Excerpt, “The Reagan Culmination” by Bruce Schulman, The Seventies (2001)

In his first months in office, Reagan laid out his agenda. His administration sought nothing less than a 'fundamental reorientation of the role of the Federal Government in our economy--a reorientation that will mean more jobs, more opportunity, and more freedom for all Americans." National policy should no longer micromanage the economy or redistribute existing income; instead it must encourage the "development of private institutions conducive to individual responsibility and initiative.

In practice, that "Second American Revolution" involved three great changes. First, Reagan demanded a dramatic reduction in taxes. The president proposed to reduce individual tax rates by 25 percent over three years. At the same time, he sharply cut the rates for the wealthiest taxpayers and indexed taxes to inflation, ending the bracket creep that had eroded Americans' few salary increases and made their tax burdens seem so heavy in the 1970s. Second, Reagan moved drastically to redefine the relationships-to shift the balance of power-among business, labor, and government. He accelerated deregulation, weakening the power of federal agencies to supervise industry's health, safety, and environmental performance. He struck hard at organized labor, removing the public backing that had armed unions in their struggle against business. And he devolved responsibility to the private sector, freeing entrepreneurs and giving business much more responsibility not just for economic but for social and cultural life as well.

Third, Reagan declared war on the federal government itself. He promised not only to end its interference in economic life, but to starve it of funds and shrink its bureaucracy. He targeted waste and inefficiency, but also attacked the welfare state he thought intrusive and counterproductive. He pledged to eliminate two cabinet departments.

He also vowed to eliminate deficit spending. During the campaign, he had blasted Jimmy Carter as 'the head of a Government which has utterly refused to live within its means." Candidate Reagan published a plan to balance the federal budget by the end of his second year in the White House and to generate a sizable surplus one year after that. 'You and I, as individuals, can by Borrowing, live beyond our means, but only for a limited period of time, "the president sermonized on inauguration day. 'Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we're not bound by that same limitation?"

Reagan embraced no coherent economic philosophy; indeed, he borrowed elements from many rival conservative strategies. Still, his basic thrust was to set loose the market--to fix the economy by shrinking government. During the transition, President-elect Reagan willingly tossed aside some of the economic policy tools his predecessors Nixon, Ford, and Carter had relied upon. He eschewed wage and price controls to fight inflation and Keynesian demand management-massive jobs and public works spending- to ease the recession.

In February 1981, Reagan appeared before a joint session of Congress to introduce his new economic program. The plan, immodestly titled 'America's New Beginning," marked the real start of Reagan’s presidency. His appearance in the House chamber, the president remarked in his diary, had been thrilling. It had made him feel like a president.

Reagan’s program endorsed the Kemp-Roth tax cut (30 percent over three years), cut more than $40 billion in spending from Carter's final budget, and promised to eliminate social programs and business regulations. The proposals seemed so ambitious, so radical, that even his own party's leadership on Capitol Hill declared the proposals dead on arrival and suggested the president seek much more modest tax and budget CUtS.45 House Speaker Tip O'Neill (D, Massachusetts), the leading congressional Democrat, warned the former governor that Sacramento lay 3,000 miles behind him. He was in the big leagues now and would find the U.S. Congress far more resistant to his charms than the California legislature had been.

O'Neill underestimated his man. Only a few months later, on July 29, the Congress passed the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981. More than sixty House Democrats deserted the party leadership and voted for the tax cut plan, which slashed income tax rates by 25 percent (slightly less than the 30 percent cuts Reagan had requested). The act also rewarded the nation's wealthiest citizens, cutting the taxes on capital gains, gifts, and inheritances.

Meanwhile, Reagan moved rapidly to free business from federal supervision. During the late 1970s, the Carter administration had begun easing the regulatory burden on American industry. In particular, Carter had dismantled the anticompetitive practices that had maintained artificially high prices in trucking, air travel, and telecommunications. Reagan accelerated and expanded the process of deregulation. The administration relaxed Depression-era controls on banks, brokerages, and savings and loan institutions. It decontrolled energy prices and permitted wider oil and gas exploration on federal land. It dropped restraints on offshore oil drilling, logging restrictions in national forests, and requirements for air bags and stronger automobile builders.

