Professor Joseph McCartin, one of the nation’s leading scholars on the decline of the strike, has written the definitive account of the PATCO strike. In Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers and the Strike that Changed America, McCartin details two decades of struggle by this group of often militant Federal employees culminating in the failed 1981 strike. Collision Course is a well written, meticulously researched, and detailed account of the PATCO strike.

I’ve pined thirty-years for something like the Occupy Wall Street movement. Thank God — I’m an atheist! — it’s here. I’ve waited that long because it’s been a little more than thirty years since the 1981 Washington, DC Solidarity Day March.