Times were tough in the heartland in the mid-1980s.
Family farms fell into foreclosure in what was known as the Farm Crisis, and John Deere, the equipment manufacturer, cut thousands of workers. In 1986, UAW-represented John Deere workers launched a strike, while the company reported its first annual loss in 53 years, according to the New York Times.
That strike, which ran for 163 days before an agreement was forged, came in a decade when unions in America were facing a tough landscape, and the man in the White House, Ronald Reagan, had made his own mark on labor relations five years earlier when he fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers.
The Detroit Free Press would later report that it was Reagan’s handling of the air traffic controllers’ strike “along with his celebrated embrace of unfettered capitalism, that hammered home to unionists that they were no longer honored guests in the nation’s corridors of power.”
Thirty-five years later, 10,000 UAW-represented John Deere workers are back out on strike in several states, but the landscape might be shifting for unions and one of their most powerful weapons, the strike. John Deere isn’t the only employer where picket lines or potential picket lines have been a factor this year. Strikes or threats of a strike have been in play in labor disputes at Michigan-based Kellogg Co., Nabisco and even among 60,000 TV and film workers, who got a tentative deal after threatening to strike.