Of course the republican hack who wrote this thinks it's all great. We know better.
In 1981, when the nation's air-traffic controllers threatened to do what the law forbade them to do—strike—Reagan warned that if they did they would be fired. When they struck in August, Reagan announced that the strikers would be terminated in two days. By firing the controllers, Reagan, the only union man—he had been head of the Screen Actors Guild—ever to be president, destroyed a union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). This has often, and not incorrectly, been called a defining episode of the Reagan presidency because it notified foreign leaders, not least those of the Soviet Union, that he said what he meant and meant what he said.
But now, more than two astonishing decades on, it also is reasonable to conclude that Reagan's fracas with the controllers had huge economic consequences, domestic and foreign. It altered basic attitudes about relations between business and labor in ways that quickly redounded to the benefit of the nation, and not least the benefit of American workers. It produced a cultural shift, a new sense of what can be appropriate in business management: layoffs can be justifiable even when a company is profitable, if the layoffs will improve productivity and profitability. Within a few years, both AT&T and Procter Gamble, although quite profitable at the time, implemented large layoffs, without arousing significant protests.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5146340/site/newsweek/