Ronaldus Magnus and Elon Musk Showed Us How To Deal With the Rogue Bureaucracies of the Deep State

Brutality is the sovereign remedy. Let's Start With the ATF.

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The true economic legacy of the Reagan years is an uglier practice: unionbusting, of the most brutal variety.

On August 5, 1981, a little less than seven months after he took office, Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 illegally striking air traffic controllers. In addition, he imposed a lifetime ban on the FDA rehiring any of the fired strikers. Three months later, PATCO, their union, was decertified, since it no longer had any members to represent.

Forty years later, the Socialist Democrats were still moaning about it.

Following the failed strike, PATCO was decertified as a union. As an organization, it was annihilated. Many of the former controllers suffered immense hardships, including struggles to replace their income and the subsequent breakdown of relationships and marriages, after losing their highly specialized job. Some fired members and their partners even killed themselves.

hubris: Overbearing pride or presumption; arrogance.

nemesis: the goddess who personified retribution for the sin of hubris; arrogance before the gods.

The commission of the first generally inspires a visit from the second. The strikers had come to think that, because of their union membership, they were invulnerable, and could ignore the black letter laws on the books that had made their strike illegal. They thought…wrongly. They also badly misjudged the political and cultural climate of the times.

A Gallup poll conducted a few days after the firings showed that 59 percent of Americans approved of the way Reagan was handling the issue, compared to just 30 percent who disapproved. The Gallup poll also found that a whopping 68 percent of the public thought that air traffic controllers shouldn’t be allowed to strike. As David Macaray states, “The PATCO strike of 1981 will undoubtedly go down in history as a monument to overplaying one’s hand.”

In today’s parlance, they FA’d, and then they FO’d, experiencing President Reagan in his role as Nemesis.

It’s worth noting that Reagan’s strength and determination in this matter changed the entire field of labor relations in the US for decades. Thanks to the twenty some years of primacy enjoyed by the Socialist Democrats under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the union movement in the United States had developed into a powerhouse capable of transforming entire industries.

Unions peaked in the immediate post-WWII period, with members comprising about a third of the nation’s non-management work force. A slow erosion followed over the next 35 years, with labor losing about a third of that overall influence by the time Reagan crushed PATCO in 1981. After that, the erosion quickly worsened, and unions lost nearly half of their representation in the workforce, a number that would have been far worse but for the union participation of government employees holding relatively steady over the same period.

Why did it work out that way? After all, Reagan destroyed a public sector government employee union. So how did public employee unions remain relatively unaffected, while private sector unions cratered?

While there were 235 major work stoppages in 1979, that number dropped to 187 in 1980 and plummeted to 54 by 1985. As conservative columnist George Will observes, Reagan’s PATCO firings “produced a cultural shift, a new sense of what can be appropriate in business management: layoffs can be justifiable even when a company is profitable if the layoffs will improve productivity and profitability [emph. ed.].”

Mark that thought.

In 2017, President Donald Trump nominated Peter Robb, Reagan’s lead attorney in the PATCO case who litigated the firings, to become general counsel of the NLRB.

Trump has always had a poignant sense of humor. More on point, though, is that it is clear he is aware of the implications of Reagan’s destruction of PATCO, especially as they concern his administrations, both past and potentially future.

October 26, 2022:

Shortly after changing his bio to “Chief Twit,” Elon Musk posted a video of himself walking into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.

“Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!” he wrote.

October 28, 2022:

NEW YORK, Oct 28 (Reuters) - Elon Musk has taken ownership of Twitter Inc (TWTR.N), [sic] opens new tab with brutal efficiency, firing top executives but providing little clarity over how he will achieve the ambitions he has outlined for the influential social media platform.

April 12, 2023:

Elon Musk says he’s cut about 80% of Twitter’s staff

Musk was quoted as saying in the interview that the social media platform now has only 1,500 employees, down from under 8,000 who were employed at the time of his acquisition. The reduction equates to roughly 80% of the company’s staff.

April 20, 2023

Tucker Carlson laughs at people being laid off in Elon Musk interview

Fox News host Tucker Carlson cracked a smile as he listened to Elon Musk describe slashing 80 per cent of Twitter’s employees after taking over.

