President Joe Biden likes to call himself the “most pro-union president in American history.” The United Auto Workers’ decision to strike against all the “Big Three” automakers for the first time ever is giving him the chance to fulfill his lofty rhetoric.
Since taking office, Biden cast his domestic economic agenda as a repudiation of the free-market economic policies that have dominated since President Ronald Reagan won election in 1980. Reaganomics, with its “trickle-down” upper-income tax cuts, corporate deregulation and anti-labor actions, “failed the middle class, it failed America,” Biden said in a June speech. More than any other single event, how Biden handles the UAW strike could determine the political and policy success of his grand agenda.
One of the defining moments of Reagan’s presidency and the economic world he created came in August 1981, after the nation’s air traffic controllers went on strike — which was technically illegal under their…