Unions Arise -- With New Tricks

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Labor unions? They're as lost in today's economy as velociraptors would be in a later-than-Jurassic environment. As the smokestack industries that they once dominated declined, unions have been losing members and influence for decades. Those remaining are too timid even to strike much anymore, and when they do they usually lose. They are toothless dinosaurs on the way to becoming fossils.

Not quite! Or at least many unions and union members no longer fit that stereotype. A growing number of organizers are signing up the unaffiliated -- janitors, retail clerks, packinghouse workers -- with a missionary fervor recalling the crusaders of the 1930s. Some long-peaceful unions are launching their first strikes in decades, or finding inventive methods of pressuring employers without striking.

Here and there, unions are even winning some battles. A Teamsters strike in April forced major trucking companies to stop using part-time, nonunion drivers. The same month, the Communication Workers of America got Nynex, one of the biggest of the new Baby Bell telephone companies, to reverse plans to lay off 22,000 workers. Under a new contract, Nynex will not lay off anybody over the next four years; it will try instead to induce workers to retire early by offering them six years of extra pension benefits.

The new union vigor is just barely beginning to show up in the numbers. Total membership in unions inched up by 200,000 in 1993, to 16.6 million, reversing 14 straight years of declines. The rise even matched the rate of increase in the total labor force, so that for once the proportion of all workers who are union members held steady at 15.8%. That was an extreme rarity; unions' share of the work force hit 35.5% as far back as 1945, stagnated around that level into the early 1960s, then fell year after year after year.

Militance as well as membership is on the rise. Repeatedly defeated by ; fierce employer resistance -- especially the practice of firing strikers and hiring permanent, nonunion replacements -- unions had almost abandoned the strike weapon. Fewer than 4 million workdays were lost to strikes and lockouts in 1993, the lowest figure in the 47 years that the government has been keeping those statistics and less than one-fifteenth of the record 60.9 million in 1959. A comparison of the first four months of this year to the same period in 1993 shows that the number of workers on strike tripled, to 162,000, and lost workdays quadrupled, to 1.6 million.

The figures will probably rise even more as some long-quiescent workers rebel against relentless job eliminations. The United Steelworkers of America in April began its first big strike in more than seven years, against Allegheny Ludlum, the nation's largest maker of stainless steel. Main issues: working conditions such as increased overtime and limited vacation schedules. Leslie Fay Cos., a New York City-based dressmaker, last week was hit by its first strike in 40 years. Some 1,800 members of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in six states walked out to protest a company plan to move all production to Asia and the Caribbean.

Almost simultaneously, more than 4,000 workers struck General Motors and Chrysler technical centers near Detroit, protesting, among other things, the company's increasing use of low-paid part-time and temporary workers to replace full-time union members. They might soon be joined by 11,000 workers at GM's Buick City complex in Flint, Michigan, who voted overwhelmingly last month to strike unless GM relieves what the local describes as a problem of understaffing at the plant, which has caused a rising rate of injuries. Since the start of 1994, GM has received more than a dozen such strike threats, all related to its plan to eliminate 74,000 workers over the next two years.

Surprisingly, this revival of fighting spirit is occurring with little help from Washington. The AFL-CIO trusted Bill Clinton to reverse what it saw as 12 years of Republican Administration help to antiunion bosses. One example: union leaders insist that many employers fired any workers who tried to organize a union. That is illegal, and the Republican-dominated National Labor Relations Board would duly order the workers reinstated with back pay -- but two or three years later, after the organizing drive had been broken.

Clinton, however, has not delivered very much. A bill to forbid companies to replace strikers with nonunion hires has been stymied by the threat of a Republican Senate filibuster and the lack of any real push from the White House. Labor leaders had hoped a commission headed by former Secretary of Labor John Dunlop would point the way to a rewrite of national labor laws -- in particular that it would urge giving unions an automatic right to represent any group of workers if they could get a majority to sign union cards. (At present a union can usually be certified as a bargaining agent only after an election, and employers have made a fine art out of stalling such votes.) But the commission last Thursday reported only "findings of fact" and withheld any recommendations until after the November congressional elections.

The report nonetheless pointed to one reason for the unions' renewed militance. The U.S. economy, it found, is creating a split-level labor market: "an upper tier of high-wage skilled workers and an increasing 'underclass' of low-paid labor." After decades during which the labor movement mostly tried -- and failed -- to protect the jobs and incomes of its primarily white male middle-class membership, organizers are finally going after this new proletariat, which consists largely of black, Hispanic and Asian workers and women. The 1.4 million-member United Food and Commercial Workers has succeeded in organizing about 60% of the workers in the meat-packing industry -- which was less than 45% unionized in the mid-1980s -- partly by printing leaflets in 14 languages and hiring organizers of Vietnamese and Laotian descent.

