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   The Murder of the U.S. Middle Class Began 40 Years Ago This Week   
   Reagan's firing of striking air traffic controllers was the first huge   
   offensive in corporate America's war on everyone else.   
   Jon Schwarz   
   August 6 2021, 11:37 a.m.   
   Members of PATCO, the air traffic controllers union, hold hands and raise   
   their arms as their deadline to return to work passes. All strikers were   
   fired on the order of President Reagan on August 5, 1981.   
      
   Members of PATCO, the air traffic controllers union. All strikers were   
   fired on the order of President Ronald Reagan on Aug. 5, 1981. Photo:   
   Bettmann Archive   
      
   Forty years ago, on August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired 11,345   
   striking air traffic controllers and barred them from ever working again   
   for the federal government. By October of that year, the Professional Air   
   Traffic Controllers Organization, or PATCO, the union that had called the   
   strike, had been decertified and lay in ruins. The careers of most of the   
   individual strikers were similarly dead: While Bill Clinton lifted   
   Reagan’s ban on strikers in 1993, fewer than 10 percent were ever rehired   
   by the Federal Aviation Administration.   
      
   PATCO was dominated by Vietnam War-era veterans who’d learned air traffic   
   control in the military and were one of a vanishingly small number of   
   unions to endorse Reagan in 1980, thereby scoring one of the greatest own   
   goals in political history. It’s easy to imagine strikers expressing the   
   same sentiments as a Trump voter who famously lamented, “I thought he was   
   going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be   
   hurting.”   
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   The PATCO saga began in February 1981, when negotiations began between the   
   union and the FAA on a new contract. PATCO proposed changes including a   
   32-hour workweek and a big increase in pay. The FAA came back with   
   counterproposals the union deemed insufficient, and on August 3, with   
   bargaining at an impasse, most of the air traffic controllers walked out.   
      
   It was unquestionably illegal for PATCO, as a union of government workers,   
   to strike. However, which laws are enforced is always and everywhere a   
   political decision: Wall Street firms broke countless laws in the run-up   
   to the 2008 financial crisis, yet almost no executives suffered any   
   consequences. Reagan & Co. wanted to send a message that mere workers   
   could expect no such forbearance. Just two days after the strike began,   
   the air traffic controllers were gone.   
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   The significance of Reagan’s actions is rarely discussed today in the   
   mainstream, and for understandable reasons: It was the first huge   
   offensive in a war that corporate America has been waging on this   
   country’s middle class ever since. As Warren Buffett — current estimated   
   net worth $101 billion — has said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but   
   it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”   
      
   The stunning victory of the wealthy over everyone else can been measured   
   in several straightforward ways. During a speech last May at a community   
   college in Cleveland, Joe Biden explained one of them:   
      
       From 1948 after the war to 1979, productivity in America grew by 100   
   percent. We made more things with productivity. You know what the   
   workers’ pay grew? By 100 percent. Since 1979, all of that changed.   
   Productivity has grown four times faster than pay has grown. The basic   
   bargain in this country has been broken.   
      
   Productivity is a simple but extremely important economic concept. Over   
   time, as technology advances and society learns how to use it, each worker   
   can produce more. One person with a bulldozer can move a lot more dirt   
   than one person with a shovel. One person with the latest version of   
   Microsoft Excel can do a lot more math than one person with Napier’s   
   bones.   
      
   The meaning of Biden’s statistics is that for decades after World War II,   
   America got much richer overall, and average worker pay went up at the   
   same rate. Then the link between productivity and pay was severed: The   
   U.S. overall continued to get much richer, but most of the increased   
   wealth went to the top, not to normal people. Corporate CEOs, partners at   
   corporate law firms, orthopedic surgeons — they make three, five, 10 times   
   what they did in 1981. Nurses, firefighters, janitors, almost anyone   
   without a college degree — their pay has barely budged.   
      
   The situation is especially egregious at the bottom of the pay scale.   
   Until 1968, Congress increased the federal minimum wage in line with   
   productivity. That year, it reached its highest level: Adjusted for   
   inflation, it was the equivalent of $12 per hour today. It has since   
   fallen to $7.25. Yet the whole story is far worse. Even as low-wage   
   workers have battled fruitlessly to get the federal minimum wage raised to   
   $15, no one realizes that if it had continued increasing along with   
   productivity since 1968, it would now be over $24 per hour. At that level,   
   a couple working full-time minimum wage jobs would take home $96,000 a   
   year. This seems incredible, yet there are no economic reasons it couldn’t   
   happen; we have simply made a political decision that it should not.   
      
   Another way to understand this is to look at the other end of American   
   society. In 1995, Bill Gates had a net worth of $10 billion, worth about   
   $18 billion in today’s dollars. That was enough to make him the richest   
   person in America. If that were all Gates had today, there would be 25 or   
   so billionaires ahead of him in line. Jeff Bezos, currently in first   
   place, possesses 10 times Gates’s 1995 net worth.   
      
   Then there’s the number of significant strikes in the U.S. each year. A   
   confident, powerful labor movement will generate large numbers of strikes;   
   one terrorized and cowed into submission will not. According to the Labor   
   Department, there were generally 200-400 large-scale strikes each year   
   from 1947 to 1979. There were 187 in 1980. Then after the PATCO firing,   
   the numbers fell off a cliff. In 1988, the last full year of Reagan’s   
   second term, there were just 40 strikes. By 2017, there were seven.   
      
   The direct causal relationship between the firing of the air traffic   
   controllers and the crushing of labor is widely noted and celebrated on   
   the right. In a 2003 speech at the Reagan Library in California, then-   
   Chair of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan spoke glowingly of the   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)