Bob Poli, former PATCO President, passed on last week. In life he was vilified by ignorant know-nothings after he accepted the direction of PATCO members to lead the union out on strike on August 3, 1981. Forty-eight hours later, 11,500 PATCO strikers were fired by then-President Ronnie Rayguns.
This strike is now universally marked as the beginning of the downfall for the union movement. Although PATCO received material support from other unions, no unions (in particular airline pilots, flight mechanics, flight attendants, and other airline-related "unions") honored the PATCO picket lines.
A year before the strike, PATCO leadership, having grown frustrated with the staunchly anti-union Jimmy Carter (yeah, yeah, I know, he is a saint.... except when it came to unions!!), endorsed Ronnie for President
“You can rest assured,” Mr. Reagan, a former president of the Screen Actors Guild, wrote to Mr. Poli just days before the election, “that if I am elected president, I will take whatever steps are necessary to provide our air traffic controllers with the most modern equipment available and to adjust staff levels and work days so that they are commensurate with achieving a maximum degree of public safety.”
(New York Times)
Yeah, well that didn't happen.
I personally listened to Bob and other PATCO leaders at a pre-strike meeting when they predicted (CORRECTLY, I might add) that if PATCO members rejected the FAA's final offer and voted to strike there were only two possible outcomes: either everyone would be fired or no one would be fired (my emphasis).
We were all adults. We were warned of the possible consequences of our actions. No one coerced us into striking, least of all Bob Poli. He simply did what we directed him to do. I've written another diary about the conditions that led up to the strike, so I won't bother recapping and if anybody wants to argue about the strike, write your own damn diary.
This diary is a tribute to someone who influenced my life beyond description simply by doing what I and my colleagues asked him to do. And he paid for it every day for the rest of his life. And for that I am sorry.
RIP Bob, and thank you from the depths of my heart.