once elected, they wanted to work with patco to offer patco a contract that they felt would reward patco for that endorsement and also signal to other unions and more conservative union members that allying with ronald reagan would be good for you. and, actually, in the negotiation that broke down that summer in 1981 the reagan administration went further than any previous administration had gone in trying to offer the controllers something. they actually did bargain with patco over what the law did not allow them to bargain over; wages and benefits. primarily wages. they made an offer to patco that no previous administration had done. the problem was that by that point that offer was so small compare today what the controllers believed that they would get. and their expectations were quite different. they ended up rejecting the offer. controllers looked at reagan, and they thought this man will help us really fundamentally change the system that so bothers us. and having broken with the rest of organized labor to endorse him, they expected a big breakthrough at the bargaining table, and

. >> when more than 12,000 members of the professional air traffic controllers' organization, patco, walked off their jobs with the federal aviation administration on august 3, 1981, one shrewd analyst noted that their illegal strike had been in the making almost since the moment that their union was founded in the 1960s. it was the inevitable choice, wrote this journalist, because most of patco's 12-year existence appears to have been preparation for this moment. the controllers had such a long history of militancy before 1981 that it was not surprising in some ways that they became the first union to stage a carefully choreographed and planned nationwide strike against the federal agency. and yet the journalist was puzzled that white collar workers with what this journalist called a keen appreciation for the professionalism of their calling, that workers like this would strike against the government. newspaper columnist jimmy breslin made a similar observation as he watched patco strikers and their families gather on long island to rally two days after the strike began on august 5,