Reagan handed over the reins of the major oversight agencies to business leaders and opponents of federal regulation. As director of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), the president appointed a businessman who had once been cited for OSHA violations. The Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice announced a new policy of friendliness toward mergers, stimulating an unprecedented wave of corporate buyouts. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission also relaxed regulations in their bailiwicks. Surveying the flattened regulatory landscape in 1984, Texas oil baron T. Boone Pickens credited these policies for restoring free enterprise and offering American businessmen unparalleled freedom and opportunity.

At the same time, Secretary of the Interior James Watt and EPA director Anne Gorsuch led a counterrevolution against environmental protection. The controversial Watt criticized even the most cherished achievements of the conservation movement. He openly organized a counteroffensive, uniting land- holders, businessmen, off-road-vehicle enthusiasts, and hunting groups in opposition to environmental regulations. As interior secretary, Watt authorized expanded surface mining and oil drilling in the West, stepped up timber harvests on public lands, slowed the creation of new parks and wilderness areas, and attempted to privatize many of the functions of the national parks. The secretary was also something of a loose cannon; he ensured his own downfall when he cavalierly announced that one of his department's advisory boards consisted of a black, a woman, 'two Jews and a cripple.” Over at the EPA, Anne Gorsuch pursued a less flamboyant, more effective strategy, quietly relaxing enforcement of the nation's principal pollution control laws.

In many cases, Reagan loosened the reins on business without repealing regulations or eliminating programs. The administration simply cut the agencies' budgets, leaving them too short-staffed and under-equipped to investigate claims or enforce existing rules. The Enforcement Division of the Department of Energy, the office responsible for policing the natural gas and oil industries, saw its staff cut by two-thirds in the first two years of Reagan’s presidency. Meanwhile, the administrations budget for fiscal year 1984 requested less funding for water quality, air quality, hazardous waste, and pesticide reduction programs in fiscal year 1984 than Jimmy Carter had appropriated in fiscal year 1981.

The Reagan administration also pleased business interests with its open hostility toward organized labor. In August 1981, nearly 12,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) violated a no- strike clause in their contract and walked out of the nation's airport control towers. The controllers expected support from the public and the administration; they had raised many legitimate safety concerns about outmoded equipment, long shifts, and understaffed air traffic control centers. Moreover, PATCO had flouted the majority of the American labor movement and sup- ported Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election. They relied on a sympathetic hearing from the former union leader, a one-time president of the Screen Actors Guild who had proudly led his colleagues out on strike.

But the president wasted no time in crushing the illegal strike. He ordered the controllers to return to work or face dismissal. The controllers, Reagan announced, "are in violation of the law, and if they do not report for work within forty-eight hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated" Congressional and airline industry leaders urged the president to relent. A delegation of Republican former secretaries of labor offered to mediate the strike. But the president remained unmoved. When his deadline passed, Reagan fired the controllers, decertified their union, and ordered military personnel into the control towers. The nation’s air traffic control system limped along for months and did not return to full strength until 1988.

Still, Reagan won a major victory. The public applauded his principled stance, admired his toughness, and blamed the controllers for the ensuing delays at the airports. Business leaders realized that management had a staunch ally in the White House and turned up the pressure on organized labor. Even the Soviets sat up and took notice when the Reagan administration hauled the PATCO leadership off to jail. Tip O'Neill visited Moscow soon after the strike and learned how much Reagan's steel will had impressed the Soviets.

The PATCO strike left organized labor in disarray. Most unions had not supported the air traffic controllers--out of unwillingness to support an illegal strike by federal employees, a lack of sympathy for the highly paid controllers who had never supported union causes, or fear of the popular president. When Jerry Wurf, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, attempted to show support for the strikers at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, he could not even find their picket line. Wurf, leader of the nation’s largest public employee organization, believed the PATCO debacle a "watershed moment" for the American labor movement. It was a 'terribly important strike," Wurf told the New York Times. "There is a message being sent that the Administration in power is hostile to the ambitions of trade unions and it's going to bang labor in the head whenever it can .”