“Turns out you don’t need all that many people to run Twitter,” Mr Musk said in an interview with the Fox News host. “If you’re not trying to run some kind of glorified activist organisation, and you’re not caring that much about censorship, you can really let go of a lot of people it turns out.”

Carlson, in an interview that aired this week on the network, called the layoffs “one of the great business stories of the year,” and recounted a story of having dinner with an executive who praised Mr Musk for “firing the staff stuff.”

During the conversation, Mr Musk referred to the thousands of employees who were fired or quit as part of a Twitter organisation that was “absurdly over-staffed,” and said running the company was as simple as a glorified “group text.”

August 12, 2024:

Donald Trump Cheers Elon Musk Over Firing Workers: 'You're the Greatest!'

During a long and jumbled interview, former President Donald Trump praised tech billionaire Elon Musk over allegedly firing his workers if they complain about working conditions.

At one point, Musk, who has endorsed Trump's 2024 presidential bid, mentioned his desire for a potential second Trump administration to form a "government efficiency commission," which he has volunteered to join. The former president then praised Musk for his handling of employees.

Let’s put this together. President Ronald Reagan fired about 90% of the air traffic controllers in a single stroke, with none of the dire predictions about mass airplane crashes ever coming to pass.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk fired or otherwise separated about 80% of the employees he inherited with his purchase of the company, with most of the terminations occurring in a single stroke over a week’s time. None of the predictions of imminent collapse for Twitter, now X, ever happened, either.

The ATCs that Reagan canned were fairly high-skilled specialists, for government workers, and commanded high (for the public sector) rewards: Most were classified as GW-13 workers, which is about as high as most public employees go, although there are two general services levels above them, and five executive services above that.

GS-13 is the 13th paygrade in the General Schedule (GS) payscale, the payscale used to determine the salaries of most civilian government employees. The GS-13 pay grade is generally reserved for top-level positions such as supervisors, high-level technical specialists, and top professionals holding advanced degrees.

Pay ranges from $89K to $115K per year, plus potentially generous add-ons for locality and availability. Masters and doctoral degrees are generally a requirement for these jobs.

Musk has said publicly that the employees he tried to keep were the engineers who wrote and maintained the software critical to delivering Twitter to its subscribers, and were mostly STEM specialists, unlike the woke social justice warriors who made up the bulk of Twitters “safety,” ie. censorship employees. On average, however, they were probably in the same general salary range as the GS-13 types that Reagan fired, and who make up the bulk of the government’s specialist bureaucratic intellectual muscle today.

So Reagan brutally crapcanned 11,500 of these types, and Musk brutally did likewise with 6500 more of them. And they did it fast. No shilly-shallying or dilly-dallying, just an immediate notification to hit the road, Jack, you don’t work here any more.

The brutality, along with speed of execution, is paramount. Job termination orders should be delivered in time frames on the order of hours, or at most, days. The Air Traffic Controllers were fired “effective immediately,” and not allowed to re-enter their former workspaces. Musk applied similar standards and methods to the separation process for his own employees, at one point even closing the doors of the home office on Mission Street to deny entry to former employees.

Fast and brutal. Fire them, physically get them out of their work spaces, and don’t let them return. Period. All of the legal and other aspects can be fought out after the physical separation of the terminated is accomplished.

Apply this strategy to any bureaucratic department determined as opposing in any significant or meaningful way any program, directive, or mandated goal the Trump administration applies to such a department. Any form of bureaucratic insurrection should meet with a similar response.

Set clear standards, and make very clear the personal consequences for any employee who fails to meet those standards, or, worse, tries to oppose or subvert them. Drag your feet because you don’t approve of the job you’re assigned? Fine. You can do that from home, because you’re fired. And you can keep yourself occupied with the no doubt myriads of lawsuits that will spring up like dragon’s teeth. But you won’t be sabotaging or otherwise defying the directives of your former employer, who will likely manage far better without you than you could possibly imagine.

One crucial suggestion: Fire the leadership first.

The team of Donald “You’re Fired” Trump, and Elon “You’re All Fired” Musk, using Ronald Reagan’s playbook, “You’re All Fired and Banned For Life,” could do this, and eliminate the single biggest threat to the American Republic in the process.

But would they?

I guess we’ll just have to find out.

Wrong! Conan, what is best in life?

Conan:

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation Bill Quick (buymeacoffee.com)

of the women!