Ex-Air Traffic Controllers Recall Strike With Regret : Labor: Few of the 11,400 workers fired by President Reagan 10 years ago found jobs that are as satisfying.

“I made two bad mistakes in life,” Phil Miller says. “I went to Vietnam and I walked away from a job that I loved.”

Miller, a 43-year-old Air Force veteran, is doing fine these days as a Boston defense consultant. But the job that he walked away from still haunts him like a stormy romance he wishes he’d never broken off.

As a younger man, Miller was part of a national fraternity of professionals who prided themselves on their unique ability to bring order out of chaos. Then their world blew up and they were consigned to the hell of normal jobs. Today they are contractors and printing company bosses and liquor store owners and prison guards and factory workers.

They are the 11,400 U.S. government air traffic controllers who went on strike 10 years ago next week in a contract dispute with the Federal Aviation Administration, and were fired en masse by then-President Ronald Reagan, the strongest action ever taken against striking federal workers by a U.S. President.

It was a roll of the dice that most ex-controllers still regret.

“I don’t think any of us would have done it again, knowing the results. It’s too high a price to pay,” said Gary Williams, who so desperately missed the work that he went to Canada and hired on as a controller at Toronto International Airport two years ago after running a hot-tub business for eight years.

Several dozen other onetime strikers have ventured to Australia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. More than 100 others have found jobs at small U.S. airports that contract traffic control to private firms.

The public legacy of the strike still ripples through American society.

Reagan’s decision to quickly fire the controllers and decertify their union, rather than attempt to negotiate an end to the strike, is regarded by labor analysts as a catalyst in American management’s increasingly aggressive tactics against unions. In response to prolonged labor criticism of that trend, the House of Representatives last week voted to ban private companies from permanently replacing striking workers.

In addition, the mass firing caused years of delays in commercial aviation, as well as a shortage of experienced controllers that still plagues the FAA. The primary complaints of the controllers who struck--outdated computer equipment and insufficient training--remain primary complaints of the controllers who replaced them.

The private legacy of the strike is the collective melancholy, often bitter sigh of thousands of ex-controllers. Most of them are men now in their 40s and 50s. Many are military veterans with only high school diplomas.

They had been convinced by their union that the FAA would not risk functioning without them. Yet the majority of scheduled flights resumed quickly, if not on time.

They had been convinced that Reagan’s firing would not stick. Even as the government began the unprecedented step of rapidly training thousands of new, younger controllers to replace the strikers, many on the picket line continued to believe that a back-to-work settlement would be fashioned between the FAA and their union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization. That, after all, was the way labor-management relations had traditionally worked in the public and private sectors.

It was not to be. Four months after the strike began, Reagan signed an executive order barring strikers from re-employment in FAA facilities. It still stands. Periodic attempts by sympathetic congressmen to force the FAA to rehire several hundred of the controllers have failed.

As reality gradually set in, the ex-controllers struggled with self-doubt, second-guessing and new career paths. Some succeeded. Others continue to wobble. But one harsh truth still binds them: Virtually none have been able to find anything as fulfilling as the adrenaline rush involved in trying to keep airplanes from crashing into one another. The art of “getting the picture,” of knowing where every plane in your assigned sector of airspace or ground is located at a given instant, of anticipating and instructing where it will be in the next moment, is the ultimate high-stakes video game.

“There aren’t any rushes in my job,” said Miller, who spent seven months as an ironworker after the strike but now works for a company that designs air traffic control systems for the Department of Defense. “There’s no immediate gratification here. I really miss sitting down and working a bunch of airplanes and seeing the results of what I did. Losing that was like losing a member of the family through death, someone you’ll never see.”

“I can probably handle a lot more pressure than other people in my job,” said ex-striker Tom Obarski, now a Denver stockbroker, “but so what? The way the rest of the world operates, it’s OK not to be able to handle a lot of things at once. The skills you were most proud of are now the least important.”

“I still miss it immensely,” said Chuck Sheehan, a former Los Angeles International Airport tower controller who spent years working as an unpaid volunteer to unions after the strike before becoming an area representative at the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor three years ago.

