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When new talks began on July 31, PATCO negotiators claimed that they had reduced the cost of their demands from $1.1 billion to about $500 million. The FAA computed the union package at $681 million—some 17 times the cost of the settlement Poli had provisionally accepted earlier. Poli, on the other hand, insisted that the federal negotiators "gave us an ultimatum: take their original offer, which had been overwhelmingly rejected by our people, or leave it. We had no choice but to leave it." After a final weekend in which both sides stubbornly repeated their frozen positions, the strike began.
When the Administration reacted with its fine-and-fire-'em ultimatum, top Government officials fully expected at least half of the PATCO controllers to heed the warnings and return to work. But by week's end only 1,260 had gone back to their posts, while fully 80% of the PATCO members still were staying home.
Their defiant stand in the face of the law, and in repudiation of their own employee oaths, was a lonely one. As a strike of taxpayer-supported employees—and such relatively well-paid ones at that—it drew little public sympathy. One supporter was the American Civil Liberties Union, which declared that "the right to strike is a fundamental civil liberty and should not be denied to public employees any more than to private ones." More significantly, organized labor around the world rallied behind PATCO, an AFL-CIO affiliate. Controllers in half a dozen countries caused delays in flights to and from the U.S. At home, the support was mostly verbal. Accusing Reagan of "harsh and brutal overkill,"AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland argued that every worker, individually and collectively, has the right to withhold his services. Said he: "You don't solve the problem by passing a law that says it's illegal."
Kirkland led a caravan of top union officials, who were attending an AFL-CIO executive council meeting in Chicago, to join cheering PATCO pickets at O'Hare. The labor leaders included United Auto Workers President Douglas Fraser and William Winpisinger, president of the machinists' union that handles airline baggage and services the big jets—duties that, if stopped, could quickly ground most of the planes. Winpisinger urged Reagan to stop "union busting" and to "get rational and sit down to negotiate an agreement."
Privately, however, the labor leaders were highly critical of Poli for calling an unpopular strike with so little warning and without seeking the help or advice of other veteran union strategists. The controllers' strike, conceded Fraser, "could do massive damage to the labor movement. That's why PATCO should have talked to the AFL-CIO council." The machinists were not crossing PATCO picket lines, but at most airports they could get to their jobs without doing so. If more flights are curtailed by the strike, the machinists fear that airlines will cut back their jobs. The Air Line Pilots Association, another AFL-CIO union, had not joined the strike. Reflecting such inter-union strains, Winpisinger said that the pilots could lose half their jobs, too, and added tartly: "They ought to be a little bit more excited about it than us, since they make 2½ times as much as we do."