Furor over air controllers to spill into Congress

[The Northerner]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An uproar over lapses by U.S. air traffic controllers will spill into Congress where critics of organized labor see an unexpected opening to push their agenda into sweeping aviation legislation.

Embarrassing disclosures of controllers sleeping on duty -- even allowing first lady Michelle Obama's plane to fly too close to another jet -- have heightened scrutiny of the Federal Aviation Administration and raised questions about the agency's ability to manage its workforce and ensure safety.

Republicans see the furor as a way to force certain proposals into a final version of a $59 billion aviation bill that lawmakers will thrash out when Congress returns in May.

These include proposals to privatize more airport towers, consolidate facilities and give FAA management more flexibility in running the sprawling air traffic system. All are part of a larger Republican effort to cut FAA spending by $4 billion.

"Sleeping on the job, near misses - those give me more ammunition when I go into negotiations," John Mica, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Transportation Committee, told Reuters in an interview.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110422/pl_nm/us_usa_air_controllers

[nykym]

1. Here some ammunition for the other side;

That question can only be addressed in light of the Reagan administration’s crushing of the PATCO strike in 1981. When air traffic controllers went out on strike that year to defend their working conditions, Reagan fired them, union leaders were arrested, workers were blacklisted and witch-hunted, and PATCO itself was decertified.

In spite of strong support for PATCO in the working class—including a demonstration of some 500,000 in Washington DC—the AFL-CIO consciously isolated the flight controllers’ struggle and worked to defeat it, a defeat that set the stage for what has proved to be a three-decade-long assault on the jobs and wages of workers in every industry.

The union that replaced PATCO in the airline industry, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), was an organization created and controlled by strikebreakers, handpicked by the Reagan administration, that from its inception promised it would never carry out an “illegal” strike as PATCO had—in other words, it would never authorize a strike at all. Nothing good for workers could be built on these rotten foundations.

More at link:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/apr2011/airt-a16.shtml

Yea I know a socialist website.