Today, Explained - Grounding the shutdown

Episode Date: January 28, 2019

Air traffic controllers aren’t allowed to strike, but they may have found another way to end the government shutdown on Friday. Vox’s Matthew Yglesias determines whether the country learned anything from its pointless and painful political exercise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hundreds of thousands of federal employees return to work across the country today. After over a month and an estimated price tag of $3 billion, the shutdown ended on Friday. But with no wall, no agreement for a wall, no IOU for a wall, nothing. So why did this totally pointless, destructive, record-breaking shit show finally come to an end? Turns out people really don't like flight delays. A full ground stop at LaGuardia. The drastic action taken by the FAA to keep the skies safe resulting in flight cancellations and many of today's 3,400 delays. Now this is due to an air traffic controller shortage, which is the result of the government shutdown. Numbers of them in two strategic locations in the country.

One was outside of Washington, D.C., the other down near Jacksonville, Florida, called in sick. At the Washington, D.C. area center, six of the 13 controllers scheduled, nearly half, called out. Delayed flights rippling across the country tonight. Joseph McCartan isn't an air traffic controller, but he wrote a book about them. He teaches history at Georgetown University. One thing we know is that their union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association,

NATGA, publicly stated that it was opposed to any organized action to restrict air traffic, whether it be a sick out, a slow down, or any other organized action. And if the union tried to organize such an action, it would be illegal. It could lead to the union's decertification. But it seems clear that controllers themselves on the local level probably did some organizing and decided that, hey, this is going to go on until we sort of bring a stop to it. Why does it seem clear that that's what happened on a local level? Well, you could see a couple of days before this, by last Wednesday, when NATCA joined with the Flight Attendants Union and the Pilots Union to make a joint statement.

Saying, quote, we cannot even calculate the level of risk currently at play, nor predict the point at which the entire system will break. Absenteeism jumped sharply in some key locations and produced the effect that it produced. Do you know how many people called in on Friday? I don't have the figures myself. But are we talking about dozens, hundreds, thousands, do you think? I think it doesn't need to be many more than dozens. There are choke points in that system where if people don't cooperate at those choke points, they can

affect things all over the country. Did this sort of sick out put anyone in danger? No. What happened when those controllers called in sick is that the system was slowed down to accommodate the fact that there were fewer people there. Controllers would never run traffic in a way that would be endangering the people. And in fact, the folks who called in sick were really trying to protect the integrity of the system. It's, I think, a desperate cry for help to maintain a system in its safety. Has this ever happened before, air traffic controller sick-outs? It's not the first time that air traffic controllers have used strategic sick-outs to try to get their point across.

NATCA is the Union of air traffic controllers today, but the first such union was called PATCO, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization. It was founded back in 1968. Shortly after its founding, it engaged in two sick-outs, one in 69 and one in 1970. It discovered that controllers calling in sick in some strategic locations

could more or less back up air traffic around the country. Did it ever get bigger than these sick outs? Over a period of years after its recognition, the Air Traffic Controllers Union found that the way collective bargaining was done in the federal government really wasn't allowing them to address the issues that were crucial. Federal workers had no right to bargain

over their pay. And in fact, some of those things that were absolutely important for controllers. So there developed a sentiment within the union that they needed to be able to bargain when their contract came up in 1981. And they also decided if the government won't bargain with us, we'll actually strike. We won't just have a sick out as we had before. We'll go all out and we'll try to shut down the system. What happens? Does it shut down air traffic over the United States? Well, it cut it in half almost immediately, but the government had been preparing for some time for this, so they were actually kind of ready,

and the walkout didn't have the impact Patco hoped for. It did cut traffic in half, but Patco thought it would cut it down to maybe 10, 20 percent. How did the government prepare for this? Did they train a shadow army of air traffic controllers? Well, in fact, they did. Wow. The lower levels of management in the FAA traditionally have been people who used to work radar screens and monitor indirect traffic.

So in preparation for the strike, those management people went back and retrained to go back on the boards, as they're called. The administration worked very closely with the airlines to get them to see that actually weathering the strike was important and, in fact, could work for them. How'd the union take it, being replaced and not having any of their demands really met ultimately? Oh, it was a devastating blow.

