Comment by tzs
3 months ago
> How could this be anything to do with Reagan firing them?
Echoes.
The fired workers were replaced as rapidly as possible. That would result in massive change in the age distribution of controllers. It takes a few years to train a new controller so lets assume the youngest new hires were 22. New controllers have to be 31 and under.
Let's take the best case and assume all the new controllers are 22 through 31 and are evenly distributed in that range, and started in 1982. The group will start reaching 56 in 2007 and finish reaching 56 in 2016. That's over 11000 controllers retiring over a 10 year span.
I haven't been able to find data on the actual distribution of ages for the replacements. I'd guess that it was skewed younger, which could make that echo narrower. Maybe 11000 controllers retiring over 5 years.
If they hired enough people to replace those that group too will show up as another echo, but more spread out.
Also you know... seeing a job get absolutely decimated by a labor hating President might make future candidates less likely apply to a hostile job where asking for better conditions mean you will lose your livelihood.
They rehired anyone willing to go back to work. No one was required to lose their livelihood.
The union's problem was that they assumed air traffic control was so important they could dictate terms and then they got called on it and lost. Public sector unions don't really work because the other side of the table is the government (and by extension the public), so the two possible outcomes are that the union gets screwed by the government or the public gets screwed by the union.
That theory assumes you can train >10,000 new air traffic controllers all at once in 1982 but then can't train their replacements over a period of ten years as they retire.
For that to be the case there would have to be some more proximate problem compromising the ability to replace air traffic controllers at the rate it was possible to in the 1980s. Like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42939941