Earlier. He called them the turbulent years. The years that gave rise to the cio and all of the organizing and mieverything we saw then. They werent years of upheaval, organization and progress so much as a big turnabout. A way in which the american working class suddenly took a turn to a different stage in its existence where we could say that from the 30s to the 70s was an experience of almost unbroken progress and expanding rights for workers. But in the years between 1968 and 1988, a lot of that turned around. So turnabout years. I want to start with three stories that help locate whats going on in this period. Then talk a bit about whats happening to the economy. Talk about Public Sector workers in the period and the physical austerity they faced and conclude with barometers of whats happening to working class america by the end of this period. So to begin, let me start with three stories. Im going to locate these in 1977. So roughly about halfway into the period that were talking about. Its 32 years after the conclusion of world war ii. Its 32 years of pretty much american progress, economically, at least into the early 1970s, when workers saw their standard of living rising and increasing opportunity. In fact, even increasing rights as we have seen africanamericans and women for the first time win some protections of their workplace rights against discrimination. But into the mid1970s, it became clear that all was not necessarily well with the american working class. I think one way that you start to see this is expressed in the music and culture of the time. Take, for example, what was a leading country and western hit of 1977, a song that you couldnt hardly turn on the radio without hearing. It was written by a writer called david alan koe. It was performed by a singer with a perfect name, i guess, johnny paycheck. The song was called take this job and shove it. I think it says a lot about what was going on in these years for many workers. Ive been working in this factory, the lyrics go, for 15 years. All this time i watch my woman drowning in a pool of tears. Ive seen a lot of good folks die that had a lot of bills to pay. I would give the shirt right off of my back if i had the guts to say, take this job and shove it. It goes on to talk about his foreman, he is a regular dog. His line boss thinks he is so cool. But, you know, lord, i cant wait to see their faces when i get the nerve to say, take this job and shove it. Now, that was an experience that a lot of people felt, even into the 1970s in their work, in many workplaces in this country. The angst of many workers in this time i think is expressed in those lines. The phrase, take this job and shove it, it turned out, i think, starts to take on interesting, deeper meanings in 1977 though. Consider, first, what was happening that year in atlanta, georgia. On march 28th of 1977, sanitation workers went out on strike in atlanta. It was an all africanamerican sanitation work force. They were led by a fellow named lehman hood. You see him with the then president of their union jerry wurf. He had been marching in memphis with dr. Martin luther king in 1968. In 1970, he had gone to atlanta and helped lead the organization of sanitation workers then and lead them out on strike in that year. They ended up getting a union. In fact, winning a pay increase as a result of that strike. But by 1977, the progress had seemed to slow in atlanta. What was really ironic about it was that the city, by 1977, had its first africanamerican mayor, Maynard Jackson. Jackson had been deputy mayor of atlanta in 1970 when the earlier strike happened. Courageously, he broke with his mayor, a white mayor and said, you have got to help these sanitation workers. Their wages, he said, are a disgrace before god. In fact, he helped to turn Public Opinion and help win that strike for the strikers. He then went on to become elected mayor in 1973 with the help of that union and with the help of the guy lehman hood. Once he became mayor of atlanta, he turned and he felt he needed to build support among the white Business Establishment of the city. It would look bad, he felt, if he caved in as he saw it to the demands of the citys workers, even the sanitation workers, who had struggled over the years and their wages in 1977 were still poor. They went out on strike. Jackson refused to negotiate with them. In fact, he issued an ultimatum. You return to work in 72 hours, he said, or you lose your jobs. You are fired. Hood was shocked. This was a guy he knew. He had worked with. He turned in this way. In fact, he proved true to his word. They didnt return and he fired them. In fact, in the middle of this, to add insult to injury, the political establishment of the Civil Rights Community atlanta for the most part sided with the mayor. In fact, Martin Luther kings father, nine years after his son had been assassinated in memphis helping sanitation strikers, he felt that this strike might damage the first africanamerican mayor of atlanta. And he came down hard against the strikers. He said publically to Maynard Jackson that if they dont return to work, you should, quote, fire the hell out of them. In fact, thats what jackson did. Later on the strike broke and many of them did get their jobs back. But it was clear one thing, times were changing. And not necessarily in a good way. Here is a protester being arrested during the strike against protesting against jacksons stand in atlanta. So that is story one. Story