Government cannot close down the assembly line. It has to provide without interruption the protective services which are government's reason for being. It was in recognition of this that the Congress passed a law forbidding strikes by government employees against the public safety. I interviewed air traffic controllers and asked them, what did you think when the president walked into the Rose Garden and threatened? And if they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.

People I asked about this said, hey, we thought he was crazy because he's making a threat that he can't actually fulfill. There's no way the system can run without us. And so to find that the system was run without them was an enormous surprise and a huge blow. And it was actually a blow to the whole labor movement of the time to see a strike broken so completely on such a national level. This strike took place in every city in the country, remember? Every place with an airport, so everybody saw it. It set a tone for the decade that followed that was really kind of devastating for labor. So what changed between then, 1981, and Friday, 2019, where just a concentrated amount of sick leave in Virginia and Florida brought this record-setting shutdown to an end within a few hours. Well, I think what we saw over the 35 days is that federal workers in general were really reluctant to take any collective action that would evoke the PATCO example. Yeah. But I think what began to happen by day 35 is that federal workers and especially air

traffic controllers were getting to the breaking point. And I think they realized that the context recently is quite different from what existed in 81. When the air traffic controllers went out in 81, most public sided with Reagan. They didn't feel like that strike was necessary or that it was even a last resort. And so Patco ran into a brick wall of public sentiment, unlike what happened last week. I think by the time air traffic controllers called in sick, public opinion was almost begging them to act. There was a sense among air traffic controllers that, hey, this can't go on. And in fact, if we act, the public will support us.

Have you spoken to anyone about whether what happened last week almost felt like a vindication of what happened in 1981? I have talked to some veterans of the 1981 effort who felt like it kind of removed some of the onus that had been on them. I think it felt to them like finally this ghost has been banished. This ghost that had haunted all federal workers and in fact much of the labor movement for now more than 30 years. Joseph McCartan is the author of Collision Course, Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and The Strike That Changed America. Up next, now that the whole thing's over, did anyone learn anything from it? This is Today Explained. I'm going to go ahead and guess that you don't have a go-to medical innovation podcast, but guess what? There's one out there waiting for you.

It's called Prognosis. It's brought to you by the good people at Bloomberg, and it explores the leading edge of medical advances and asks who gets or should get access to them. You meet people on the front lines of medical change, like a crusader in psychedelic drug research that's trying to hit people up for funding at Burning Man, or an entrepreneur who's genetically engineering frogs in his garage. There's also an online community of diabetics

who've apparently hacked together an artificial pancreas. Think of Prognosis as a podcast about the leading edge of medicine and all of the people who are balancing on that edge. The first season is available right now. You can find it on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher or any one of the many, many apps out there for listening to podcasts. I hear there are many of them. Matthew Iglesias, you're the host of The Weeds Podcast here at Vox.

We had you on our very first show of the year back on January 2nd, and you said… Sometimes politics touch your life personally, right? Like, you wanted to take your family on vacation to a national park, and now you can't. That's when things change. And here we are. Wow. Nailed it. Yeah, they closed down an airport in New York,

and suddenly they had to reopen the government. It was, like, the first major political event and standoff of this new era of Trump and Republicans in the Senate, but Democrats controlling the House. I was kind of hoping we could go through and talk about what we learned from it. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Starting with Nancy Pelosi, let's say. We're pleased that we reached an agreement to reopen government now so that we can have a discussion on how to secure our borders. I think, you know, one of the big things that we learned or we learned here is that for all the criticism she had taken and all the doubts that had been raised about her inside the party while Democrats were in opposition, she is very effective at the job of being speaker of the house. Right.

Right. Right. Whether or not she's the best person to have a stump speech, you know, which she isn't, or is a political asset for somebody running in a swing seat someplace, that this is an important job and she is good at it. And that's what you saw here, right? She kept her people calm. She kept Democrats united, even when, as always happens in a high-profile standoff. Look, people get nervous. People have doubts.

She listened but privately. There was a show of unity. She escalated a little bit with the State of the Union gambit. It worked. She got Trump back down and now she emerges from this with enormously higher confidence level in her among the caucus. You don't hear any more skeptics saying, well, you know, it's fine if she wants to gavel back, but she's got to move on soon.