“It grows in your blood,” he said. “Every day you don’t know what’s going to happen. It builds and it builds to a point where you need that challenge. It’s almost like a drug high. We’d get to work in the morning and we’d fight each other to get the busier (control tower) positions in the morning rush.”

Those are the words of a man who, like most controllers, despised FAA management and still blames his 12 years as an FAA controller for a heart problem that at one point put him on a list of transplant candidates. And yet . . .

“It’s hard to explain,” said Sheehan, 43, who later this week will pack up a large collection of strike memorabilia and travel to a weekend reunion of several hundred ex-controllers in Washington. “My wife still doesn’t understand it,” despite the fact that she is a devoted supporter of organized labor who met Sheehan when he was speaking at a strike rally.

“Here I am, I have a heart problem and everything caused by the stress and I would love to go back and do it again,” he said. “It’s almost like a gambling fever.”

It was the camaraderie, most of them say. The absolute trust you often had to place in your colleagues’ judgment. It was like the combat environment many of them had experienced. It was the ninth inning of a tie game.

Ancil Young, 44, tried vainly to recapture it. He checked out a maintenance job with Los Angeles County’s airport department, just to be around airports and planes. He briefly entered a training program to become a California Highway Patrol dispatcher, desperate for something that would allow him to use those mental juggling skills you develop when words and paper and electronic data are simultaneously racing at you.

Nothing was the same. All Young had ever been was a controller. He had gone into the Air Force after graduating from high school in West Covina in 1965, served five years, come out as an experienced military controller, then joined the FAA’s ranks in 1970, a time when the agency was hiring substantial numbers of new controllers.

After the strike, Young first got a job installing high-rise glass windows. That lasted a year and a half. Then, like many ex-controllers who were used to being given free rein, he tried to set up his own small business. He opened a frozen yogurt store in his hometown. It failed. He eventually declared bankruptcy.

Four years ago, he began working at a Honda dealership in Pasadena, where he is now a service adviser.

“It’s fine, but it’s just a job,” he said.

His voice is different when he talks about the old job.

“I was so enthralled with it,” he said quietly. “I felt so special. I miss it terribly. I used to love to tell people, ‘I’m an air traffic controller.’ Now it’s just, ‘I’m in the car business.’ It’s like being exorcised from a family. It’s a very frustrating thing to live with.”

Phil Wood, an Illinois attorney who has represented hundreds of former controllers in class-action lawsuits against the FAA, said stories like Young’s are typical of how thousands of controllers gave up upper-middle-class security. The job now pays up to $60,000 a year, depending on seniority and the intensity of the facility’s air traffic.

“What happened to them was catastrophic,” Wood said. “They lost homes, a great deal had marriages break up. Most of them suffered a loss of income by at least one-half. It’s a unique job. There’s only one employer, the U.S. government.”

The controllers’ confrontation with their employer had been brewing for years.

In early 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, which represented 14,000 of the FAA’s 17,000 controllers, threatened to strike. For a decade, PATCO had demanded that the FAA improve computer equipment and training, raise benefits to compensate for stress, cut the workweek and increase salaries. “Sick-outs” by thousands of controllers had badly disrupted air traffic in many cities for several weeks in 1968, 1969 and 1970. The president of PATCO, Robert Poli, came to power in 1980 maintaining that past union tactics were not militant enough.

There was little common ground. The government, which was offering three years of $4,000-a-year pay raises, called the controllers’ demands “outrageous,” defended the FAA’s computer equipment and criticized controllers for on-the-job complacency. An earlier FAA administrator had described their jobs as “not much different than a bus driver’s.”

Although it is illegal for federal employees to strike, the government had maintained a relatively tolerant attitude. Postal workers and controllers had struck in isolated instances with no mass firings. PATCO, operating with the traditional mentality of organized labor, planned its strike as a quick show of muscle that would shut down a substantial amount of the nation’s airline traffic and cause passenger outrage. The union expected to be bloodied with fines and suspensions but figured it could force the FAA to bend on contract issues.

Wrong.

On the first day of the strike, about 80% of PATCO’s members honored the picket line. The FAA, using supervisors and non-strikers, allowed about 60% of the nation’s commercial flights to operate. Reagan immediately issued his back-to-work ultimatum. Controllers literally laughed at it. Two days later the firing notices went out. In Alexandria, Va., the president of a PATCO local was led away from a federal courthouse in leg irons, handcuffs and waist restraints and jailed for 60 days after he told a judge he would not obey a court order that declared the strike illegal.