two, a completely different part of the country just months later, september 1977. September 19th, it was a monday. In youngs toyoungstown, ohio, j of pittsburgh. It had been a steel making center in the country. In fact, it was known as steel town, u. S. A. Steel city, u. S. A. As this postcard from the 50s had it. In the years from the 1930s to the 1970s, it had been a center of huge employment of many steel workers, people like johnny metzger. Although, he himself didnt work in youngstown. It had been the site in the 1930s of struggle. This very plant, the youngstown chu sheet and tube plant, workers had to go over this bridge to get into the plant back in the 30s. When they organized the cio. One thing they had to do over the years that galled them is they had to pay a penny, a toll to get in and out of work on this bridge. They said, to hell with that toll. They formed a union. They initially lost the strike in the little steel strike of 1937, as we saw most unions did. But they got the union finally by 1941. And they built it into a really good job to have. When they arrived on september 19, 1977, that morning, 5,000 people to go to work, summarily they were told without warning, were closing down the plant. That day they were out. Some of them had only recently graduated from high school. They looked forward to working there as their parents had done, as their grandparents had done. It was a solid job. Suddenly, it was gone. It became known in youngstown as black monday. It wasnt the end. Within five years, 50,000 jobs were lost in whats called the Mahoning Valley in what had been the heart of the steel making center of the country. It was being wiped out. It began that day in 1977, at least symbolically. The third story, that summer of 1977, the congress introduced, with a democratic president , jimmy carter, in office, a bill called the labor law reform act. It quickly passed the house. It passed the house by october of 1977. What was the bill being pushed through congress for . Well, by 1977, it was becoming increasingly clear to people who supported unions that the wagner act, the National Labor relations act really no longer functioned. Employers, as we talked about before, they found no penalty really in engaging in unfair labor practices. The number of charges that employers that were brought against employers for engaging in those practices was skyrocketing, up 400 , between 1960 and 1980. The number of workers fired for trying to form unions, up 300 . Those who had to be given back pay up five times. A industry having emerged of labor consultants who advised companies on how exactly to pursue these policies, when to fire people, how to appeal it in the courts, how to basically get around the law. The bill was supposed to fix all that. It got through the house. It ran into a bridge wall in the senate. The democrats controlled the senate. They controlled the house. They had a democratic president who said he would sign it, juny carte jimmy carter. They couldnt get 60 votes. And it died. There have been several attempts since then. They have all failed. In the middle of this period of postwar boom that lifted so Many Americans by the mid 70s, something was happening. Something disturbing. That led to the events in atlanta, to the shutdown in youngstown, that led to the bottling up of any possibility of being able to modernize the labor law that was already by then 40 years old and growing increasingly anacronistic. American was entering a new period. I want to talk about two aspects of this period. One is what started to happen to the economy. As all of this was occurring. Because the country started to go into a rapid economic reorganization. This was just a set of factors. I would say five big things came together in the period between 1968 and 88 to change everything for workers. A fateful convergence, i would call it. The first is what happened to oil and gas prices and how that led to a word that nobody had ever heard of before. A concept that was alien to economists even 20 or 30 years before. A concept called stagflation. What happened was this. In october of 1973, a war took place between israel and some of its arab country neighbors. Its known as the yom kipur war. The u. S. Supported israel in that. In retaliation, some arab member stations of an Organization Called opec, the organization of Petroleum Exporting countries, decided to embargo oil sales to the united states. This sent fuel prices skyrocketing. Just in a matter of weeks in the fall of 1973, the country saw huge lines at gas stations, rationing of gas happening in many states. Stealing of gas out of each others gas tanks sometimes by siphoning. That was how desperate some people were for gas. I dont know if you can make out that one picture. Its a father and son saying, gas stealers beware, were loaded. He has a gun in his hand. Dont try to take gas from us. What could lead to this kind of sense of panic almost . I think for working class america, probably there was nothing symbolic more of postwar prosperity than having your car and the mobility that came with it. Suddenly, gas prices were making driving that car increasingly difficult. What that led to was a bigger economic phenomenon that we call stagflation. There were two oil shocks in the 1970s. The first happened in 1973. The second began in late 1978. You can see them on this chart here. What happened during these shocks is that prices skyrocketed at the same time the gnp growth