Unions and management heard the message loud and clear. An intimidated labor movement lost influence, tamed its militants, and moderated its demands. Reagan scoured the corporate community to staff the National Labor Relations Board, eschewing the more sympathetic university professors, congressional staffers, and union officials that his predecessors had called on to supervise labor-management relations. Labor secretary Raymond Donovan, a former building contractor, worked to erode preferences for union labor in government contracts and tried to ease regulations on industrial home work. The Reagan recovery did little for working people. Real earnings of production workers actually fell between 1980 and 1987.

Unions fell back in disorganized retreat. The meatpacking industry shied away from heavily unionized slaughterhouse districts in Chicago and Omaha, opening new low-wage, nonunion facilities in the outlying towns of Iowa, Illinois, and Nebraska. In Austin, Minnesota, Hormel packinghouse workers organized the entire community in a struggle against wage concessions and other "givebacks' to management. Despite its herculean efforts, Austin Local P-9 could not win a battle against a company armed with hungry strikebreakers from nearby farming communities, national guard troops sent in by the governor, and even the national leadership of their own union.

To be sure, the union’s share of the nation's nonfarm workforce had fallen steadily since the late 1950s. But Reagan’s first term proved a catastrophe for organized labor. Unions experienced their first absolute drop in membership since World War II organized labor's share of the workforce plummeted from 23.6 percent in 1980 to 19.4 percent in 1984.

But for Ronald Reagan, not even unions posed the biggest obstacle to prosperity and personal freedom. The federal government itself--huge, stolid, insensitive, intrusive--was the main problem. After only a year in office, Reagan had already succeeded in cutting taxes and empowering business. But the most crucial component of his antigovernment agenda-cutting spending and shrinking the federal establishment--proved more difficult. The budget certainly offered little wiggle room. In 1982, defense constituted a quarter of federal spending, and Reagan had committed to a vast arms buildup. Debt service remained an inviolable 10 percent of outlays, and the entitlement programs--popular universal benefit programs like social security and Medicare--occupied nearly half.

At the beginning of his presidency, just as he announced his tax proposals, Reagan presented plans to slash the budget. He asked Congress to knock $41 billion off his predecessor's proposals for the coming year. Defense spending would increase-its share of the budget rising from 24 to 32 percent of spending. Nearly every other program and agency faced cuts, although the president promised to preserve the 'safety net" in social programs. In practice, he saved the politically sensitive middle-class entitlements-Social Security, Medicare, veterans' benefits-while shredding the actual safety net, the means-tested programs for the poor. Reagan called for dramatic cuts in food stamps, student loans, public service jobs, training programs, welfare, school lunches, and urban mass transit. The plan dropped almost half a million households from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the major federal welfare program. Another 350,000 lost support when the administration closed down CETA, the national job training program.

Writing in the Nation, liberal critics Derek Shearer and Martin Carnoy called Reagan's program "the most significant income redistribution since the 1930s. Reaganomics, the liberal academics asserted, “does not really mean getting the government off people's backs; it means repealing the hard-won social gains of the last fifty years and using the government to transfer money to large corporations, high-income earners and military contractors."

Reagan certainly made no secret of his disdain for the welfare state. The president truly lacked sympathy for the downtrodden, accepting the canard that the poor deserved and even desired their own misery. Asked if he could have done more for the homeless, Reagan told his authorized biographer that his opponents had exaggerated the scope of the problem. There were few homeless people, he asserted, "and a lot of those are the type of people that have made that choice.”

In purely budgetary terms, Reagan's assault on the social safety net remained modest; total welfare expenditures still grew during the 1980s. But the administration consciously reduced the share of national resources dedicated to the neediest. It tightened eligibility requirements and eliminated ser- vices for the impoverished, making public assistance much less accessible. The 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act allowed states to impose fees on Medicaid patients for each doctor or hospital visit and reduced outlays for food stamps and AFDC by 14 percent each. The administration also phased out social security benefits for college-aged children of deceased adults, eliminated the public service employment program, and raised the rent contribution expected from recipients of housing assistance.

