Structure and Solidarity

Abstract

Two strikes serve as bookends for the heyday of the twentieth-century American labor movement: the 1936–37 sit-down strike of the fledgling United Auto Workers (UAW) against what was then the nation’s largest corporation, General Motors, and the 1981 strike of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) against the Federal Aviation Administration, a government agency. The successful UAW strike led not only to the unionization of General Motors; it opened the door to the unionization of basic industry across the U.S. economy, from auto, steel, and textiles to important components of transportation, food production, and communications. The PATCO strike, broken by President Ronald Reagan, led not only to the demise of that union; it marked the start of a period during which industrial unions were decimated and strikes in the United States dwindled to a mere handful.