--- title: Parallels to the 1980s for US Workers description: Breaking news and analysis from time.com. Politics, world news, photos, video, tech reviews, health, science, and entertainment news. canonical: https://time.com/partner-content/charter/7268549/parallels-to-the-1980s-for-us-workers/ author: TIME Staff article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-03-16T10:30:33.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-04-28T07:07:30.428Z article:section: Charter og:title: Parallels to the 1980s for US Workers og:description: Breaking news and analysis from time.com. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Mar 16, 2025 10:30 AM UTC  Art: Charter by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Mar 16, 2025 10:30 AM UTC President Ronald Reagan’s hard-line approach to public-sector unions in the early 1980s—especially his [firing of striking air traffic controllers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981%5FProfessional%5FAir%5FTraffic%5FControllers%5FOrganization%5Fstrike)—emboldened private-sector employers such as [Phelps Dodge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983%5FArizona%5Fcopper%5Fmine%5Fstrike), [International Paper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1987%E2%80%931988%5FInternational%5FPaper%5Fstrike), and [Hormel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985%E2%80%931986%5FHormel%5Fstrike) to become more aggressively anti-union and contributed to the decline of organized labor in the US. Could the Trump administration’s [sweeping layoffs of federal workers](https://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-firings-layoffs-rif.html) and [undermining of ](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-nlrb-national-labor-relations-board-gwynne-wilcox/)[workplace regulations](https://apnews.com/article/trump-eeoc-commissioners-firings-crackdown-civil-rights-c48b973cb32bad97e9da9e354ba627db) similarly set a hard-line tone for the private sector, giving business executives more confidence to push back aggressively against workers? To explore parallels between the landscape for workers in 2025 and the Reagan years, we spoke with [Kim Phillips-Fein](https://history.columbia.edu/person/phillips-fein-kim/), a history professor at Columbia University specializing in 20th century American political economy and the history of labor and capitalism. Here are excerpts from our conversation, edited for space and clarity: Sign up for Charter's newsletter to get the handbook for the future of work delivered to your inbox. Email Address You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our [Terms of Service](https://www.charterworks.com/terms-of-service/) and [Privacy Policy](https://www.charterworks.com/privacy-policy/). **From a historical perspective, what are the most striking similarities between today's labor and economic trends and those of the 1980s?** The most striking immediate parallel is that the Reagan administration and the Trump administration both have come in with a strong sense of unions and workers being too powerful in one way or another and wanting to seize the initiative back. What is striking is that unions are in a very different position today than they were in the early eighties when I think 23% or 24% of the workforce was unionized compared to about 10% today. For private sector workers, it's even lower. It's about 6%. So while there's this similar stance or rhetoric, the reality is very, very different. More generally, over the course of the 1980s you do see a set of profound shifts in the norms of the corporate workplace and you see the growing power and assertiveness of finance and shareholders. There's a prolonged period in the seventies of economic uncertainty and the crisis of profitability, concern about the viability of American capitalism overall. Of course, there's inflation, which is a parallel. What's really striking though is that you could say this is another moment of uncertainty, with the adjustments around AI and the parallel between that and the adjustments around de-industrialization and globalization in the early eighties. But in other ways, I actually think the two moments seem on the surface quite different. **How are they different?** There is not the same serious set of concerns about profitability that there were in the late 1970s hovering around the American economy today. Also, the seventies were still a period of intense political upheaval in many ways— following the civil rights movement, the movement against the war in Vietnam, which many corporate leaders feared and bled into a broader set of challenges to capitalism across the board. This compounded—with the economic instability, the persistent recessions—the sense of intensified economic competition that American manufacturers were increasingly aware of over the seventies, and which had a profound impact on their businesses. That political context is not the same today. In terms of the workplace, there were still, over the 1970s, hundreds of major strikes per year. In 2024, a year with higher strike activity than had been the case, it was what, [like 31](https://www.bls.gov/web/wkstp/annual-listing.htm)? It's just a deep contraction. The number of strikes per year has shrunk profoundly. So the workforce is actually much more politically quiescent than it was in the seventies going into the eighties. Correspondingly, economic inequality is much, much higher than it was at the beginning of the 1980s. That has really deeply reshaped the entire American political landscape. **The 1980s were a turning point for the decline of unions, at least in part because president Reagan's crackdown on federal air traffic controllers (who were members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or PATCO) emboldened private-sector employers to take a hard line with unions. Does this suggest that the Trump administration's hostile treatment of the federal workforce could spill over into aggressive private-sector employer treatment of workers?