(Knight Ridder circulated the following story by Thomas Ginsber on June 10.)
PHILADELPHIA — Minutes before Ronald Reagan was shot in an attempted assassination in 1981, hundreds of union leaders did something few might believe today.
They gave Reagan raucous applause at their annual Building and Constructions Trades union meeting at the Washington Hilton.
“He received one of the longest ovations. It was an awe-shucks speech,” said Patrick Gillespie, business manager of the Philadelphia Building Trades Council, who was there that day. “The fact is, people liked Ronald Reagan. Our members liked him, make no bones about it.”
Four months later, Reagan fired 11,500 air-traffic controllers engaged in an illegal strike, setting a new tone for labor-management relations for years to come. In unions’ eyes, Reagan gave employers a green light to strike back at organized labor. To employers and their allies, he signaled that business should operate without undue interference from union leaders.
The debate over Reagan’s legacy in labor-management relations continues today. Some labor historians say Reagan validated a souring of attitudes about unions and presided over a conservative swing by the National Labor Relations Board, led by his appointee, Donald Dotson. It was part of a shift from which organized labor is still trying to recover.
“There was a strong, strong cooling of expectations for organized labor,” said John Beck, director of the Labor Education Program at Michigan State University and a onetime union organizer. “Many spent time just trying to keep what they got.”
Many labor activists note that Reagan was the only U.S. president who had been a union leader: He was president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952. But he followed with a stint as spokesman for General Electric Co., promoting the company line that unions were unnecessary, according to labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein.
Richard Bensinger, former head of national organizing for the AFL-CIO and now a Virginia-based labor consultant, contrasted Reagan to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who helped enshrine the right to unionize.
“Just as Franklin Roosevelt created a climate of acceptance of unions,” Bensinger said, “Reagan essentially said: `If I were an employer, I would bust a union.’ ”
His defenders note that Reagan did not cause labor’s woes. Reagan as president didn’t publicly bash unions, according to Beck and other experts. On the contrary, he actively courted blue-collar union members among the so-called Reagan Democrats, usually over the heads of pro-Democratic union leaders, historians said.
Union membership as a portion of the workforce had been steadily declining by the time Reagan was elected, going from 25 percent of the workforce in 1955 to less than 20 percent in 1980. Today, it is 12.9 percent.
“Reagan certainly did set a tone,” said Ken Boehm, chairman of the Virginia-based National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative group that tracks union corruption. “But he was president 16 years ago, and managers of labor have been ossified for a long time.”
“The real question is, why is the union movement attriting?” said John Raudabaugh, a labor lawyer and Republican appointee to the NLRB in the early 1990s. “You cannot blame only the employers” or Reagan.
On both sides, people agree that Reagan’s record started with his explosive decision to fire members of PATCO, the air-traffic controllers union.
While legal – the law allows permanent replacement of striking workers and specifically bars public servants from striking – his action broke a post-Depression preference for negotiation over firing.
“This gave a signal to other employers that they could do it,” said Lichtenstein, the labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Soon, striking workers were fired at a Phelps-Dodge Corp. copper mine in Arizona, Continental Airlines Inc., International Paper Co., and Greyhound Lines Inc., among others.
At the same time, the Dotson-led NLRB began reversing pro-labor precedents, ruling in 1984 that pickets could be permanently fired for shouting at workers who cross picket lines.
While the pendulum later swung back partially under President Bill Clinton, Reagan’s NLRB may have pushed the rulings further rightward than usual, said labor lawyers and historians.
Unions became increasingly wary of walking off the job, with large strikes declining from 145 in 1981 to 51 in 1989, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
To employers, that is not a bad legacy. “That’s the goal of the NLRB, and, to that extent, it’s something to be applauded,” said Hal Coxson, a leading management lawyer and employer representative to Reagan-era labor advisory commissions.
“It was absolutely the dark ages,” countered Philadelphia labor leader Evon Sutton of District Council 33 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. “But as long as you don’t forget it, you can make sure it doesn’t happen again.”