Labor's Unhappy Birth

By John S. DeMott

Labor's Unhappy Birthday

Union ranks are thinning, and organized workers are losing their clout

Exactly 100 years ago next week, a ragtag group of tradesmen and industrial workers met in Pittsburgh under the leadership of Samuel Gompers, a cigarmaker from London, to form the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions. Ahead lay many battles against obstinate employers as unions fought for recognition: the Homestead and Pullman strikes in the 1890s, the bloody 1937 Battle of the Overpass in Dearborn, Mich., when Walter and Victor Reuther were attempting to organize auto workers. But now, as the U.S. labor movement enters its second century, it faces equally serious problems: eroding membership and fading public support.

Indeed, as the leaders of the American

Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations celebrate labor's centennial next week at their convention in New York, they will have little to cheer about. Unemployment has withered union ranks. Last month's joblessness stood at 8% of the U.S. work force, up a full percentage point since July and hitting unions like the United Auto Workers hard. About 25% of the U.A.W.'s members, for example, are out of work because of the two-year-long depression in Detroit. Says Union President Douglas Fraser: "We're going through the most difficult period in our history."

Antiunion sentiment seems to be everywhere, and not just among white-collar suburbanites. A symptom of this was the public support President Reagan got when he fired 11,500 air-traffic controllers who struck illegally in August. Says Victor Gotbaum, head of New York City's largest (109,000 members) public employee union and one of organized labor's most powerful voices: "Not even Eisenhower or Richard Nixon did that."

In Congress, where unions have long spoken loudly and carried a big stick, labor's political influence is waning. Conservatives in the Senate, under the banner of deregulation, have begun mounting an attack on federal labor laws, some of which are probably ripe for overhauling. One target: the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, which shores up wages by requiring that workers on many federal contracts be paid the "prevailing wage" in an area.

"Prevailing" now often means union scales in cities far from actual construction sites, which boost costs and contribute to inflation.

Unions have lost support even among workers. Polls show that one-fifth of families in which one or more members belong to unions disapprove of unions, and 27% of union-household members said that no one should be permitted to strike. Only 55% of the American people favor unions, down from 66% in 1967 and 76% in 1957. Perhaps the last major public employee strike that enjoyed any measure of public sympathy was the walkout by postal workers in 1970.

This disapproval of organized labor shows most vividly in the numbers for overall union membership. During the past decade, the U.S. labor force has grown from 86 million to 107 million workers, but the enrollment in unions has remained essentially flat, at about 22 million. Union members were only 21% of the labor force last year, as compared with 25% in 1970.

More and more workers are now actively voting down unions. Last year 8,198 federally supervised union collective-bargaining elections were held, and organized labor won only 48% of them, vs. 55% a decade ago. There is also a tide of decertification elections called by employees who want to throw out the organizations that already represent them. In 1970 there were only 301 such "decerts"; last year there were 902, with workers voting to reject their unions in 73% of the cases.

Why is labor's once sturdy house in such disrepair? The first and foremost reason is the rapidly changing nature of the U.S. economy. American business is no longer dominated, as it once was, by what Wall Street analysts call "smokestack industries," such as autos and steel. Only 16% of workers in U.S. industry were employed in manufacturing last year, vs. 23% two decades ago. The economy's service sector, on the other hand, has blossomed. It currently employs 46% of workers. For example, the McDonald's hamburger empire now has more than three times as many workers as United States Steel.

For labor, those economic trends have meant trouble. It is far more difficult to organize service workers than employees on an assembly line. Service workers tend to be spread out in many places rather than grouped together in one plant. Moreover, they often lack the class-," solidarity views of blue-collar employees and resist unionization.

Organizing them is both expensive and cumbersome.

The weakened U.S. economy and stiff Japanese competition have also lessened the strength of unions. Workers are starting to become more and more aware of the costs of strikes, including the fact that they could strike themselves out of jobs altogether, and are less likely to hit the bricks. The 1979 International Harvester walkout lasted six months, ended in a standoff, resulted in layoffs of thousands of workers, and pushed the company to the brink of bankruptcy. Not surprisingly, the number of major strikes, those involving 10,000 workers or more, has gone from 34 in 1970 to 14 last year.