** I would say two things. One is yes, it's hard to imagine bringing back the world before the PATCO firings of the air traffic controllers. Employers very, very rarely hired permanent replacements in strike situations. They tended not to do so, even in situations where they might have had the legal right to do so—there was a very strong norm against that. The firing of the air traffic controllers really shifted that. It changed the narrative of organized labor so that instead of the unions being on the side of right, standing up for the working class or the little guy, suddenly they were portrayed as selfish and greedy, whereas management was not. It both changed the public narrative and perception and it also specifically legitimized this practice. There was a manual that Wharton School professors prepared shortly after PATCO that described the strategies and said, 'How can management learn from this?' So it really changes the willingness for employers to take a hard line. We can talk about the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), but that's the other area. It was a bit quieter, but it really also changed the situation quite profoundly. I do think that Trump's actions will embolden employers, but they're much more in line with employers today. Private-sector employers already have a very hard line stance toward unions in many cases and situations. Think of Amazon, which has been refusing to negotiate with the union that its employees on Staten Island voted for more for than two years now, I believe. In a lot of ways, the Trump administration is actually bringing into the public sector a set of hard-line practices that have been adopted widely in the private sector. This is in keeping with Trump's presentation of himself and bringing in Elon Musk as well as businessmen who are going to remake the federal government. Who might actually, though, take this hard-line approach up is state and local governments. One of the many proposals in Project 2025 has been to outlaw public-sector unions across the board, or to encourage the revoking of laws that allow public-sector workers to organize. That would also really profoundly change the power of the labor movement. We might actually see state and local governments taking up some of what Trump has done at the federal level. **Read** [**a full transcript of our conversation**](https://www.charterworks.com/what-workers-can-learn-from-1980s-parallels/)**, including more about parallels between worker concerns about AI automation today and the deindustrialization and offshoring of the 1980s, as well as historical context for the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI and the NLRB, and how popular discontent could impact union membership.** **Read Charter editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney’s** [**essay on the state of work in the US**](https://www.charterworks.com/how-america-works-today/) **in a new report out this week on the fifth anniversary of the start of the Covid pandemic edited by Julia Hobsbawm called “**[**The United State of Work**](http://workathon.io/usw/)**.”** --- ## Read more from Charter [READ MORE](https://time.com/partner-content/charter/) [Open article: What Jared Diamond Says Decides Whether Leaders Actually Matter](https://time.com/partner-content/charter/what-jared-diamond-says-decides-whether-leaders-actually-matter/)  ### What Jared Diamond Says Decides Whether Leaders Actually Matter [READ MORE](https://time.com/partner-content/charter/what-jared-diamond-says-decides-whether-leaders-actually-matter/) [Open article: Dr. Becky on What Good Parenting and Good Leadership Have in Common](https://time.com/partner-content/charter/dr-becky-on-what-good-parenting-and-good-leadership-have-in-common/)  ### Dr. Becky on What Good Parenting and Good Leadership Have in Common [READ MORE](https://time.com/partner-content/charter/dr-becky-on-what-good-parenting-and-good-leadership-have-in-common/) [Open article: The Three Ingredients for Building Trust](https://time.com/partner-content/charter/the-three-ingredients-for-building-trust/)  ### The Three Ingredients for Building Trust [READ MORE](https://time.com/partner-content/charter/the-three-ingredients-for-building-trust/) --- ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/partner-content/charter/7268549/parallels-to-the-1980s-for-us-workers/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/partner-content/charter/7268549/parallels-to-the-1980s-for-us-workers/"},"headline":"Parallels to the 1980s for US Workers","datePublished":"2025-03-16T10:30:33.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-28T07:07:30.428Z","description":"Columbia University's Kim Phillips-Fein on what history tells us about the outlook for workers and labor regulations.","url":"https://time.com/partner-content/charter/7268549/parallels-to-the-1980s-for-us-workers/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd88ba19970981def/6998c4f21f67093b40f5630d/charter-Phillips-Fein.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"TIME Staff","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/time-staff/"}],"articleSection":"Charter","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd88ba19970981def/6998c4f21f67093b40f5630d/charter-Phillips-Fein.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"charter-Phillips-Fein","caption":"","creditText":"","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/partner-content/charter/7268549/parallels-to-the-1980s-for-us-workers/","name":"Parallels to the 1980s for US Workers"}}]}] ```