While total welfare spending continued to mount, the administration slowed its rate of growth. Social welfare spending (even including the social security program) occupied a smaller share of federal outlays in 1985 than in 1981. Social spending also fell as a share of gross domestic product (GDP).

Moreover, Reagan reduced the federal government's role in the welfare state. Wherever possible, the administration contracted out social services to private firms, especially with regard to nursing homes and federally supported child care. The president also replaced direct spending on social programs with tax incentives and shifted welfare burdens to state and local government. In these ways, the Reagan Revolution displayed signature features that distinguished the American experience from other revolts against the liberal welfare state that swept simultaneously across the industrialized world.

Finally, Reagan shifted the terms of the welfare debate. For a generation, ever since President Lyndon B. Johnson had asked Americans to join in building what he called the Great Society, American social policy had aimed to eliminate poverty and redress the most blatant extremes of inequality. Johnson's successors lacked his commitment to total victory over poverty, but their welfare policies followed his lead. From Nixon's guaranteed income proposal to Carter's PBJI, policymakers regarded poverty and inequality as economic and social defects and the welfare state as the medic.

Reagan turned the tables; welfare now became the problem, not the solution. Drawing on the work of conservative thinkers Charles Murray and George Gilder, Reagan's first economic report rejected "paternalism' in welfare policies, suggesting that antipoverty programs only aggravated the problems of the poor and trapped them in a cycle of poverty and dependence. Indeed, Reagan went so far as to argue that Great Society programs had actually harmed the impoverished--encouraging illegitimacy, welfare dependence, and hopelessness. 'With the coming of the Great Society," President Reagan insisted in 1982, "government began eating away at the underpinnings of the private enterprise system. The big taxers and big spenders in the Congress had started a binge that would slowly change the nature of our society and, even worse, it threatened the character of our people.... By the time the full weight of Great Society programs was felt, economic progress for America's poor had come to a tragic halt.' With such sweeping assertions, Reagan succeeded in refocusing debate from poverty to dependency.

But pulling the reins on big government proved far more difficult. During the 1980 campaign, Reagan pledged to eliminate two cabinet portfolios, junking the recently created Departments of Education and Energy. The president wanted not only to strip the Education Department of its cabinet rank, but also to cut federal education programs to the bone. Terrel Bell was thus mystified when Reagan offered him the position of secretary of education. Bell possessed strong educational credentials and supported federal aid to education; he told Reagan he would go along with downgrading the department to a lower-level agency but would not dismantle its programs. The president still appointed Bell, and, of course, Reagan never abolished the Education Department. Ignored by the White House, the secretary formed a commission to investigate the baleful state of American public schools. The report, A Nation at risk.- The Imperative for

Educational Reform, became a national cause celebre after its release in April 1983. By 1984, the Reagan administration had adopted education reform as a campaign issue, the Republican Party platform pledged support for the Department of Education, and federal education spending reached record levels. After William Bennett replaced Bell as secretary, the Department of Education became one of the most high-profile departments in the administrations Most dramatically, Reagan ignored his own homilies against excess spend- ing and racked up tremendous budget deficits. From the start, administration officials recognized that their budgetary math did not square; they could not fulfill Reagan's promises of tax cuts, rearmament, and a balanced budget, at least not without massive cuts in public services. David Stockman certainly understood. He believed that Reaganomics necessarily implied a 'blueprint for radical governance." The administration's commitments to tax relief and the Pentagon, the budget director believed, required deep cuts in spending. Just to balance the ledgers, Reagan would have to shred the federal establishment- canceling whole programs, eliminating entire agencies, returning to an almost nineteenth-century conception of small government. Two weeks before inauguration day, Stockman spent two hours with the president-elect, informing

him of the 'dire shape' of the federal budget. Immediately, the new administration would have to trim $40 billion from Carter's last budget. "Do you have any idea what $40 billion means,' Stockman gleefully teased Atlantic Monthly writer William Greider. 'It means I've got to cut the highway program. It means I've got to cut milk price supports. And Social Security student benefits. And education and student loans. And manpower training and housing. It means I've got to shut down the synfuels program and a lot of other programs.”