Next year, when contracts expire for roughly 3.7 million workers in autos, trucking, rubber and a host of other industries, is expected to be a mild wage-negotiation period because of the weak economy. The business slump is also expected to hurt efforts at organizing employees. Workers are now less interested in signing up because the unions often fail to deliver the goods in terms of higher wages or shorter working hours.

In fact, many of the labor talks now being conducted involve so-called givebacks, whereby the workers forgo previously won benefits in exchange for more job security. Workers at Chrysler made concessions worth $1.1 billion during the past two years in an attempt to help that company stay afloat. The Steelworkers local in Canton, Ohio, accepted an eleven-year no-strike clause to help lure a Timken Co. steel plant there. Employees at a new Goodyear plant near Akron will receive a base pay of $8.62 an hour, vs. more than $10 at a comparable older factory.

In many fields, unions are being forced to get along by going along. For years the United Auto Workers has taken socially activist positions on many issues, including civil rights, the environment and welfare. But economic pressures on the auto industry have forced the union generally to support relaxed auto-emission standards, for example, and to back the building of a new Cadillac plant in the Poletown section of Detroit that would provide jobs but has uprooted hundreds of poor families in the process.

Some companies have been quick to exploit the vulnerability of unions, chiefly by hiring consultants to keep unions out or to encourage employees to decertify unions even after they are in a plant. Such professional union busters have long held sway in the South, where few workers have been organized. Only 1.7% of manufacturing workers in the Greenville-Spartanburg area belong to unions, and South Carolina's business establishment intends to keep it that way. Says Carroll Gray, executive vice president of the local Chamber of Commerce: "We'd prefer not to have unions. We will continue to oppose them within the law."

But the American labor movement is far from dead. Indeed, some union leaders believe that the current adversity will provide the stimulus that labor needs to get moving again after years of smugness, security and leadership somnolence. Results are slow in coming, but they are beginning to show up.

Last month 30 unions began a drive to organize Sunbelt workers, starting in Houston. They will spend more than $1 million a year in the effort.

The Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO has half a dozen unions involved in an organizing campaign in Tupelo, Miss., and it is about to start a drive in the Baltimore-Washington area aimed specifically at women employees. White-collar workers are a prime target for organizing.

Says Karen Nussbaum, 31, a union official in Cleveland: "Organizing white-collar workers is now make or break for the trade-union movement." Inroads are being made by some unions, among white-and gray-collar workers in health care, teaching and government, which tend to offset the blue-collar losses.

Some union leaders are starting to rethink their old and often outdated shibboleths. Productivity used to be just a word that meant harder work for the same pay.

Now it is seen as a way to preserve at least some jobs in the face of foreign competition and a changing U.S. economy. Says Jim Poedy of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor: "We're beginning to address the issue of productivity simply because we took a look at the competition from Japan and other countries. You have to look at it. We have to look at the future."

There are much smoother worker-management relations in the two toughest competitors American business now faces in the world market, Japan and West Germany.

Unions in those countries strongly defend the rights of their members, and have not become mere acolytes for the employers. But there is not the spirit of adversarial confrontation that has characterized so much of American labor history. Company officials and employees in Japan and West Germany usually work together successfully to solve their common problems.

Some union and management officials are now questioning whether the U.S. can afford to continue waging the old conflicts between workers and bosses. Says W.J. Usery, Secretary of Labor under President Ford: "Now is the time we should try to reason together and work together. We have to minimize the adversary roles that we have played in the past 40 years and concentrate on productivity and providing steady jobs with upward mobility for people." That would be a worthy goal for both unions and management during labor's next century.

--ByJohn S. DeMott.

Reported by Gisela Bolte/Washington and Patricia Delaney/Chicago

With reporting by Gisela Bolte, Patricia Delaney

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