In 1981, seven months after taking office, former Hollywood actors union leader Ronald Reagan sent his infamous signal to the world that the official attitude of the United States government toward trade unions would henceforth be unremitting hostility. In firing over ten thousand striking air traffic controllers and destroying the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), President Reagan provided an opportunity to labor leadership in the airline unions and the broader AFL-CIO to step up and face forcefully the challenge of a new stage of labor-capital conflict. Following a few days of saber-rattling and tough talk — with William Winpisinger of the Machinists even uttering the words “general strike” — those union leaders made a firm decision: to step back and cave in.

Before the strike officially gave up the ghost, the Bay Area labor movement called a demonstration at San Francisco International Airport in support of the picketing PATCO members. I attended as part of a contingent from a small socialist group, Workers Power, which a few years later merged with a couple other left grouplets to form what is today Solidarity.

Comrades from both sides of the Bay came out in the late summer afternoon to carry signs and chant alongside PATCO members and sisters and brothers from a number of unions. Representatives of the air traffic controllers, other airline unions, the California AFL-CIO, and the San Francisco labor council thundered through a bullhorn at perhaps five hundred angry people, vowing that they’d never let PATCO die.