In 1980, PATCO leadership infamously chose to grovel to Ronald Reagan, endorsing his presidential run. Less than a year later, Reagan smashed PATCO and helped jumpstart American labor’s precipitous decline.

Unions in the Trump era face a familiar dilemma: how to grapple with powerful politicians poised to launch broad attacks on the American working class. The stakes of the dilemma are no less than those faced by PATCO under Reagan: unions that give their imprimatur to an anti-union president will soon find that president destroying them and the rest of the labor movement anyway.

Too often in American history, unions have responded to attacks by narrowing rather than expanding the scope of their fight, abandoning the increasingly massive sea of unorganized workers as well as cross-sector solidarity in an attempt to curry favor with otherwise anti-worker politicians.