plummets. That means unemployment goes up. Here is what was weird about that. Prior to the 1970s, it was a basic law of economics that unemployment and inflation tended to balance each other out. When unemployment was up, that meant workers were out of jobs, they werent spending money, that would drive prices down. Unemployment up, prices down. If unemployment started to fall, that would tend to push prices up because people had money. They had jobs. What happens when both rise simultaneously . That had never happened before. As you can see in these periods, that happened. It was given the name stagflation. Its hard to exaggerate the degree of disorganization and fear that that produced in many working class households that were simultaneously fearing losing their jobs in this crisis but also at the same time seeing prices rise. It had a big, big impact. Look at the changes in Consumer Prices over the years. There was a big inflation spike during the war. One right after it. But then two big spikes in the 1970s. In which for a time inflation got up above double digits, more than 10 increase in the cost of things on average over the course of a year. At the same time, that was happening, unemployment was also high as you see on this graph. That led to a tremendous sense of being squeezed by Many Americans. What followed with that, what coinci coincided was just about total, sudden stop in the growth of real wages. What that means is, in the growth of the purchasing power of the average persons paycheck. What does a dollar buy . All through the postwar years, there was a continuous rise in that. The purchasing power of the american paycheck grew over time. You could buy more with it. But suddenly, boom, it flat llid and even went down. The real average Weekly Earnings made a downturn after 1973. What impact did that have on families . As you can see here, it meant that family Median Income suddenly stopped growing and flatlined. Individual income was declining. Family income was stagnant. By the way, what do you think accounts for that . If individual income was declining, shouldnt Family Income have been declining . Why wouldnt it have been . Transition from single breadwinner to double. Thats exactly right. The transition to two bread winnewi breadwinners. What families did is they deployed women with children into the workplace faster. A couple of the demographic consequences of what happened. One was that women share in the paid labor force, boom, jump by more in the 70s than any decade. Crossed the 50 mark for the first time. It started to affect when people married and when they had children. People started to marry later. This might seem astonishingly young to you, that in 1971, most women on average married at age 20. Can you believe that . It had risen to all of 22 by 1981. Men from 22 to 24. That still might seem young to you, because its continued to go up. Right . The biggest reason that it went up then was that people were uncertain about making the economic commitments necessary in this new environment. So you had stagflation, you had stagnant incomes. Then you had the beginnings of the phenomenon that we have come to call globalization. It was beginning already after world war ii. We had basically bombed to rubble the german economy. The japanese economy. But we helped rebuild those after the war. And then we also saw our companies become multinational and increasingly invest abroad. It got to by 1971 actually for the first time the u. S. Imported more than it exported. So that was happening even before the dislocations i mentioned in the 70s. What made globalization much more real for people in the 70s was a transformation that was happening in logistics. This is something that i think shapes all of our lives even today. Where you can order something, say, from amazon and have it within a day. All of that, i think, can be dated to what began to happen in the 70s with shipping containerization. Actually, not much had changed in the way ships were loaded and unloaded between the 19th century and the 1960s. They were mostly loaded and unloaded by longshoremen who put boxes on pallets that were hauled up in a cargo net, deposited on the dock or taken up from the dock and deposited in the hold where longshoremen would stack them in the hold of the ship. By the 1950s, a shipping entrepreneur named malcolm mcklain came up with a revolutionary idea. What if you put all of the things that were made in a factory into a container at the factory and then put that container on the back of a truck or train, took it to a dock, put it in the ship, sent the ship to wherever it was going, it was unloaded and then that same container was either put on a train or a truck and brought exactly to the location where it was needed . Where the goods had been ordered. This would so streamline shipping. Thats what he did. He founded a Company Called sealand. He shipped his First Container from new jersey to texas in 1956. The first one from the u. S. To asia in 1968. It was really in the 70s that containerization took hold. And what it did was it totally transformed shipping in this country. By 1980, 70 and plus of goods between the u. S. And europe were sent this way. 80 between the u. S. And asia. These giant ships if you are driving on 95 past baltimore, you see those big cranes that are meant to move those containe containers that ply the atlantic and pacific. It made shipping so cheap to move goods that suddenly u. S. Workers found