It's like she may have secret opponents still lurking someplace, but nobody's talking anymore about how Nancy Pelosi is a problem. It appeared that having political experience could be useful to someone like Nancy Pelosi. Exactly. I mean, she had a real strategy. She understood the basic dynamics of this. She knew that as time went on, it was going to make Trump fold and that therefore she did not need to come to the table with anything or do anything, that she could hold her line

and, you know, and that the White House would project confidence and then they would suddenly break. And that's exactly what happened. Right. When the president's held responsible by people for making things work, when his negotiating tactic is to sabotage the operations of the government, he is going to lose. She understood that. She made sure that her caucus understood that.

When people maybe didn't agree with her, she made them shut up about it and she prevailed. And that means that next time something comes in, she's going to get a lot more deference, speak with a lot more authority, regain the respect, enormous respect that she had amassed in 2007, 2008, 2009. I'm glad the closed portions of the federal government will reopen and get back online. I'm glad that the dedicated men and women of the Coast Guard, law enforcement, the TSA, and all the other federal employees will not have to go longer without pay for their work and will receive their back pay.

What about congressional Republicans and Republicans in the Senate who seemed a lot quieter for the past couple of weeks? Yeah, I mean, it's going to be interesting to see how this played out. Because essentially what happened here is that Senate Republicans and Mitch McConnell tried to tell Trump that this shutdown strategy was not going to work. And they tried to get him to— Behind the scenes. Well, not behind the scenes. I mean, they voted for a bill that would have kept the government open right before the lame duck. Then Trump interceded.

He got then-Speaker Paul Ryan to kill that bill, move into the shutdown. Senate Republicans agreed to back Trump up. They had already clearly signaled that they did not think this was a good idea. But for whatever reason, they didn't want to fight with Donald Trump. So Trump led them into this battle and it was a fiasco. And ultimately they had to fold because Senate Republicans started getting off the bus. So one way this could go going forward is Trump could say, hey, it turns out I should have listened to Mitch McConnell, right? That Mitch McConnell, like Nancy Pelosi, is a guy who's been doing this a long time, really understands legislative

tactics. And, you know, maybe I'm going to like set the direction in terms of message. But like, I should listen to Mitch about this stuff. Another way it could go is that Trump feels that he was betrayed by Senate Republicans. And, you know, he wants to take them out or start fighting with them. Senate Republicans could feel that they were led astray by Donald Trump and they want to start fighting with him. It'll be interesting to see, right? I mean, what we know so far is that in the final days of the shutdown, Republicans were kind of yelling at each other behind closed doors. It was very tense. And they were having an internal crisis. But moving forward, you know, the rational

lesson to take from this would be that Mitch McConnell knows what he's talking about and you should listen to him. But Donald Trump is sometimes a little bit of a tempestuous fellow. Does his base still support his pursuit of the wall the same way it did before the shutdown? You know, I mean, I'm sure that they do. The president, well, he showed leadership, rose above the partisan bickering in the swamp, offering relief to federal workers, all while sticking to his commitment to secure our border. This is the thing where when you talk about Trump's real base, right, this is people who when they read a Donald Trump tweet, they think it's true. And there's a million different ways Trump can spin what he wants to do going forward, right?

There is money appropriated for construction projects at the southern border. How you characterize that as building a wall or not is entirely up to Trump. If he wants to say that taking the existing vehicle fences and hardening them into being more like the anti-pedestrian fences is building the wall, I think his base will believe him. And I might, you know, make fun of him on Twitter or something. But a politician's base, by definition, is very malleable.

The question for Trump is not the base, but is people who had some doubts about him, but who all things considered decided to vote for him one way or the other. And is he projecting confidence or does it turn out that he is kind of flailing? And to me, I think to anyone looking from the outside, this looks more like flailing. And meanwhile, this might just happen again in three weeks.

In theory. I mean, it seems unlikely, but doing the shutdown that we just had also seemed at least a little bit unlikely. Yeah, you didn't know on January 2nd when we talked that it would go as long as it would, did you? No, I mean, you know, there's no telling because he shouldn't have done it in the first place for foreseeable reasons and his allies were telling him. So in theory, we might do it all over again. I think if I was, you know, wagering, I would guess that we won't just because he already saw that he lost. And I think

Senate Republicans will be very reluctant to do this all over again after having told him not to do it, then agreed to go along with him, then lost. I don't think they're going to do it again. But, you know, crazy things happen. Matthew Iglesias calls a bluff when he sees one for Vox. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained.