Blaming the Workers

In June 1981, 12,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) went on strike. They were all summarily fired by then-President Ronald Reagan.

It was an act that reverberated throughout the country and permanently changed labor relations in the United States, a change for which workers have paid dearly. In the decade since PATCO, union membership has declined, and--arguably as a direct result wages have fallen and the standard of living for most Americans has plummeted.

A brief survey of some recent labor struggles illustrates clearly the problems American workers face. In Brooklyn, New York, a group of 200 Haitian immigrants working in a used-clothing factory, the Domsey Trading Corp., went on strike in 1990 after the company fired several union activists.

Working at minimum wage and subject to sexual and racial harassment, these workers were forced to wear badge numbers. The employers refused to use the workers' names, referring to them only by numbers. It took a court order to force Domsey to rehire its workers after the 18-month strike ended. Charges filed by the workers against the company have not been settled yet.

In the coal fields of southwest Virginia, workers at the Pittston Coal Company were forced to strike in 1989 after the company refused to negotiate in good faith and cut off health benefits for retired and disabled miners. In New York City, the Daily News management locked out workers in 1990 and forced them into a bitter six-month strike. More recently, Caterpillar broke a five-month strike in Peoria, Illinois, by threatening and advertising to replace the entire work force.

What has happened in the last 11 years is the breakdown of the social contract that once kept capitalist interests and workers' rights in a relatively stable balance. The painful shakeout of a struggling industrial order and an emerging international economy have come together with the recklessly selfish shift in attitudes epitomized by Ivan Boesky's declaration that "greed is good." The result is that companies have increasingly tried to blame their economic woes on workers, while at the same time exerting a new willingness to exact concessions from those workers in whatever ways they can.

Capital mobility in a globalized economy has created downward pressure on wages and working conditions. Whenever a company fails or falters, corporate spokespeople are quick to blame well-paid (or not-so-well-paid) American workers for preventing the company from being "competitive." The threat of moving overseas - whether real or just a bluff--has forced concessions out of countless workers.

The conventional wisdom that blames high wages for corporate woes ignores the model of capital-labor relations in the rest of the developed world; European companies, for instance, provide higher wages, better benefits, and greater workplace protection, and yet many are among the healthiest capitalist enterprises on Earth. Fair compensation and dignified treatment on the job improve productivity and corporate viability far more dramatically than worker concessions. More important, the conventional wisdom ignores the inevitable result of an international economy based on ever-downward-spiraling labor standards: Poverty and injustice will increase while the consumer spending that drives the market must eventually decrease.

Yet companies have persisted in pursuing this low-wage, short-term strategy. Because most unionized workers earn markedly more than non-union workers, union-busting has risen sharply.

Employers have increasingly resorted to firing union activists. This is illegal under U.S. law, but it is nonetheless an extremely effective weapon for it instantly intimidates and silences other workers. Employees have good reason to fear; nationally, one in 10 workers involved in trying to organize a union is fired, and many companies have shown no scruples whatsoever in using this weapon. Many of those fired have been loyal employees for 20 and 30 years.

THE SINGLE MOST destructive development, however, has been the use of so-called "permanent replacements" in strikes. This practice has doomed countless union efforts and devastated tens of thousands of workers. While it is illegal to fire workers for striking, it is legal to permanently replace them--a meaningless distinction, of course--in the case of an economic strike. The effect of this legal loophole has been to virtually destroy the right to strike; it may go so far as to precipitate the collapse of the entire collective bargaining relationship in the United States.

Since PATCO, the practice of "permanently replacing" workers has gone from taboo to commonplace, and now we are even to the point where employers deliberately provoke strikes in order to replace their union work forces. At the Daily News, management advertised for permanent replacements even before contract negotiations had begun. When the company finally succeeded in precipitating a strike with a lockout, a bus load of scabs pulled into the plant's parking lot 20 minutes after workers walked off their jobs.

At Caterpillar this year, the company was able to refuse to bargain in good faith simply by threatening to replace workers. Faced with the loss of their jobs during a recession, United Auto Workers members went back to work on management's terms.

Added to these practices has been the deliberate use of delays at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Cases at the NLRB now take months, or even years. The increased number of firings since the 1980s combined with a reduced budget for the NLRB have crippled the board's ability to handle an increased caseload. The result is that it usually takes two years to get a worker who was fired for union activity reinstated. For the workers involved, it is truly a case where "justice delayed is justice denied."

The fact is that employers can quite literally get away with breaking the law. While workers wait for a case to be resolved, the employer prevails in the workplace. Employers have become willing to break the law now and deal with the consequences several years later because they can win labor disputes this way. Needless to say, this situation has almost the same effect as not having any labor laws in the first place.

LABOR LAW REFORM is urgently needed in the United States to help counter the increasing economic violence to which millions of American families are subjected. As a start, bills have been introduced in the last two sessions of Congress that would ban the permanent replacement of striking workers. In 1991, the House of Representatives passed the Workplace Fairness bill, but in June it was filibustered in the Senate.

But more than a change in laws is required, crucial though that is. A change in attitude is necessary. The pursuit of profit without regard to the consequences for workers (or the environment or neighboring communities) must not be acceptable. Likewise, the willingness to use the emerging global economy to reduce labor standards in developed countries rather than raising them in developing countries has to be abandoned.

In the meantime, the labor movement has tried to reverse its fortunes through new tactics. American labor has traditionally been very insular, concerned almost exclusively with the interest of its members and distrustful of those outside its ranks. Now that it cannot win organizing drives or labor disputes through tried and true methods, it has had to find new strategies and reach out beyond its members.

The Pittston strike, for instance, was won because the mine workers were willing to break the law, and because every school child, every preacher, and every store owner in southwest Virginia was involved in the strike and stood by the miners. In 1989, this was a novelty; but now similar examples can be found in almost every American union.

It would be misleading to suggest that a general revival or a resurgence of militancy has taken hold in the labor movement. For every Pittston story, there are still two Caterpillar stories, where the union had no strategy beyond simply striking. The battering of the 1980s has made some union officials willing to reach out, to join with other progressive forces, and to try new approaches. But it also reinforced the conservatism of other labor leaders, who read the troubled times as a mandate for caution. On balance, however, the trend is towards innovation. Indeed, union efforts to link their work with other social justice causes and their renewed creativity may be the silver lining in this era of continuing economic violence.

Conservative forces would have us believe that labor is a "special interest." In truth, there is perhaps no other institution in this nation that represents a more diverse and broad constituency--from immigrant workers in Brooklyn to coal miners in Virginia and reporters in New York. Labor's cause is a struggle for justice to be embraced by all.

Dorothee Benz was a free-lance writer and the director of communications for ILGWU Local 23-35 when this article appeared.