The Role of and Challenges Facing Unions in the 1940's and the 1980's - A Comparison
The R ole of and Challenges Facing Unions in the 1940's and the 1980's - A Comparison
as R. Donahue
Recommended Citation Thom as R. Donahue, Th e Role of and Challenges Facing Unions in the 1940's and the 1980's - A Comparison, 52 Fordham L. Rev. 1062 (1984). Available at: http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol52/iss6/2
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Article 2
From the 1940's to the 1980's, the essential role of unions has
remained unchanged. But the subsidiary elements of that role-the
accidents which attend its fulfillment, the strategy and
techniqueshave changed enormously. Thus, the essential challenges facing
unions in the 1940's and 1980's are quite different, and the strength of
those challenges and the force of the opposition we face are, I think,
substantially greater.
But I am never sure how to compare one age with another. How
does one compare the Wagner Act of the first seven years of the 1940's
with the labor law of the 1980's, after Taft-Hartley and
LandrumGriffin? How does one compare the divided labor movement of the
1940's with the movement of the 1980's, which is finding its new
strength in solidarity, both economically and politically?
How does one compare the 1940's when soldiers, acting with the
full force of the government and the full support of the Chief
Executive, carried Sewell Avery out of Montgomery Ward in his executive
chair to the cheers of the people, with the 1980's when the Chief
Executive, acting with the full force of the government, fired 11,500
workers for striking, unhappily with the concurrence of a great
number of citizens?
How does one compare the strength or effectiveness of unions which
bargained for wages and a few fringes with those that today bargain,
or seek to bargain, on everything from plant closures to outsourcing,
from social investment of enormous pension and welfare funds to
varying degrees of worker participation, management or ownership,
and from comparable worth to "employer neutrality" clauses?
How does one compare the political divisiveness of unions which
split over Truman vs. Dewey in 1948 with the political unity of unions
in the 1980's, when they conducted the widest opinion-sampling ever
taken among their members, and then, four months before the first
primary, threw the full force of their sophisticated polling machinery
behind the candidacy of Fritz Mondale?
I would urge that the comparison must start with an examination of
the continuing fealty of our unions to the philosophy which drove
* Secretary-Treasurer, AFL-CIO
them through the infancy and childhood years of the modern
American labor movement. I submit that we are still faithful to that
philosophy and that it dictates an essentially unchanged role.
We are the workers of America who have banded together to
improve our lot and to improve America. The role of the American
trade union movement is that of a change agent in society. Our role is
to improve the human condition in America.
Our goals were best spelled out in 1893 by the first president of the
AFL, Samuel Gompers, in response to the question, "What does labor
want?":
What does labor want? It wants the earth and the fulness thereof.
There is nothing too precious, there is nothing too beautiful, too
lofty, too ennobling unless it is within the scope and comprehension
of labor's aspirations and wants.... We want more schoolhouses
and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less
vice; more constant work and less crime; more leisure and less
greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the
opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more
noble, womanhood more beautiful and childhood more happy and
bright.'
I suppose in today's world Sam would have urged making both
manhood and womanhood more noble and more beautiful.
These goals expressed by Mr. Gompers call for transforming
America and require a trade union movement open and alert enough both
to foster change and to manage it, and indeed, to change itself. The
ideas, philosophy and goals of the trade union movement surely have
that continuing validity.
Let me offer you my view of that trade union philosophy and of its
continuing importance in our labor movement. The trade union
movement of this nation has been and remains one of the great
civilizing, humanizing and democratizing forces of American life. It
has been, first and foremost, a special interest organization seeking to
improve the lives of its members by improving their job-related
conditions and by insuring respect for their individual dignity on the job. It
believes that the worker, at all levels, is entitled to a fair day's pay for
a fair day's work.
Moreover, it believes that the worker is entitled to share in the
profits he helps to create, and thus, its function is also to seek a larger
share of those profits than "market forces" might dictate. It believes
that those profits can only be created in a well-managed enterprise,
1. Address by Samuel Gompers Before the International Labor Cong., Chicago,
Ill. (Sept. 1893) (available in files of FordhamLaw Review).
where both capital and labor contribute to the result and participate
in the decision-making processes.
