Before this year, the most important government worker union labor action in U.S. history took place in 1981. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, PATCO, called an illegal strike against the Federal Aviation Administration during the Reagan administration. President Ronald Reagan responded decisively; holding to President Calvin Coolidge’s maxim that “there is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, at any time,” Reagan fired the striking controllers, replaced them with military controllers and nonunion civilian supervisors, and barred strikers from federal employment.

Compare Reagan’s decisiveness to the weak-kneed response of the nation’s governors to the de facto strike action of the teachers unions. With a few exceptions — Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, and Rhode Island’s Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, among them — governors and local officials have more or less allowed teachers unions to conduct a mass-scale “sick out” keeping schools closed and families in lockdown. This was ostensibly because of the coronavirus pandemic but more plausibly as an extortionate political action in advance of a presidential election. Reagan’s decisiveness in dealing with the unions, even in jurisdictions that ban government worker strikes, has been entirely absent.