themselves competing with workers around the globe making things that could be shipped so cheaply it didnt matter how far from the point of use that they were ultimately made. What began to happen in response to that is the creation of Global Supply chains. Supply chains that made use of the technologies and could assemble a kind of Global Assembly line. Consider the automobile, the product that invented the assembly line, henry ford. Before the 1970s, almost all the parts in an automobile assembled in the u. S. Were made in the u. S. By the 1980s, they could be made increasingly anywhere and they could be brought here cheaply. Once these Global Supply chains started to emerge, that really changed things. The Way Companies could make all of this logistical revolution work was in combination with other new technologies that really also took off in the 70s. The communication satellite, that meant that a corporation could be in immediate contact with any of its contractors arn around the world. The upc code, barcode developed in the 70s and took off that made it possible to scan an item in china later and to immediately know in the u. S. When it had been loaded, where it was anywhere in the world. Of course, the computer. The combination of those things changed the structure of the economy. That was already going on by the mid 70s. With all of this, a fourth event happened. That is, corporations began to change in some fundamental ways. Their relationship to the market, to the Financial Market also began to change. I would say the first change is a change from a kind of capitalism that i would call managerial capitalism to one that i would call shareholder capitalism. Before explaining that change, let me say a few things about what made it possible. The 1970s saw the intersection of three things occur that made a financial revolution in the country possible. The first was that there was a tremendous increase in the pools of capital in this country that were looking for an outlet, a place of investment to get returns. Part of that was a result of the success of workers. They had won Pension Plans for themselves in the public and private sector. Part was a development of new entities like 401 k that were made, tax investment tax protected retirement investments made possible by legislation in 78. Huge pieles of capital develope, they can be used to leverage change in the structure of things. The second thing that occurred was that the stagflation, the rising inflation that i told you about had a big impact on how people with that capital thought about what kind of returns they wanted. Before the 70s, 4 , 5 return, that was good. You were happy with that. You are not happy with that if the inflation rate is 10 , 11 . So suddenly, there is an incentive to try to get greater returns on investment. Thats preparing to change the way markets work. Then a third thing, a new idea, an idea first proposed by economist Michael Jensen and william meckling. An idea that i think could be defined as shareholder capitalism. Basically, what these economy i have economists did, they looked at aat the way corporations were run. The Corporate Leaders are lazy and they are not doing the best for their stockholders. What we need is stockholders to be able to get more. One of the first executives who believed it entirely was a man who came to the leadership of General Electric corporation in 1981. His name was jack welch. He gave a speech in 1981 in new york right after becoming ges ceo. He called it, growing fast in a slow growth economy. Basically, what he said is, there are things we can do to get those bigger returns. One of the things that he focused on in ge was downsizing. Taking the companys payroll and shedding as much of it as he could. The more he shed, the more stock prices rose. Ge cut its payroll from 411,000 down to under 300,000 in five years under welch. The revenues of the company ballooned at the same time. He developed a nickname in those days. It was after a weapon that the military was developing called the neutron bomb. The thing of a neutron bomb, when you dropped it on a city and it exploded, it didnt destroy any of the buildings. It simply spread lethal radiation over everything. It killed people but it left structures intact. In a sense, this is what they said about jack welch is that he was like a neutron bomb for ge employees. They called him neutron jack. Yeah. He was popular. In fact, he was a guru. He became a guru for the management people of his time. Whats that tv show with alec baldwin . 30 rock. The executive is patterned on jack welch. That alec baldwin character tries to emulate and wants to be. That was the thing to do in the 80s, was to manage your company that way. As that was happening, as people like welch were redefining the corporation, they began to change the form of american corporations. I would say you could look over the 20th century and say there were three different models of corporate types that existed. At the beginning of the century, it was a model of bigger is better. That was a model of vertically and whorizontally integrating. Buying up competitors so you had the most market control. Thats what u. S. Steel did. It was founded in 1901. It was that kind of company that gave rise to managerial capitalism. What is an evidence of managerial capitalism . Remember how u. S. Steel remondayremonday responded in 1935 to the cio . Anybody remember . By bringing in the police . Not quite. What they did is