Secondarily, it has sought to improve the conditions of life of its
members by improving the conditions of life for all in our democratic
society through political action and legislative efforts. Since its earliest
days, it has sought to improve the quality of worklife, insure industrial
democracy and participate in decision-making-long before the call
for these values became "fashionable." It seeks, through collective
bargaining, political activism and legislative action to bring about a
broader sharing in the riches of the nation.
It believes that confrontation and conflict waste of our energies and
resources, and deeply desires a cooperative approach to our shared
present and future problems. The problem always is finding those
who really wish to cooperate.
It believes that it is the single most effective voice in this land raised
in support of the poor, the unemployed, the sick-the people Ben
Hooks so clearly refers to as "the least, the lost, and the left out." It is,
in short, a truly virtuous institution to which you all owe a great debt
for the progressive yet stabilizing effect it has had on America.
If that picture of a truly virtuous institution, contributing so
importantly to American life, has not come through to all of you and all of
American society, it must be that our public relations efforts have
been less effective than those of corporate interests with which we
struggle, that media owned by corporations that see themselves as
adversaries of unions do not give us a fair shake, or that we are
responsible for having failed to communicate properly what we really
are. Another part of the explanation, of course, is that, because we
exist in the real world, our performance does not always live up to our
philosophy or our promise. But I would insist on your seeing the true
face of labor, not just the warts, however obvious they may be.
Faced with hostile employers and a sometimes hostile press, a
change agent in society has to take what help is at hand, self-help
included, and use it as best it can. Thus, when our offers to participate
in management in a truly cooperative fashion are spurned, we are
forced to take a confrontational role. When our view of a fair day's
pay or a larger share of the profits does not accord with the bosses'
view, we must confront them over that disagreement.
We have hailed and agreed with the view of Pope John Paul II
expressed in his latest encyclical, "On Human Work," that man must
be at the center of the economic order, that the economic order must
serve man and that capital must serve labor.2 But we have not
believed that faith in the Lord would be enough to accomplish our goals.
2. Pope John Paul II, On Human Work 25-27 (Encyclical Sept. 14, 1981).
1984]
Now we take this philosophy, this desire to improve the conditions
of work and life for workers and all people, this desire to transform
America, into the 1980's. We try to address those same goals in a
somewhat changed and changing economy and in a changed and
changing personal and organizational environment. We pursue our
efforts to insure that man is at the center of an economic order that is
designated and operated to serve him and that his dignity is respected
fully.
Unions are the single most powerful force for progress in this
nation: There are 22.4 million people in over 105 national unions and in
40,000 local unions, well over one-third of a million
democraticallyelected officials and over one million shop stewards. Unions are the
best hope for the kind of nation we all want.
Unions represent some twenty percent of the total workforce, but I
think it makes much more sense to see those twenty-two million union
members as thirty percent of those American wage or salary
employees eligible to join unions. It is misleading to use the twenty percent
figure as the press continually does when the owner and managerial
group-the supervisors, doctors, lawyers and
self-employed-continues to grow, and when that group is ineligible for union
representation by law, circumstance or custom.
Admittedly, union members are a slowly declining percentage of
the union-eligible workforce, although membership is growing in
absolute numbers as the workforce grows. This is true, I believe, because
the early strength of the trade union movement was in those industries
and occupations which have been shrinking in recent years due to
technical change, process change or the effects of unfair international
trade. But it is also due to two other factors. One is the time it has
taken to gear our unions to new industries and new, often more
"hightech," occupations. The second is the overwhelming obstacles that
have grown up in the path of workers who seek to assert their legal
rights through the processes of the National Labor Relations Board
(NLRB).
One of the chief questions for the 1980's is whether the traditional
relationship between management and labor is going to change or is
already changing. I submit that it is changing now, but only in a
relative handful of organized firms in which an enlightened
management has accepted our desire to move from conflict to cooperation and
has been willing to accept the participation of the union as a real
partner in the process.
In the overwhelming majority of firms, the employer continues to
resist employees' efforts to organize or to expand the union to
currently unrepresented units. He continues to encourage or stimulate
decertification petitions or, at a minimum, maintains an ambitious
union avoidance program as part of the normal training for all
supervisors.
The fact is that the employers of this nation preach
labor-management cooperation only after we have wrestled them to the ground and
pinned their shoulders to the mat. At about the point when the referee
is calling two, and just before he tolls the final verdict, they start
preaching cooperation to us and to all the journalists and economists
who will listen.