But Reagan had drafted no such radical blueprint. Stockman quickly discovered the president's distaste for drastic cuts in popular programs when his second round of proposed economies languished unattended on the president's desk. Reagan simply did not share his budget director's zeal to shrink government, even when it offended the interests of big business. Stockman's 'Chapter 11"-a plan to axe corporate welfare like the oil depletion allowance and remove tax breaks for mansions and tax exempt industrial bonds-merited no more than a disinterested sniff from the president.

Despite his folksy denunciations of charge-card government and his rhetorical support for a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget, Reagan hesitated little about racking up ever larger deficits. During Reagan's presidency, one distinguished economist noted, the U.S. government spent $1,413 billion more than it received in revenues. "The borrowing that the treasury did to cover this shortfall approximately tripled its outstanding interest-bearing debt, or about doubled it after allowance for inflation.' Pundits complained of the deficit's adverse effects on economic performance, savings, interest rates, and investment. 'It is not clear whether President Reagan actually meant to throw this party or whether things simply got out of hand," chastised the New Republic. Another critic lambasted Reagan as "the king of the deficit-makers and undisputed master of the national debt mountain." American society, he warned, was devouring its seed corn instead of planting it.

But the deficit never bothered the president; he never noticed the egg on his face. In part, the administration understood that the deficits were not as large or as damaging as they appeared to be. Compared to the size of the economy and the crushing shortfalls that many Western European nations faced, the problem was manageable. Moreover, in the federal system, state and local governments also collect and expend revenues; the general government deficit, the total for all levels of government, remained far more modest.

The president's calm also reflected his famous optimism. In discussing the deficit, many of Reagan's economic advisers recalled, he frequently repeated his favorite anecdote about the boy who looked at a pile of manure and assumed he must have received a new pony. One aide recalled the president's views on the deficit 'going through three stages.- one, they won’t occur; two, they'll be temporary; three, when they stick they serve a good purpose-they keep the liberals from new spending programs. Oh, sure, that was Reagan." On that last point, Reagan was right. The unpaid bills choked off future spending and prevented even the most committed liberal activists from proposing new programs. Reagan's budgets ensured that Reaganomics would continue long after the president had departed the White House.

But the paradox of antigovernment ideology and massive federal spending remained. On Reagan's watch, the federal government grew larger and larger; it cost more dollars, employed more bureaucrats, sustained more agencies, departments, and programs. Reagan's reputation, and real achievements, as the scourge of big government owed more to acts of omission than actual cut-backs. The administration slowed the growth rate of the federal establishment; it simply crossed many new programs off congressional wish lists before they could be proposed. Reagan's success reminded conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick of 'a Sherlock Holmes story where the key fact was that the dog did not bark." Many of Reagan's triumphs involved 'political things that were not done and in many cases were not even attempted.' In the final session of the Carter administration, congressional leaders had championed national health insurance, a stronger National Labor Relations Board, and the creation of a new consumer protection agency. "All of those dropped out of sight after Reagan's election.”

Surveying the American landscape in the early 1970s, Richard Nixon had envisioned a new American majority, a conservative revolution that would transform national politics and topple the balance of power within American culture. Nixon’s strategy rested on the burgeoning influence and freewheeling conservatism of the rising Sunbelt. He had imagined an anti-establishment coalition, drawing together northern workers and Sunbelt entrepreneurs in common disgust with a decadent, liberal Ivy League elite. Nixon had dreamed of a nation where the dog-the manicured poodle of the eastern establishment-no longer barked. Without the pessimism and menace of Tricky Dick, Reagan realized that objective.

But if Reagan dulled the sharper edges of American conservatism, it surely never seemed that way to most Americans. In his public statements and his displays of presidential pomp and power, Reagan never backed down. That air of command and commitment proved to be the most potent and enduring feature of his presidency. More than any policy achievement or failure, that feeling-the seismic shifts in national mood and political debate--constituted the real Reagan Revolution.