By the fourth day of the strike, 79% of all commercial flights were operating. Under FAA pressure, airlines continued for years to limit their schedules. The limited controller work force was ordered to increase spacing between airplanes in flight. The caution made life more difficult for travelers--and eliminated any public support the strikers might have counted on--but it avoided any catastrophe that could be blamed on the wholesale replacement of controllers.

By the fourth week of the strike, 109,000 people had applied to the government to become air traffic controllers. They were hurriedly processed through the FAA’s training center in Oklahoma City.

Nevertheless, the FAA continued to attract criticism. More than three years after the strike, an FAA task force concluded that conditions in the nation’s busiest air traffic facilities were as bad or worse than before the strike, and that the new controller work force was suffering from poor morale, declining skills and an increased “burnout” rate.

By 1987, the new work force formed a union to pressure the FAA on many of the issues that had triggered the strike. Leaders took pains to reassure members that the ugliness of 1981 would not be repeated.

“Hell will freeze over before we strike again,” said organizer Steve Bell, the union’s president.

Today, the FAA has about 1,000 more controllers than it did before the strike. However, the number of experienced controllers--those who have been trained to perform every job in the control tower or other traffic control facility--is 3,000 lower.

In Washington, Bill Taylor works as an addiction counselor at an outpatient clinic. Taylor, 48, went back to school to learn how to help people re-examine their lives, and in the process he learned how to re-examine his.

Taylor, too, was a controller and a PATCO leader. He worked in the Tucson control tower. He went out on strike. Like a handful of controllers, he was arrested for violating a court back-to-work order. He was convicted and placed on probation in lieu of a year in federal prison. The next year, he drove to Washington to work with PATCO, which was decertified and in bankruptcy, but which Taylor wanted to help keep alive.

In 1985, Taylor took the union’s old mailing list and found that 5,200 of the addresses were still current. He formed an organization he called PATCO Lives. To remember. Today he still has 4,800 names on his list. Thousands of others who struck have no interest. PATCO to them means only betrayal.

“The first three years were extremely difficult for us,” Taylor said. “A lot of anger, depression, shame in our ranks about what happened to us. Many of us identified ourselves by our jobs. We had to go through the loss. We had to feel the pain. Most of us have recovered.”

For Taylor, who edits a PATCO Lives newsletter, the challenge was to stop thinking of himself as a loser, to stop thinking that his life was a failure because he hadn’t gotten his old job back.

“I miss the work, but I don’t miss the job,” he said. “I miss the people. When I fly, when I go by an airport, I get that longing. But I still to this day believe the strike in my life was not a losing endeavor. It was not a wrong decision for me. Just because I lost my job and a lot of money doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision for me. I think right decisions can end up in a lot of loss. I can’t rate the decision just based on the outcome.

“Yes, I lost my job, but I found a new career in health care. I found a way of living. I’m closer with my family. I can’t just base it on whether I make X amount of money or whether I work as an air traffic controller.

“There’s a lot of anger still out there. A lot of bitterness. Feelings of having been abandoned--by the government, by the American public, by the union. That’s still part of what we need to work through and live.”

Portrait of Two Fired U.S. Controllers

CHUCK SHEEHAN

Age: 43

Past Job: Formerly a controller at Los Angeles International Airport tower.

Current Job: Area representative for Los Angeles County Federation of Labor since 1988.

Observations: “For several months after the strike we kept saying, ‘It’s going to work out.’ But it didn’t. Reagan just wouldn’t bend. I don’t regret what I did because it was necessary. The air traffic control system was falling apart. The controllers were falling apart individually.”

GARY WILLIAMS

Age: 43

Past Job: Formerly a controller at Stapleton International Airport in Denver

Current job: Air traffic controller at Toronto International Airport since 1989; one of a dozen former U.S. controllers working at the Toronto facility.

Observations: “I really enjoy the job. I hope to retire up here. But what aggravates all of us is that here we are, we’re qualified to do this work and we have to do it in a foreign country. The draft dodgers who went to Canada, they were all pardoned. It’s like we have a life sentence.”