Tom Brockett ’87 spoke on the turbulent history of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) Monday afternoon. Brockett was the vice president of the PATCO local at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport during the historical 1981 strike that ended when President Ronald Reagan fired all strikers.
“I come from a blue collar family,” Brockett said. “I was brought up with a union background.”
Brockett was drafted into the U.S. army soon after completing high school. He joined the Air Force and was sent to air traffic control school after a period of basic training. He served as a journeyman air traffic controller in Viet Nam from 1968 to 1969, where he directed the routes of U.S. aircraft and helicopters in South Viet Nam.
Upon his return to the U.S., he became an air traffic controller at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, a hub for air traffic in the U.S., often considered the world’s busiest airport.
“I [thought] ‘if that’s the busiest place, that’s the place I want to be,’” he said.
Brockett and eleven other air traffic controllers were responsible for calculating and controlling the flight paths of up to 30 planes that were leaving from and arriving at the airport. The airport handled approximately one million arrivals and departures per day when he was there.
“Just like we have a highway system in the U.S., we have a highway system in the sky,” he said. “The problem with O’Hare is that O’Hare was everyone’s hub.”
Entry requirements for air traffic controllers were very stringent. According to him, 9.5 out of 10 air traffic control trainees fail to get a position at O’Hare. Because of the limited staff, air traffic control became their lives, with 6-day workweeks and unpredictable shifts.
“It’s not a 9-to-5 job, you don’t get to go to your kid’s soccer game, you don’t get to know your neighbors,” he said. “Christ, I didn’t know my neighbors and I lived next to them for ten years. They thought I was a drug dealer!”
Brockett explained the difficulties of negotiating working conditions with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). While the FAA would meet with workers, they used the guise of government employment to refuse to discussions of wages, benefits, or pensions, making most bargaining pointless. Brockett described contract negotiations not as bargaining, but “collective begging.”
“[In 1978] we went to contract negotiation and it was crystal clear that first of all, the federal government hated us, and second, wasn’t going to deal with us,” he said. “We [the union] were too young, and we had to accept the measly 1978 contract.”
But PATCO decided to plan for the future, pledging to educate members and bargain for real benefits in the future.
“We flew all across this country for three years and visited every air traffic control facility to educate them about what it meant to be a union member,” he said. “Our [message] was: unless we get our demands, the skies will be silent.”
Although the air traffic controllers had signed a contract saying that they would not strike against the U.S. government, Brockett argued that the government had itself broken promises to guarantee reasonable working conditions and flexible job assignments.
After a delayed strike in June due to weak member support, PATCO went on strike on Aug. 3, 1981. The government responded swiftly.
“Ronald Reagan came out in the rose garden and said, ‘Be back to work in 48 hours or you’re fired,” he said.
When the 11,359 air traffic controllers failed to return to work, Reagan fired them and permanently banned them from public service.
“Here you have thousands of air traffic controllers who had been in Viet Nam, served their country well, and were left jobless,” he said.
Because the federal government hired all air traffic controllers in the U.S., those fired were left with non-transferable skills.
“It wasn’t enough to say, ‘hey boys, you don’t have a job,’ we couldn’t even get unemployment [on the grounds that] we broke the law,” he said. “Strikes are a funny thing…the only illegal strike is when you lose.”
It wasn’t until 12 years later in 1993, when President Bill Clinton signed an executive order, that the ban on public jobs for the former air traffic controllers was removed.
Brockett acknowledged that PATCO made numerous mistakes during the strike, such as not properly recognizing the nation’s poor economic climate and failing to enlist support from the AFL-CIO.
“I think PATCO dropped the ball, got cocky, and didn’t try to get labor’s support,” he said. “Still, the problem is the employer, not the employees. It’s tough to work for the federal government; it’s a bureaucracy. And we were fired up! We were trying to [strike] for 10 years, we weren’t about to go back in two days.”
Following his departure from air traffic control, Brockett enrolled in Gateway College in New Haven, where he earned a scholarship that enabled him to transfer to Wesleyan. Brockett graduated with a degree in history and earned his law degree by taking night classes at the University of Connecticut.
He is currently a labor lawyer in Hartford. His work involves representing labor unions, particularly those from the construction industry, in negotiations.
Brockett is no stranger to helping Wesleyan students understand the history behind PATCO. As a student in Professor Schatz’s labor history class 20 years ago, he spoke to classmates about his experiences. And when Andrew Tonelli ’06 decided to write a senior thesis on PATCO and the strike, Brockett provided interviews and documents he had saved since then.
“The students in [this year’s] Labor History Class read many documents by and about workers in American history,” Schatz, who invited Brockett to speak, said. “However, speaking to a person involved in past events, especially someone who is as articulate as Tom Brockett, is a unique experience. Most of all, what I took away from the talk was a sense of Brockett’s immense intelligence, which has given me a better understanding of the history of labor leaders and their efforts.”
Leave a Reply