they recognized the union was a strike. They didnt want to go through what gm went through. In fact, the Corporate Leaders felt free to do that. They didnt feel pressure from their stockholders that said dont do that. In fact, there was no stockholder backlash. They ran the company as they saw fit. They werent really worried about what the market thought. In fact, it probably proved to be a good decision for them. You had that model. That was up until the 1950s. In the postwar era, it started to change a little. Instead of integrating within your sector, Companies Began to diversify, to buy up things outside of their sock tore. The conglomerate. It was on the rise between the 50s and the 80s. U. S. Steel joined that parade in 1981. They bought marathon oil. It had nothing do with the steel business. They thought it was a good sideline for the company. We have the rise of the conglomerate. Then what happens as a result of the market revolution i have just described to you is that a third model starts. It dates to the 70s. What we might call the lean corporation. Once people started to think about how you get more returns on investment, how you bump up stock prices, they began to look at those conglomerates and believe that they were worth more in pieces than they were as a whole. The whole was less than the sum of the parts. So thinking that, people began to move in to sell off parts of these conglomerates to drive up prices. Again, to shed part of the labor force. One company that modelled this was the likes corporation. It was a shipping company. But it bought youngstown sheet and tube in 1969. After it did that, it basically used youngtown sheet and tube to suck capital out to do other things. Never reinvested in the steel furnaces of the company. Then ultimately decided it made more sense to shut it down than to keep it running. Youngstown was profitable at the time it was shut down in 1979. Likes thought it could do better by moving the capital elsewhere. With that came new tools and a new approach on wall street to how to run companies. The emergence of a new phenomenon called private equity firms. They were giant pools of capital in which partners would encourage people like pennsylvania fupension funds to give them a hunk of capital and promised big returns. Amassing the big capital, the private equity leaders would buy up companies and break them apart and resell them. Often making a lot of money. In the process, usually laying off a lot of people. A lot of this was accomplished by big borrowing. Lea leveraged buyouts, when companies had to bore rrow to b new companies. They did it against the wishes of the management of the company they were buying, hostile takeovers. That led to a phenomenon, 85 of the u. S. Fortune 1000 downsized, shedding 5 million jobs. We talked about the kelly girl. You remember this from the book on the kelly girl. The thing about the kelly girl was that she was flexible. You could get rid of her. She wasnt an ongoing cost. Increasingly, this idea started to represent more and more workers to corporate america. Declining employment of the top 500 industrial corporations, they were all shrinking in these years. A final thing happened as the economy changed. That was a new ideology started to gather strength in the country. What we could call neoliberalism. Its most influential figure was the economist, he won the nobel prize in 1976, milton friedman. He was a critic of the new deal. He was a critic of government regulation, of liberalism, of unions and believed that private markets, unleashed markets, unregulated market were better at everything than government was. He became increasingly influential in the 1970s. He had a weekly column in newsweek. He authored a huge book called free to choose that became a very influential book in its time. So influential were ideas like his that they also affected how democrats thought. It was under the Carter Administration that neoliberal ideas of deregulation first began to spread. Airlines were deregulated in 1978. Trucking in 1980. The Banking Industry in 1980 as well. The thing about airlines and trucking, they had been highly regulated before this. That is the rates that they could charge, the fares you could be charged on an airline. The government all had a say in all of that. It was not necessarily great for consumers. What friedman argued is that competition without regulation would lead to lower fares. That did happen for a while until airlines started to consolidate and to collude to prevent it. What it really hurt was workers, because under regulation, their companies werent competing so hard. They were able to protect their pay standards. That became hard to do. A huge transformation was happening between 68 and 88 in the structure of the economy and how it worked. That transformation had huge implications for working people. Now thats the private sector. Lets shift a little bit and talk about government work, government employees. Because there the story was also a big turnabout. The situation that workers were facing. Coming out of the 1960s, the Public SectorUnion Movement was surging. Inspired by things like the memphis sanitation strike. In 1970, postal workers engaged in a wildcat strike nationally that perhaps over 100,000 people participated in, not delivering the mail. In effect, they won new legislation that allowed the Postal Service to become the usps now, a semigovernmental body. For postal workers to have the ability to bargain over