Part 2

The Crushing of PATCO and the Air Traffic Controller Shortage

The ongoing crisis in the aviation industry has, like all other burdens of capitalism, fallen onto the backs of the aviation workers who have struggled bitterly against the bourgeoisie throughout the decades. The aviation unions have at times, really put the screw to the bourgeoisie, utilizing strikes to their advantage, while the companies were facing hardships., Today, the weakness of the class union movement has all workers fighting on the back-foot; submitting to the legalistic appeals of the NLRB or the Railway Labor Act, which the airline workers are categorized under by the bourgeoisie. As the crises of capitalism ripen and tragedies accumulate, without a militant centralized class movement, the workers will bear only more strain.

In the first week of May 2025, a series of critical technological failures at Newark Liberty International Airport brought a long-simmering crisis in U.S. aviation labor to the surface. Malfunctions in the airport’s aging infrastructure, particularly in the systems that manage flight departures and arrivals, resulted in nearly one-fifth of the airport’s air traffic controllers walking off the job. These workers, represented by the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), cited chronic under-staffing and the mental toll of their already stressful jobs as the reason.

Although these workers generally get paid relatively well they, on average, work 10 hour days, 6 days a week under mental duress in exchange for a relatively negligible drop of the total money raked in by the bourgeoisie. Many workers feel traumatized and helpless, as the weight of catastrophe from collapsing capitalist infrastructure seemingly falls upon their shoulders, further exposing the serious cracks that have been developing in the air transport industry for decades and the fragile line of laborers struggling daily to ensure planes take off and land.

Airlines, under pressure to maximize returns on fixed capital investments, continue to push for more flights and faster turnaround times. But airports like Newark are already stretched past safe operational limits. Newark was forced to cap the number of daily flights until at least the end of 2025. United Airlines, by far the dominant carrier at Newark, responsible for roughly two-thirds of its flights, has openly supported reclassifying the airport as a “Level 3” controlled slot facility, which would give the FAA the authority to restrict flights to within infrastructure capacity. This move, however, would eliminate smaller carriers unable to service at least 80% of their designated slots, consolidating United’s market dominance all while presenting itself as a responsible stakeholder.

PATCO Strike

In August 1981, 13,000 Air Traffic Controllers organized through the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) went on a national strike for overall better pay and conditions. At its start, the workers were able to halt 70% of the daily flights, a huge blow to the capitalists, which responded by declaring the strike “illegal”, giving the workers 48 hours to surrender. The workers defied the warning and continued their strike.

The bourgeoisie prepared for the strike by trying to recruit as many scabs as possible to keep the airports operational, eventually being able to keep about 75% of the scheduled flights going after a few days. The opportunistic leadership in PATCO, having endorsed Reagan during his presidential run, gave quite a bit of credence to the president treating them favorably, which of course proved to be disastrous for the rank-and-file and their fight.

After replacing the workers with scabs and skeleton crews and with no strong class union support from other worker defense organizations, Reagan promptly fired all the striking workers, thus decimating the union which then decertified the following October. It took nearly a decade to bring the number of air traffic controllers back to what it had been, and as made evident by the recent issues, it has never fully recovered.

The Current Situation

The destruction of PATCO emboldened a broader turn toward strikebreaking and union suppression that defined the 1980s and continues to this day. The union that eventually replaced PATCO, NATCA, was formed with an explicit promise to never engage in “illegal” strikes, a promise that functionally disarmed it. Like many post-Reagan unions, NATCA accepted its role as a lackey to capital, operating primarily as a contract negotiator rather than a fighting organization for workers.

Despite many air traffic controllers demanding higher wages to compensate for their grueling work days, the current NATCA leadership has no interest in championing this fight. They have not negotiated pay since 2016 and the boss-linked leadership, instead, has extended the current contract twice, and it’s now set to expire in 2029. The NATCA leadership openly aims to collaborate with the bourgeoisie on technical improvements to increase the efficiency of exploitation of the workers instead of their economic defense.

As we have always said, contracts between workers and those who rule them are not worth the paper they’re printed on. We can look to the recent action by the bourgeoisie of removing “bargaining rights” of the Transport Security Administration workers organized through the American Federal Government Employees (AFGE) union, which–to the opportunistic leadership that are only interested in collaboration with the bourgeoisie– has rendered any “struggle” inert in their eyes; substituting real worker defense for empty calls for “protests” and legal appeals instead of militant strikes and other forms of direct action.

But the aviation industry workers are not afraid to strike. The Association of Flight Attendants, which was able to win large concessions from United Airlines by threatening a strike with nearly 100% approval by the workers last year, has also endorsed the “general strike” ostensibly being planned for 2028. There have also been numerous strikes by the workers in the defense sectors and aircraft production in the last few years, with yet another Boeing strike on the horizon in Illinois and Missouri.

The recent strikes of 3,000 International Association of Machinists (IAM) members at Pratt & Whitney and 900 UAW workers at Lockheed Martin in May and June caused a brief disruption in military aircraft and weapon production, but the absence of any international character or even national coordination in the strikes makes evident the need for workers to build centralized class unions that unite the shared struggles of the workers that are being unfavorably fought separately and, as we have mentioned numerous times, the opportunistic union leadership continually try to tie the struggles of the workers to the national interests of the bourgeoisie, like Shawn Fain, who tells the workers that their struggle for wages is a fight for an illusory “share” of the war industry. Workers must continue to fight against the nationalistic leadership of the regime union leaders, lest their struggle become yet another example of the proletariat sacrificing its own interests to those of national capital.

Look at the subordination of the transportation workers and the suppression of their economic demands, as seen with the suppression of the Railroad workers’ strike in 2022 under the Biden administration, to see how the struggle for wages and better conditions for transport workers is directly opposed to the interests of the national ruling class, who want the transport of their commodities to continue uninterrupted, and will fabricate, utilize, and abuse any of their laws to ensure this, with the threat of the army and police always implied.

Conclusion

Air transport, just like the previous revolutionary technological advances in the means of transportation, has continued showing the bourgeoisie’s historical tendency towards consolidation in the face of the inevitable economic disaster brought about by the anarchy of production, inter-imperialist pressures and the tendency for the profit rate to fall. Domestic competition gives way to competition between national monopolies on the road towards world war; wages for the workers are immiserated and strikes suppressed; and the world economy convulses, requiring regular state intervention in an attempt to stabilize the collapsing pillars.

The bourgeoisie, desperate to hold onto their share of the social capital, must enter into incumbent alliances to try and force the proletariat into submission, but this results in an ever greater sense of urgency on the part of the proletariat to defend, in its economic struggles, the necessary share of the social capital that it needs, increasingly just to survive. As the overproduction crisis continues to ripen into sharper contradictions, the transportation industry in the US may eventually formally fall into the hands of the state, as it has done in the past during wartime, but a nationalized transportation industry will not save the proletariat from disaster, only focus capital’s onslaught to further align with the interest of the national bourgeoisie against all that threaten it.

This is all reflective of a key contradiction in the nature of the capitalistic means of transportation and production in general: that the productivity of labor and its faculty of creating value stand in opposition. The more efficient the transport, the less value transferred from productive capital to the commodities, as there is less total labor-time required to move the same mass of commodities; the profits dwindle and the proletariat eventually foots the bill in lost wages or blood.

Only through international coordination of class based unions and the rejection of nationalist labor leadership can transportation workers, indeed, all workers, strengthen the ranks of their economic defense as the crisis of capitalism only worsens.