In 1989 the AFL-CIO set up an Organizing Institute to train recruiters, and the next year graduated 40; this year it expects to send out 120. Maria Naranjo, 25, a recent graduate of the institute, figures she works from 10 a.m. to as late as 11:30 p.m. trying to sign up janitors in Washington for the Service Employees' International Union. That's weekdays in the buildings; on weekends she calls on the janitors at home. The union now represents janitors in 45% of downtown buildings, vs. only 19% a year ago. But the gains are threatened by building owners who try to switch contracts from union to nonunion cleaning firms. To stop one owner from taking three buildings nonunion, 15 janitors and organizers staged a mock funeral, carrying a coffin symbolizing "the death of justice" past the owner's home in one of Washington's swanker neighborhoods. Says Naranjo: "Unless you put it in their face, you're not going to win."

Workers who are not part of the underclass are feeling some of the same put- it-in-their-face spirit. Many who once thought they did not need a union to enjoy good pay and pleasant working conditions have changed their minds. Ruthless company-downsizing drives and continued layoffs, coupled with rising pay for top managers, have made their bosses look a good deal less benevolent. After Armco Steel announced a stock offering that included $45 million to be sold to key managers on generous terms, while leaving health and benefit plans unfunded to the tune of $1 billion, workers at the Middleton, Ohio, mill demanded an election to dump a 50-year-old company association and replace it with a United Steelworkers local. The election was held in May, and the USW seemed to win, though nobody actually knows yet: the company got the NLRB to issue an injunction impounding the ballots.

Since strikes are still not easy to win, unions have been developing other tactics to put pressure on the bosses. They are making growing use of boycotts, in which they urge shoppers not to buy anything from stores that sell goods made by a struck company.

Embarrassing the boss is another tactic. In April, 64 members of the Amalgamated Clothing & Textile Workers Union stormed the North Carolina golf course where the Greensboro Open, an event on the Professional Golfers' Association tour, was in progress. They were arrested, but their protest was splashed all over TV and local papers -- to the distress of their employer, K Mart, which spent $2 million to sponsor the event. "Our bargaining leverage improved dramatically," says Bruce Raynor, ACTWU executive vice president.

The most innovative step is for U.S. unions to seek aid from their labor brethren overseas when facing companies with international operations. Balked at organizing a Polyfelt plant in Evergreen, Alabama, the ACTWU appealed for help to Austrian unions -- some of whose leaders sat on the Supervisory Board of Polyfelt's parent company, OMV. The European unionists got the company to order its U.S. managers to tone down antiunion activities, and the ACTWU won a contract at the Alabama plant last month.

After the Ravenswood Aluminum Co. locked out members of the USW from a mill in West Virginia and hired nonunion workers to replace them, the AFL-CIO traced the company's ownership to Marc Rich. He is a former commodities speculator who fled the U.S., pursued by a flock of indictments, and rules interests throughout Europe. For almost two years, at the U.S. federation's request, unions in 20 countries harassed and disrupted Rich's activities until, in mid-1992, he ended the West Virginia lockout.

For all its recovering elan, though, the labor movement has managed only a turn away from the graveyard gate, and the obstacles to a larger revival are enormous. Employer resistance is still ferocious, and the climate in Washington is merely lukewarm. If the Dunlop commission does eventually recommend changes in labor law to make union organizing easier, it is expected also to urge that companies be allowed more latitude in forming worker- management production and quality teams. Some union leaders suspect such a move could open the way for a new form of company union.

Public opinion has not swung very far toward the unions either. A TIME/CNN poll last week, conducted by Yankelovich Partners Inc., turned up wildly ambivalent feelings: 42% of those questioned said it would be good for the U.S. economy if more workers joined labor unions, vs. 36% who thought that would be bad -- yet 37% thought unions have too much power, in contrast to 23% who believed they have too little. That hardly constitutes the climate necessary for a dramatic increase in union clout. But after the savage buffeting the union movement has suffered over the past 30 years or more, even interrupting a funeral procession marks a noteworthy change.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT:CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 600 adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on June 1 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 4%. Not Sures omitted

CAPTION: With whom do you most often side in labor disputes -- the striking workers or management?

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 600 adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on June 1 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 4 % Not Sures omitted

CAPTION: Would it be good or bad for the U.S. economy if more workers joined labor unions?

Are labor leaders more interested in their own personal concerns or more interested in helping their members?

With reporting by Bernard Baumohl/New York, William McWhirter/Detroit and Suneel Ratan/Washington