The employers of America, acting individually and through their
organizations, have proclaimed their flat-footed opposition to any
change in the nation's basic labor-relations statute which might make
it more responsive to the needs and the desires of workers. They have
proclaimed, in a full chorus from which only the nation's Big Four
auto manufacturers and a handful of smaller companies have excused
themselves, that they are determined to oppose the efforts of their
workers to form and join unions. Then, without so much as a pause
for breath, they proclaim a desire for labor-management cooperation
and the need to join together to increase productivity as if it were
simply a matter of worker effort.
Strange behavior? I think it is. Counterproductive? Of course it is.
Behavior for which they are criticized, ridiculed or ever questioned?
Not at all. It is perfectly acceptable in America-good old
Americanstyle, free-enterprise capitalism at its best. That is the kind of conduct,
we are told, that made America great.
For our part, we would like to see the fullest degree of
labormanagement cooperation in this country. Such cooperation, however,
must be based on: mutual acceptance of both the other side's right to
exist and the other side's good faith; an acceptance of corporations'
needs to be productive and to generate capital for investment,
production, payroll and profit; and, an acceptance of workers' needs to be
undisturbed and unintimidated in their right to form unions or to be
participants in forms of industrial democracy that would guarantee
their diginity and the decency of their living and working conditions.
But until those things are an accepted part of the labor-management
scene, it seems to me futile to speak about labor-management
cooperation other than as an abstract principle.
In a recent article, Professor Paul Weiler of Harvard Law School
analyzed the conduct of American employers. 3 He traced "the
skyrocketing use of coercive and illegal tactics by employers" 4 back to
1957, when union representation was at its zenith. In all of the United
States that year, .922 workers were fired illegally for union activity
3. Weiler, Promises to Keep: Securing Workers' Rights to Self-Organization
Under the NLRA, 96 Harv. L. Rev. 1769 (1983).
4. Id. at 1769.
1984]
and consequently reinstated by the NLRB. By 1965, the number of
workers illegally fired during organizing campaigns reached 6,000. In
1980, the NLRB ordered a stunning 10,000 reinstatements for illegal
firings during certification campaigns. One can imagine, if the Board
ordered 10,000 reinstatements, how many discharges there were in
total. Professor Weiler states that "[s]uch a widespread pattern of
employer intimidation has ramifications that reach far beyond the
units in which discharges actually occur. It fosters an environment in
which employees will take very seriously even subtle warnings about
the consequences of joining a union."5
I submit that the employer community of this country is responsible
for such conduct just as I and my fellow trade unionists are responsible
for the conduct of this trade union movement. Labor-management
cooperation can exist when the views of that community change, and
when 10,000 people are not fired for simply trying to assert their right
to join or form a union.
What is ahead? What is not ahead? What is not ahead is union
irrelevance, at least not until everybody in society is fair,
understanding, generous, noble, hard-working, impartial, selfless and so forth.
In the meantime, I think, unions will remain quite relevant. What is
ahead is a shortfall of four to six million jobs in the 1980's and 1990's,
on top of frictional and cyclical unemployment-a shortfall created
by the shrinkage of traditional industries and the inability of the
newer industries to take up the slack.
From the 1950's through the 1980's, we have seen constantly higher
levels of unemployment. In the 1950's, we had only four years when
the unemployment rate went over five percent. In the 1960's, we had
five years when the unemployment rate went over five percent. In the
1970's, we had eight years when the unemployment rate went over
five percent. In the first four years of the 1980's, we have had
unemployment of 7.1, 7.6, 9.7 and 9.6%.
We have had an AFL-CIO Executive Committee studying job,
occupational and industrial changes and looking at the shape of our
workforce and its deployment by 1990. After a nine-month analysis,
the Committee concluded that a job shortfall of four to six million is a
modest estimate if present trends are continued. 6 U.S. News & World
Report, in a special report on the 1990's, predicted that the shortfall
could be as high as 17.5 million by 1990.7
My reservations about these predictions-if present trends are
continued-obviously means that I believe that we have it in our power
as a nation to prevent such shortfalls: We can adopt a National
Industrial Policy designed to promote full employment; adopt an
International Trade Policy designed to maintain that full
employment; develop education and training policies which will supplement
those policies; and return to the concept that the federal government,
in the words of the Papal Encyclical, is the "Indirect Employer" with
a responsibility to manage the economy to insure that it is at the
service of man, not vice versa. And all of this is possible with a change
of administration-but that is another speech.
