A Growing Itch to Fight

By John Greenwald

First they suffered a decade of relentless layoffs and wage cuts. Then they watched hopefully as corporate profits and stock prices bounced back from the recession. But now many American workers are impatient and fed up. Their common plea: When do we get our share of the comeback? Their discontent seemed ready to boil over last week, even as striking flight attendants returned in triumph to their jobs at American Airlines. No sooner had American resumed its normal flight schedule than pilots and mechanics at United Airlines began a slowdown to protest the prospect of thousands of new layoffs. In Los Angeles more than 150 police officers scheduled for the morning shift called in sick to pressure the city into negotiating a new contract to replace one that expired 17 months ago. And in Illinois Caterpillar workers staged slowdowns at plants in six locations after ending a work stoppage two weeks ago.

Such an atmosphere of growing militance would seem to be an opportune moment for a resurgence of the American labor movement, which had never looked as moribund as it did this past year. In mid-November, Big Labor watched in fury as a Democratic President, whom it had helped elect, pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement through a Democratic Congress over heated union objections that the pact would cost jobs. That humiliation was merely the latest in a string of setbacks for labor since Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 1981, which made many other workers afraid to strike. "After Patco we felt we were looking down a double-barreled shotgun at the wrong end," says Joe Gunn, president of the Texas AFL-CIO. "Those days are over now."

Perhaps so, but labor knows it will be tough to regain anything like its former clout. Union membership has shrunk from a high of 35% of the workplace in 1945 to 22% in 1980 to only 16% today; corporate downsizing exacerbates the trend. In bleakly familiar fashion, Philip Morris and NCR said last week they would shed a total of 21,500 jobs in the next few years. Such cutbacks have hollowed out the core of American manufacturing, from which labor has traditionally drawn its rank and file. The number of U.S. autoworkers, for example, has shrunk from nearly 1 million in 1985 to 750,000 today, while steel employment has fallen from 772,000 to 421,000.

But the same downsizing that has sharply pared union membership has also created new receptiveness for union organizers among surviving employees who find themselves overworked and stressed out. Labor productivity, which measures the hourly output of workers, grew a robust 3.2% last year, the best showing since 1964, while paychecks got smaller. In inflation-adjusted dollars, average weekly wages have fallen from $272 10 years ago to $254 today. Adding insult to injury, the gap between executive compensation and ordinary pay has been rapidly widening. According to compensation expert Graef Crystal, the earnings of chief executive officers of major corporations have zoomed from 33 times the average income of U.S. workers two decades ago to 157 times the average today. (Japanese and German CEOs typically earn no more than 25 times what the average worker makes.)

Yet unions have been unable to tap into the unrest that now roils the American workplace. Organizers seem stymied at every level of job: while hamburger flippers and sales clerks come and go too quickly to provide a stable base for membership, professionals such as bankers, lawyers, geologists and engineers feel little kinship with a labor movement rooted in blue-collar traditions. All that has left unions running in place. Organizers for the Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents grocery checkers and other clerks, signed up 500,000 new members over the past five years only to see the net increase dwindle to 30,000 as a result of layoffs, attrition and automation.

The very nature of high-tech industries also hampers organizing efforts. Many software designers or biotechnical engineers work for small start-up companies that unions find difficult and expensive to penetrate. Among larger firms like Ap ple Computer, which has no production unions, workers are often part of flex ible teams that change tasks from month to month and work closely with management. That creates a sense of empowerment that can leave unions with little role to play. "Labor's mentality is manifestly tied to the old workplace," says David Hale, chief economist for Chicago-based Kemper Securities. "The new industries in the U.S. are evolving so rapidly that there is no stable craft pattern for a union to represent."

Not surprisingly, labor has scored its biggest gains in recent years in work places untroubled by foreign competition. While government employees were virtually non-union in 1946, 37% of the country's 6.6 million public workers are card-carrying members today. "You don't import your government from Hong Kong, do you?" says Daniel Mitchell, a labor expert at UCLA. Among private- sector unions, the Service Employees' International, whose membership includes janitors and hospital orderlies, has grown from 625,000 in 1980 to more than 1 million. While that growth reflects intensive union efforts, organizer Andy Stern also credits the increases to the fact that the jobs "can't be moved offshore."

Labor experts say unions now have their best chance in years to score broader gains. Paula Voos, who teaches industrial relations at the University of Wisconsin, cites recent polls showing that up to 40% of nonunion workers say union representation would improve their lot. "It's not a majority, certainly, but it still represents millions of workers," Voos says. Dawn Kowalski, a machine operator at a Pilot Industries auto-parts plant in Dexter, Michigan, is one of them. Hoping to win higher wages and better conditions, she plans to vote to join the United Auto Workers at an in-plant election this week. Like many other parts suppliers, Pilot has never had a union. "We're standing up and fighting back," Kowalski says.

The biggest challenge for labor in the next few years will be to organize professionals and other white-collar workers in growing industries. "Union leaders clearly have failed to think strategically about the long term," says Steven Currall, assistant professor at Rice University's Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Administration. "They need to recruit lawyers and MBAs who can more easily tap into the professional ranks. You've got to have a white collar to organize white collar." Without such innovative strategies for gaining new members, labor's victory at American Airlines could prove to be little more than an isolated incident.

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante/Los Angeles, Jerome Cramer/Washington, Deborah Fowler/Houston and Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit