History of the United States II / Unit 16 USH2 2257 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Air Traffic Controllers
The idea
In August nineteen eighty-one the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, one of the few unions that had endorsed Reagan, struck for better conditions. Reagan ordered the controllers back to work and fired those who refused. The count differs by source: twelve thousand in the anchor, more than eleven thousand in the Yawp, fifteen thousand in Digital History.
In practice
A president who had called himself an old union man, in the Yawp's words, breaking a strike of federal workers.
Where people slip
The anchor says the administration had little use for unions and that the strikers' demands would have improved public safety too. Digital History calls the firing a devastating blow to organised labour. It reverses the course's earlier labour arc: in unit eleven the Wagner Act put Washington behind the right to organise; here the federal government broke a union.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
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