Reagan de-legitimized government. By the end of his first term, leaders across the American political spectrum embraced Reagan's conviction that government had grown too large, too intrusive, too unwieldy. The democratic system 'has never failed us, but for a time we failed the system," Reagan preached in his Second Inaugural Address. "We asked things of government that government was not equipped to give."

While total welfare spending continued to mount, the administration

Deregulation and the Attack on Labor from Right Turn (1986) by Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers

The [Reagan] administration also used the enormous discretion of the executive branch to relieve business of many of the burdens of regulation. Building on the reforms of the Carter Administration, it effectively concentrated control of the regulatory process in the OMB, where David Stockman presided, and even without major legislative actions, it succeeded (through leadership changes, staff cuts, reduced budgets, changed agency rules, and other means) in gutting enforcement at major regulatory agencies of special concern to business. The notoriously complex and heterogeneous nature of the American administrative process prevents any adequate summary of the Reagan regulatory program here. But it is safe to say that it comprised another giant, if almost hidden, transfer program, shifting all sorts of costs away from business and onto the rest of the population.

In the critical area of environmental regulation, the Administration simply refused to implement all sorts of key provisions of existing air- and water-pollution laws. Over Reagan's first term, EPA's overall budget was reduced by 3 5 percent (a cut Of 50 percent was proposed), enforcement against strip-mine violations declined by 62 percent, prosecution of hazardous-waste violations declined 50 percent, and FDA regulation enforcement declined 88 percent. Exposure limits on hazardous chemicals were raised above previous EPA levels, sometimes on the order of 10 to 100 times. The number of "emergency exemptions" for business for restrictions on pesticide use more than tripled (in 1982 better than 97 percent of business requests for such exemptions were approved by EPA). The Administration's treatment of hazardous-waste problems may be taken as exemplary. At present, according to the Office of Technology Assessment, there are approximately 378,000 waste sites that may require corrective action. The vast majority (87 percent, on one estimate) pose threats of groundwater contamination. As Of 1985, the Reagan EPA had put only 850 Of these on its "priority" list for action. Of these, it cleaned up only six during its first term; whether they were cleaned properly and completely is sharply disputed. That year, with this record, the Administration proposed phasing out the "Superfund" for toxic-waste cleanup; for fiscal years 1984-85, it proposed no funding at all for the EPA's groundwater programs.

In some areas, however, the Administration was prepared to spend money. When Reagan ran for office, he announced that "I am a Sagebrush Rebel," and soon went about the business of rewarding this business constituency. (western ranchers). Early in its first term, the Administration announced plans to sell off as much as 35 million acres of federal land, at the low price of $17 billion. This proposal was eventually beaten back, but efforts at other "privatization" of natural resources continued. The Administration made massive sales of federal timber and embarked on an extensive leasing program of off-shore oil and gas rights (originally proposed to cover one billion acres) and coal development rights to federal properties-all done in ways that turned resources over to private actors at below-market prices. It opened millions of acres of already degraded grazing land to private users, with usage fees set at less than a quarter of market prices. And it promoted enormous water projects, including the wasteful and environmentally disastrous Bonneville Unit of the Central Utah Project. This, too, was a major subsidy to business. On average, irrigators pay back only about 10 percent (without interest) of the massive investments made by the public.

In other areas of "regulation" as well, the Administration led a broad attack on long-standing policies. It presided over a quiet revolution in antitrust policy (leading law professors to joke to their classes in the subject that they now were teaching "protrust") that helped spur one of the great merger manias in recent U.S. history. It gutted enforcement of voting rights, other civil rights, and affirmative-action programs. It launched a broad campaign of nondisclosure and secrecy in the executive branch, and while further institutionalizing business involvement in the promulgation of new regulatory standards, it declined to enforce provisions for public participation. Calculating accrued benefits over ten Years, the Administration estimated the total "savings" from these and other programs of regulatory re- form to be $150 billion; if the number is to be credited at all, virtually all of it should be credited to business.

