You have a long memory, Salsam. Yep, I was a Patco striker in 1981.

We were so naive. Patco was one of the few unions - maybe the only one - to endorse Reagan when he ran for president in 1980. We did it with the express understanding that he'd support us when we negotiated with the FAA for a new contract in '81. We had it from him in writing. In August of '81, after 8 disappointing months of negotiation, we struck. It was a violation of our signed oaths as civil servants to not strike. And it was a felony, punishable by $1,000 fine and a year in a federal penitentiary. But we figured we could pull us off: we were most of the national workforce, 11,400 out of 16,000 controllers. And Reagan had pledged his support. We failed to realize we'd been perceived as challenging his power. He fired us the next day.

Fortunately for me, there were 11,400 of us. You may have read that Department of Justice has had trouble prosecuting the ~2,000 January 6th Capitol rioters because it has limited resources. Think of what would have happened if DOJ prosecuted 11,400 strikers. So they left it to individual U.S. attorneys to decide if and who to prosecute. The attorneys sent ~100 strikers to prison (mainly in non-union states like Texas; none here in Michigan). The rest of us were just fired and blacklisted from working as controllers until 1993. By that time, most of us had established new careers, and would have taken a major pay cut to meet the requirement of returning as entry-level controllers.

Looking back, I wish I'd taken that pay cut.