things. That came electrfrom that strik. Public sector unionism into the early 70s kept expanding. It was, in fact, growing, even as private sector unionism was declining. This is the Public Sector. In fact, a greater percentage of Public Sector workers were in unions by the mid 70s than private sector workers. But boom, they ran into a brick wall in the mid 70s because of some of the economic changes ive mentioned to you. 1975 was a real turning point for workers in the Public Sector. It was that year that the stagflation hit home. In the place of new york city especially, where Public Workers had done the most to win rights, to bargain collectively, to improve their situation. Suddenly, new york was in the middle of a crisis. Think about it. When stagflation happened, that meant prices soared. The price of everything a city had to buy soared, including its own energy costs. The economy dipped. That meant tax revenues dipped. Governments were paying more and bringing in less. Boom, what do you do . Workers were caught in the vice very quickly. The federal government refused to help new york. The mayor appealed to president jerry ford for help. This was fords answer in a famous front page of the new york daily news. To ford to city, drop dead. You are on your own, new york. You made your bed. Find your own way to get out of this. What happened was that massive layoffs had to happen in new york. That caused a lot of turmoil. Police, fire, sanitation workers were laid off. Many of them engaged in protests in a result of that. Police began distributing this leaflet here called welcome to fear city at airports and the Port Authority and train depots saying, you know, were being laid off here. Maybe you want to think about going somewhere else on vacation. Trash began to pile up in the city. Bitterness developed between Public Sector workers and the government which had been more or less allied with them before that. So by the mid 70s, there was a problem. How did new york get out of that crisis . In part, the unions did it. The Teachers Union and the Largest Union of Municipal Workers afscme, their leaders, they used the Union Pension funds to buy Municipal Bonds that would help to keep the city afloat. It made it through the crisis. Everybody after that crisis knew that things were different and they were going to be far more austere from that point going forward. That crisis also opened the door to a campaign that began to gather steam as the 70s moved on to privatize the Public Sector. One of the people who had been calling for this was peter druker, one of the premiere economists in 1969. He wrote a book called the age of discontinuity. It included a chapter that was called the sickness of government. Basically, what he said is that theres mounting evidence that government is big rather than strong. Its too big. We need to downsize it. We need to take Government Services and find a way to use the market to deliver them, privatize them. Just as industry was changing, so, too, was pressure on government to change. How did Public Sector workers deal with that . They didnt like it a bit. They knew that this pressure was coming after them. They tried to push back against it in the late 70s. You could see the number of strikes occurring in the country continued to grow in this period. As the austerity regime clamped down on workers, workers tried to push back against it. They were not getting much help from washington either. In 1978, they wanted to reform the hatch act, the federal law that restricted what federal workers could do to be involved in politics. They also hoped to pass a Civil Service reform act that would give them the ability to bargain, federal workers to bargain over their pay. They werent allowed to do that. Frustration was building. This really was something you could see when you looked at the nations air Traffic Controllers. I ended up writing a book about this, because i thought it was really a symbolically important group. And what happened to them symbolized what was happening to many workers in this period. I want to talk about this union briefly called the professional air Traffic Controllers organization. It was made up of men like this. This is a picture of air travel controllers working on a radar screen in 1960. This was taken in new york in a hangar called hangar 11 at jfk where they used to monitor with very old equipment planes going in and out of new york. It was in that hangar on a december day in 1960 that a terrible mistake was made because of the bad equipment. Planes were routed toward each other and they had a midair collision over new york, killing many. The workers involved in that effort said, we have to end this. They had been complaining for a long time about the outdated nature of their equipment. Those kinds of radar screens, they literally came off of battleships. They were oldfashioned and not up to the task. These controllers had been complaining for years about the stresses of their lives. Embodied in this cartoon from their magazine from this time. Two people who worked that day in 1960, they were both military veterans working class guys from new york from the bronx. They banded together. They said, lets organize. They started to form a union with the help of president kennedys executive order in 1962. They eventually formed a union by 1968 called patco. They couldnt really bargain with the federal government. They were not recognized initially. So they started to push back