Finally, in what was a sharp break from prior policies-which had ranged from active promotion to malign neglect-the Administration mounted a wide-ranging offensive against organized labor, beginning with a string of anti-union appointments at the Department of Labor. As Secretary it brought in Ray Donovan, an obscure construction company executive from New Jersey who had been a leading fund- raiser for Reagan efforts there. Donovan's firm, Schiavone Construction, was a repeat violator of national health and safety laws. During the late 1970s, it was cited an average of ten times per year for "serious" violations (defined as involving "a substantial probability that death or serious physical harm could result") of the Occupational Health and Safety Act. (After a series of inconclusive federal investigations into charges that h engaged in kickbacks, bribery, and extortion schemes while at Schiavone, Donovan would later become the first sitting Department Secretary in U.S. history to resign under criminal indictment.) At OSHA itself, the Administration appointed Thorne Auchter, another construction company executive from a firm with a history of repeated OSHA violations. At the National Labor Relations Board, the Administration's first appointee was Robert P. Hunter, a former aide to anti-labor Utah Republican senator Orrin Hatch, a central figure in blocking Labor Law Reform. Among Hunter's other anti-labor bona fides was his authorship of the chapter on the Department of Labor in the Heritage Foundation's famous Mandate for Leadership policy blueprint for the Administration. There he urged many of the policies subsequently adopted in the Department, including the gutting of OSHA and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (moving both to a more "cooperative" relationship with industry) and closer review of the "pro-labor bias" at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (as well as sharp cutbacks in its funding). Hunter also found the NLRB to be too pro-labor and "ivory tower" in its approach. Among a host of procedural and policy recommendations, he urged greater use of injunctive powers against unions and the ex- tension of coverage for Taft-Hartley's section 14(b)."

With Hunter on board, the Administration moved to replace outgoing NLRB chair John Fanning with John Van de Water, a Los Angeles-based management consultant who specialized in preventing or breaking unions. When this effort failed, it placed management lawyer Donald L. Dotson (formerly of Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel and, earlier, labor counsel for Westinghouse and Western Electric) in that critical spot. Only months before his appointment, he had argued that "collective bargaining frequently means labor monopoly, the destruction of individual freedom, and the destruction of the market- place as the mechanism for determining the value of labor," and held that the NLRB (under Carter and previous Administrations) had engaged in a "selective enforcement and perversion of the Labor statutes," exhibiting a "tendency to act as a legal aid society and organizing arm for unions."

Later, Dotson and Hunter were joined by Patricia Diaz Dennis, another management lawyer (formerly of ABC and Pacific Lighting), whose appointment the Administration often described as a "triple," since she was a woman, a Hispanic, and a nominal Democrat who strongly supported the President. Finally, as Solicitor for the NLRB, to whom Dotson promptly gave enormous new powers, the Administration appointed Hugh Reilly, veteran staff attorney for the rabidly anti-union National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. Remarkably, he continued working for that organization even after accepting government employment.

Such appointments heralded major changes in policy. At OSHA, for example, enforcement of existing law dropped precipitously, while the development of new workplace standards came to a virtual halt. Over the [fiscal year] 1980-82 period, OSHA complaint inspections declined 58 percent, while follow-up inspections declined 87 percent. Citations for violations of the act also fell, dropping 50 percent for serious violations, 91 percent for willful violations, and 65 percent for repeat violations. At the bottom line, total penalties (including both state and federal programs) dropped 78 percent, while failure-to-abate penalties fell 91 percent. By the end of Reagan's first term, enforcement levels would have slid to a point where they provided virtually no deterrent to violations of the act. Manufacturers who violated the law could expect, on average, a penalty of only $6.50 for doing so. The agency also stalled repeatedly, and in some cases even suppressed its 4wn studies of worker risk, in issuing standards for such known work- 'place carcinogens as asbestos, formaldehyde, and EDB. It would not be until June 1984 that the Reagan OSHA issued its first new final standard for a workplace carcinogen, which was immediately challenged in court as inadequate.”

