Because at one point they had one of the most powerful Unions in the country. The ATC union strike in 1981 threatened to bring the US empire to its knees. So in retaliation they simply made it illegal for them to strike citing “national security”.
The failure of the PATCO strike reshaped the American labor movement. Unionization within the U.S. steadily declined, from 20.9% in 1981 to 10% in 2024.[2] The strike encouraged employers, with the backing of the federal government, to wield the threat of permanent replacement as a strikebreaking weapon.[11] Consequently, labor unions grew more hesitant about going out on strike, and employers grew bolder.[12]
This was the final blow to labor in the US spurred on by the decline and destabilization of the USSR which signaled to western capital that the End of History was inevitable and they were emboldened to attack labor harder. This started in the 70s and culminated with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Clinton era NAFTA agreement.
Ever since we have basically been back to square one in terms of organizing. It is worse now than it was in the 1920s. At least back then the unions were armed and did cool shit like Blair Mountain.
It was always unlawful for federal workers to strike. Reagan was just the first one to actually enforce the law on the matter and permanently replace striking workers, something that was uncommon in both the private and public sector at the time.
The unions totally folded after this rather than doing anything to fight back which is really why they’ve withered and died.
That may be but the post my comment is still essentially correct. Also ATC workers were a bit of a Grey area before than and the fact it is illegal for federal employees to strike is worth further examination in the context of this discussion.
Now I’m just some guy but personally if I saw that the workers of one of my most important industries had the power to cripple my country by striking, I wouldn’t make it illegal to strike, I would simply nationalize the companies who are causing the strikes and give the workers their demands
In fact, make it illegal to cause those workers to strike! All strikes are completely and totally the fault of the employer, so put the responsibility on the responsible party.
It’s actually something that railway workers sort of “won” way back in the 1920s almost a decade before the passage of the NLRA. Basically railway workers were so powerful that strikes and lockouts became too detrimental to commerce so Congress stepped in and decided that they would regulate labor relations in the industry. I think airlines were interpreted to fall under or encoded in the law a few decades later.
This is the thing that liberalism fundamentally obscures. A small proletarian victory is transmogrified into a win for bourgeois society in general. It’s taken as a feature of capitalism that it endows workers with rights, rather than such rights being only a tentative moment in the struggle between labor and capital. To the extent that the average liberal admits that labor had to fight for those scraps, it’s believed that today’s capitalists have come-to-Jesus, in the same way that those same capitalists suddenly realized that slavery is wrong only a century or two ago.
Why the fuck are airlines exempt from the labor relations act in the first place
Because at one point they had one of the most powerful Unions in the country. The ATC union strike in 1981 threatened to bring the US empire to its knees. So in retaliation they simply made it illegal for them to strike citing “national security”.
This was the final blow to labor in the US spurred on by the decline and destabilization of the USSR which signaled to western capital that the End of History was inevitable and they were emboldened to attack labor harder. This started in the 70s and culminated with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Clinton era NAFTA agreement.
Ever since we have basically been back to square one in terms of organizing. It is worse now than it was in the 1920s. At least back then the unions were armed and did cool shit like Blair Mountain.
It was always unlawful for federal workers to strike. Reagan was just the first one to actually enforce the law on the matter and permanently replace striking workers, something that was uncommon in both the private and public sector at the time.
The unions totally folded after this rather than doing anything to fight back which is really why they’ve withered and died.
That may be but the post my comment is still essentially correct. Also ATC workers were a bit of a Grey area before than and the fact it is illegal for federal employees to strike is worth further examination in the context of this discussion.
Now I’m just some guy but personally if I saw that the workers of one of my most important industries had the power to cripple my country by striking, I wouldn’t make it illegal to strike, I would simply nationalize the companies who are causing the strikes and give the workers their demands
In fact, make it illegal to cause those workers to strike! All strikes are completely and totally the fault of the employer, so put the responsibility on the responsible party.
Ronald 6 Wilson 6 Reagan 6
It’s actually something that railway workers sort of “won” way back in the 1920s almost a decade before the passage of the NLRA. Basically railway workers were so powerful that strikes and lockouts became too detrimental to commerce so Congress stepped in and decided that they would regulate labor relations in the industry. I think airlines were interpreted to fall under or encoded in the law a few decades later.
This is the thing that liberalism fundamentally obscures. A small proletarian victory is transmogrified into a win for bourgeois society in general. It’s taken as a feature of capitalism that it endows workers with rights, rather than such rights being only a tentative moment in the struggle between labor and capital. To the extent that the average liberal admits that labor had to fight for those scraps, it’s believed that today’s capitalists have come-to-Jesus, in the same way that those same capitalists suddenly realized that slavery is wrong only a century or two ago.