the OMP and its relationship with its working-class members, but also reinforced the comforting notion of workingwomen’s pliability for journalists, politicians, reformers, and countless casual observers. Even as the OMP proffered a vision of emancipated French womanhood as a national renovator, it also deployed a powerful typology of the Parisian garment worker to temper its radical potential. Defined and confined by a nineteenth-century type, the female garment workers of Paris were exemplary targets for a benevolent effort which, at a moment in which feminist action and labor militancy were consolidating, reimagined women’s emancipation and working-class uplift as a matter entirely managed by bourgeois male authority and desire.

The Dynamics of Labor Militancy in the Extractive Sector: Kazakhstan’s Oilfields and South Africa’s Platinum Mines in Comparative Perspective

This article investigates why, in two very different regimes, similarly high levels of labor militancy are evident in Kazakhstan’s oilfields and South Africa’s platinum belt. It also explores the common dynamics leading up to the massacres at Zhanaozen (2011) and Marikana (2012). The hypothesis-generating most different systems comparison highlights the challenges of labor relations where extraction at fixed sites combines with volatile prices and shareholder pressures in a globalized economy to raise the stakes for business, labor, and state. Also significant are blockages in existing channels for bargaining linked to quiescent unions. These jointly necessary conditions account for increased militancy in extractive industries in Kazakhstan and South Africa. To account for the Zhanaozen and Marikana massacres, timing and sequence are considered. Both standoffs came later in the strike wave, prompting impatient state and business elites to criticize the protests as “criminal” acts, and priming security personnel to employ violent repression.