Policy changes at the National Labor Relations Board [the agency that oversaw workers’ complaints about unfair labor practices by companies] were even more dramatic. Especially after consolidating a solid majority of Reagan appointees in 1983, the Board began making major changes in basic labor-law doctrine-all in the direction of favoring management over unions. During the first five months of 1984 alone, it altered long-standing policy in a slew of lead cases: narrowing the scope of activities subject to traditional NLRB protections; broadening the permissible range of employer conduct in union representation campaigns; lowering the costs to employers of unlawful activity during such campaigns; freeing employers from the constraints traditionally imposed on work-relocation decisions by the collective-bargaining obligation; and otherwise narrowing or excusing the employer to make changes subject to bargaining without informing unions before the change is made, or by permitting employers wider latitude to end the bargaining process by declaring impasse. The Board also announced a broad new policy of deferring cases, whenever possible, to private arbitration, thereby shifting more and more of the costs of dispute resolution onto unions, and removing the government as an active player in the enforcement of many worker rights. More subtly, perhaps, the Reagan Board gutted much existing law through biased application of it, sometimes overturning the credibility findings of its own Administrative Law Judges and hearing officers in the process.

In addition to being the most anti-union Board in history, the Reagan NLRB soon became the least efficient. The case backlog, or number of contested cases awaiting decision by the Board, grew dramatically, rising from about 4oo cases when Reagan took office to a high of close to 1,700 cases by February 1984. By 1983, it would take the Reagan Board, on average, 627 days to move from the filing of an unfair-labor-practice charge to a final Board decision. Such inefficiency complemented the Board's anti-union animus. Because, as in any adjudicative system, the resolution of contested cases in one area (be that defined factually or in terms of the law) is typically related to the resolution of cases in cognate areas, the backlog had a huge and geometrically increasing bottleneck effect throughout the Board's regional system. And by slowing the processing of cases at the local level and stretching out the already nearly interminable procedural delays at all different stages of the organizing and bargaining process, it made it that much more difficult for unions to organize new workers or effectively represent the members they already had.

As it lay the foundations for these administrative changes in early 1981, the Administration was also moving forward on other parts of its programs. The budget and tax enactments of midyear, both of which (except for their military component) were strongly opposed by labor, promised to wreak untold havoc on union members' lives. A few weeks after they passed, in August, the President crushed a strike called by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, which bad earlier been one of the handful of unions to endorse his 1980 candidacy. By then, of course, the vast Reagan recession that would M,*k the next two years had begun, throwing millions of workers off their jobs, driving the level and duration of unemployment to post- war record highs, prompting a host of "givebacks" and "concession bargaining" from unions, sharply reducing overall union membership, and, at least in the near term, fundamentally altering the bar- gaining climate between unions and employers. Cutbacks in unemployment benefits illustrated the synergy of the unemployment "cure" and the social-spending cutbacks. During the 1973-75 recession, un- employment insurance coverage reached as many as 8o percent of those who were officially without jobs; in January 1983, near the bottom of the Reagan recession, less than half the official jobless were covered; by the fall of 1984 only about a quarter were covered.'

By the end of Reagan's first term, the full extent and success of this attack would be evident. By 1984, for the third year in a row, average first-year settlements in major bargaining contracts would lag substantially behind inflation, major strike incidence set a postwar low, and unions organized fewer than 100,000 new workers through NLRB representation elections. Even in that year of economic recovery and boom, real average gross weekly earnings were 12 Percent below their 1972 peak, while real adjusted hourly earnings were still in decline.

Most striking were the figures on trends in membership over the 1980-84 period. During that time, total labor-organization membership dropped 2.7 million, and the private-sector unionization rate fell to a bare 15.6 percent of employed wage and salary workers. Union membership fell absolutely, and as a percentage of industry employment, in every major industrial classification, with no apparent relation to the underlying growth or decline in employment. In goods- producing industries, where total employment declined by 8oo,ooo, union membership declined by more than 1.8 million. In service- producing industries, where employment grew by more than 4.9 million, membership declined by more than 700,ooo. And in mining and construction, where employment remained stable during the period, unionization rates still plunged by 44.1 and 21.4 percent, respectively. Clearly, what began happening to labor in 1981 outlasted the Reagan recession."

[see charts and previous handouts for more recent figures, as this trend continued]