When 11,345 air-traffic controllers struck in August 1981, President Reagan fired them all, banned them from federal service for life, and had the union's leaders taken to court in chains: PATCO officers were jailed for contempt of back-to-work injunctions — strikers led away in handcuffs and leg irons before television cameras — and the union was decertified and fined into oblivion. The spectacle licensed a generation of employers to treat the strike itself as an offense.

The pattern persists wherever labor law meets the criminal code: injunction contempt against miners in the Pittston strike, mass arrests of Justice for Janitors and Fight for $15 civil disobedients, felony prosecutions of picket-line militants, and the routine arrest of union organizers from the fields of California to the warehouse gates — the century-old machinery of Debs's Woodstock, still in service.