Greyhound Strike Ends in Permanent Replacement Victory, PATCO Pattern Spreads to Private Sector

The Amalgamated Transit Union ends its 47-day strike against Greyhound Lines on November 2, 1983, after the company successfully operates with permanent replacement workers, demonstrating that Reagan’s PATCO strategy translates to the private sector. Greyhound CEO Fred Currey demanded 9.5 percent wage cuts and benefit reductions; when 12,700 drivers and maintenance workers struck on September 17, the company continued operations with management and newly hired replacement workers. The union returns to work accepting most of Currey’s original demands.

The Greyhound strike proves that private employers can now openly embrace permanent replacement tactics that were previously considered extreme and reputation-damaging. Before PATCO, most major companies relied on temporary replacements during strikes, understanding that permanently replacing striking workers would trigger boycotts and public condemnation. Reagan’s PATCO firings changed the calculus: if the federal government could permanently replace workers exercising their legal right to strike, private corporations faced no moral or political barrier to doing the same.

The defeat accelerates a pattern that devastates industrial unions throughout the 1980s. Continental Airlines files bankruptcy specifically to break its unions (1983), Phelps Dodge permanently replaces copper miners (1983), and Hormel uses permanent replacements against meatpackers (1985-86). Strike activity plummets from 187 major work stoppages in 1980 to 40 by 1988, as workers recognize that striking increasingly means losing jobs permanently. The Greyhound strike demonstrates that PATCO was not an isolated incident but the opening of a new era where the strike—labor’s fundamental weapon—becomes a tool corporations can use to destroy unions rather than a tactic workers can deploy for bargaining leverage.