Of Presidents and Union Strikes

by Jack R Johnson 10.2023

Steven Rattner, a former Obama administration financial advisor, whose net worth falls somewhere between 108 million and 609 million dollars and who led the restructuring of the automotive industry when the UAW accepted painful cuts, is now accusing President Joe Biden of overstepping his authority by supporting a major UAW strike. Rattner, whom the press has nicknamed the "car czar”, slammed Biden for joining the UAW picket line in Michigan, saying the president went against years of precedent and tradition.

“For him to be going on a picket line is outrageous,” Rattner told NBC News. “There’s no precedent for it. The tradition of the president is to stay neutral in these things.” His statement is wildly misleading. U.S. Presidents have a long and storied history of picking sides in major strikes, including the work Rattner did himself in forcing UAW to accept the painful cuts on behalf of the Obama administration’s bailout efforts.

As another example, one of the defining moments in Reagan’s presidency was his handling of the air traffic controllers strike forty-two years ago. For weeks in 1981, the professional air traffic controllers organization or PATCO was protesting what they considered to be unfair wages and long work hours. The airlines refused to concede. Finally, on August 3rd, 1981, they walked off the job. Two days later, Reagan fired more than 11,000 of those who hadn't crossed the picket line. He barred them from ever working again for the federal government. By October of that year, PATCO had been decertified and lay in ruins. The careers of most of the individual strikers were similarly dead. Bill Clinton lifted Reagan’s ban on strikers in 1993, but fewer than ten percent were ever rehired by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Not only was Reagan not neutral, his actions decimated the union movement in this country for decades to come. 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.”

After the air traffic controller’s strike, strikebreaking became “the thing to do.”  According to NPR reporter, Kenny Malone, there was a wave of firing, “Striking copper miners in Arizona - fired. Striking paper workers in Maine - fired. Meat packers, bus drivers - so many strikes in the 1980s were broken to the point where unions realized that employers wanted them to strike so that they could fire them and replace them with non-union workers. And if you realize that your boss wants you to strike so they can fire you and rehire somebody else, that is going to make you less likely to strike, the main piece of leverage unions have.”

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The foundation of our Labor Day holiday is yet another example of a president’s involvement in striking workers and picket lines. You can thank President Grover Cleveland and the Pullman strike for that.

Because of the depression of 1893, the Pullman Palace Car Company, a manufacturer of railroad cars, cut the already low wages of its workers by about 25 percent. These workers mostly lived in the Pullman’s ‘company town.’ but Pullman refused to reduce the rents and other basic living expenses in the town and as a result, many workers and their families faced starvation. 

When a delegation of workers tried to present their grievances about low wages, poor living conditions, and 16-hour workdays directly to Pullman, he refused to meet with them and ordered them fired. The delegation then voted to strike, and Pullman workers walked off the job on May 11, 1894. As soon as the plant had emptied, company representatives posted signs at all the gates: “The works are closed until further notice.”

Eugene V. Debs, through his leadership of the American Railway Union (ARU), supported the effort. On June 27, 5,000 workers left their jobs and 15 railroads were tied up. By the next day, 40,000 had walked off, and rail traffic was snarled on all lines west of Chicago. On the third day, the number of strikers had climbed to 100,000, and at least 20 lines were either tied up or completely stopped. By June 30, 125,000 workers on 29 railroads had quit work rather than handle Pullman cars. 

The strike paralyzed the nation and left cars carrying Federal postal mail vulnerable.  One car was set on fire by angry strikers. In Washington, D.C., a majority of the president’s cabinet supported Attorney General Richard Olney’s demand that federal troops be sent to Chicago to end the “reign of terror.” 

On July 2 Olney obtained a federal injunction that prohibited ARU leaders from “compelling or inducing” any employees of the affected railroads “to refuse or fail to perform any of their duties.” Once the federal injunction was issued, President Cleveland treated the strike and boycott as a federal issue, and he ordered troops into Chicago on July 3. 

Thousands of US Marshals and 12,000 US Army troops, led by Brigadier General Nelson Miles, took part in the operation. President Cleveland claimed that he had a legal, constitutional responsibility for the mail. His lawyers argued that the boycott violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, and represented a threat to public safety. 

During the course of the strike break, 30 strikers were killed and 57 were wounded. Property damage exceeded $80 million dollars, but the strike was broken. Eugene V. Debs and many in the ARU leadership wound up in jail. Debs went on to found the American Socialist Party.

Later, in 1894, in an effort to conciliate organized labor after the strike, President Cleveland and Congress designated Labor Day, on September 1st as a federal holiday in contrast with the more radical May 1st, often associated with the Haymarket riot. Legislation for the holiday was pushed through Congress six days after the Pullman strike ended. This is why we celebrate Labor Day in September rather than on May 1st, unlike every other Western country on Earth.

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There are, of course, U.S. presidents who have sided with labor as well. Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously signed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933 which guaranteed laborers a right to collective bargaining and he supported the textile workers strike of 1934. When the Supreme Court ruled the NIRA unconstitutional, he later signed the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) into law on July 5, 1935. The broad intention of the act was to guarantee employees “the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid and protection.” Additionally, the act created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to arbitrate deadlocked labor-management disputes, guarantee democratic union elections, and penalize unfair labor practices by employers.

Joe Biden is clearly following in Roosevelt’s footsteps. During a speech last May at a community college in Cleveland, Joe Biden made a point of bringing up Reagan’s anti-union history, “From 1948 after the war to 1979 [Reagan’s election], 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.”

The fact that Biden has decided to weigh in on a labor dispute is not without precedent. It is, however, unusual within the last four decades for a president to favor labor as opposed to management. Maybe someone should explain to Steven Rattner that the times are changing.