against what they felt were unsafe procedures by slowing down their work. This was a magazine picture in 1968 right after they formed the union. They engaged in Operation Air safety. They just went by the book of how the instruction manual told them they should be working. That slowed everything down. They said, were not going to speed up until you improve our jobs. They eventually won recognition of their union and their first contract by 1973. This is their Union President meeting with richard nixon. Here are some of the leaders right after they formed their union. Over the course of the 1970s, they found that they were really unable to change things. So they determined that when their next contract expired, which would be in 1981, that they would strike if they had to to change the situation. These were buttons they started to wear by 1980 on the job. They knew their contract would expire. Im going. That means im going to strike. This was a fist holding the headset that controllers used to wear. They were ready to strike. Strike a blow for unity. They had won they had gotten no real help from the Carter Administration. So they gambled. They decided to endorse carters opponent in the 1980 election, ronald reagan. They thought in Reagan Reagan said, i will help you if im elected. Once reagan was elected and they tried to negotiate, they found they were not getting what they wanted. They did go on strike. On august 3, 1981, they went out on strike in airports and control centers all over this country. About 11,000 of them. They basically froze air traffic for some days. What reagan did is exactly what Maynard Jackson had done in atlanta in 1977. You said you have 72 hours to return to work. If you dont, you are fired. They didnt return. They thought that the country couldnt possibly operate without them. They were fired. They were replaced. It took years to get the system back up to speed. But the government had the resources to do that. It constituted a huge turning point. To bring this around to a close then, a huge number of changes had occurred. The economy, the power of Public Sector workers, all of this had begun to change rather rapidly. By the 1980s and in the aftermath of the patco strike, you could see that some important barometers were measuring danger for working people. One was that after patco, workers in general found that they couldnt strike anymore effectively. Patco was a federal strike. They didnt have a right to strike. But in the private sector, even where workers did have a right to strike, Many Employers felt like if the president can fire strikers, why dont we just replace them . Thats what began to happen. Strikes like the phelpsdodge strike of 1983. Remember jack metzger . They were a measure of working class power and to get things from their employers. The strikes happened with a precedent on the books that dated back to the 1930s. When workers strike for higher wages, employers can replace them if they want. Most employers didnt do that before the 80s. All of those strikes in the 50s, there were very few efforts by employers to beat those strikes. That precedent started to now be brought into affect. When copper minor ers went on strike in arizona, they faced replacement workers. The National Guard was called out to break their strike. Other strikes by hormel meat strikers, international paper, Greyhound Bus drivers, they were broken. You saw the number of workers and strikes sharply diminishing. As workers saw they really did not have the power to strike anymore. That led to a second thing. When workers no longer had the power to force their employers to deal with them, what began to happen is that productivity and wages began to diverge. All through the postwar period, workers were able to ensure that if they became more productive, that their wages would rise with their productivity. After 1973, that began to change. Productivity kept rising. Compensation stagnated. Workers didnt have the power to force companies to do anything about that. What did this lead to . A final thing. This post 1981 period saw increasing inequality in the country, inequality that started to recapitulate something that existed before the Great Depression but had been diminishing since then. Inequality was on the rise. All of this happened in these turnabout years from 1968 to 1988. Now just a final thought. I talked about the things that were happening in 1977. In atlanta, in youngstown, in rural mexico, three hours from new york city, Something Else happened that year. A young boy named Edwardo Gutierrez was conceived. We will read about him and talk about him. What we will see is that his family, too, was starting to be affected by the same things. These things would bring him to this country. How his story then intersects with this larger story is, i think, something we will see that deeply speaks to us in our time. Okay . Thank you very much. [ applause ] this weekend, American History tv is joining our spectrum Cable Partners to showcase the history of san antonio, texas. To watch more video from the cities on our tour, visit cspan. Org citiestour. We continue with our look at the history of san antonio. [ bells ] san antonio is here because of these missions. Whats really kind of wonderful is that a lot of the people who call this their parish home, who come to church here on a regular basis, can trace their ancestry to the colonial period, to the people who actually built these mission buildings, who built these