But if we do not do these things, if we tolerate and accept the
shortfall, we will see the destruction of our wage base, the elimination
of good mid-level jobs which have been the strength of our economy,
and their continuing replacement by minimum wage jobs-a process
that would take us half way down the road to being truly competitive
with Brazil, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and half way down the road to
the adoption of their standards of living as well.
For the labor movement, then, what challenges are ahead? First,
we must change the labor laws at state and national levels, in both the
public and private sector, to make them fully responsive to workers'
needs and fully protective of workers' rights to organize. Surely, one
question posed in today's program-"Is there a need to amend the
NLRA?"-is rhetorical. The question really is whether to amend the
statute or repeal it and create a whole new law. Second, we must
adapt our trade union structure to shift resources and organizing
strategies and techniques to the new occupations, the new geographic
areas and the new industries. Third, we must find ways to improve
the public perception of the trade union movement. Finally, with a
combination of these changes, we must reverse the trend and become
once again a larger and growing force in American life.
I note that USA Today reported yesterday the prediction of the
California-based Institute for the Future that "unions will grow as
organizing becomes more effective inside new conglomerates," and
that the union share of the workforce will increase to twenty-six
percent by 1995.8 That would mean an increase to thirty-three million
members, enough to gladden every organizer's heart. I am not
prepared to make such estimates, but I do not think they are
unreasonable if changes take place.
With respect to negotiating, the challenge will be to maintain
bargaining strength in the face of advancing technology, high
unem8. U.S.A. Today, Jan. 31, 1984, at B1, col. 2.
1984]
ployment, a slack labor market and increasing offshore competition.
Naturally, if we address our industrial and trade policy problems,
these negotiating problems will be eased. Even so, in the face of
increasing technology and an increasing number of conglomerates
with diverse investments, the strength of our strike weapon will need
to be reexamined. To be effective, its range will probably have to be
broadened in order to be brought to bear simultaneously against the
several divisions of a conglomerate or against industry segments or
areas.
What the Greyhound strike taught us is that it is not possible to
exert real pressure against one division of a conglomerate operated by
a chief executive officer who is willing to sacrifice that division, sell it
off or lose it, and reinvest his cash in another division. I think that fact
will require more coordination in bargaining across industrial sectors.
Moreover, the increasing internationalization of financing and
finances-the growing "globalism"-will surely require coordination in
a variety of ways across national borders, probably through the
strengthening of the International Trade Secretariats for bargaining
and joint actions. Similarly, we will have to find and refine the ways
in which we can use our economic power, not just strikes and
boycotts, but a whole range of corporate campaign strategies, to affect
the corporations at different levels. This would include developing
strategies that will enable us to utilize the substantial worker interest
in pension fund assets to affect bargaining outcomes.
The challenges ahead in bargaining issues surely include issues you
are discussing today: "The Rights of Individual Workers," not just in
the context of employment at will, but in the extension of that
doctrine to the worker's ownership interest in his or her job and the
consequent inability of an employer permanently to replace such an
employee in the event of a strike, and "Comparable Worth," which
will be fought out at the bargaining table as well as in the courts.
Other bargaining issues will include quality-of-worklife, productivity,
worker participation, worker ownership and worker management, as
well as the more traditional economic and dignity issues.
One important bargaining issue that will arise in healthy
industries-and in sick industries as soon as they get well-is the reduction
of hours of work. It is now nearly fifty years since the last hours
movement, and given the shrinking total work available, our unions
will move to shorter hours without reduction of wages as soon as
economic conditions make it possible.
The special challenge ahead for the labor movement is in the
political arena. The challenge will be, I am confident, in handling success
and maintaining solidarity. We have now entered almost fully into
the processes of the Democratic Party in search of a voice in candidate
selection and to help sustain the vitality and strength of that party.
The challenge will be to maintain the necessary degree of separation
to insure our freedom of action outside that party and to resist the calls
for a labor party or other third party.
A Democratic victory in 1984 will go a long way toward easing this
challenge, and the solidarity that has grown in our movement during
the last three years of our involvement in the political process will
surely be reflected in all of our other activities.
So there you have it: Our role-grounded in a still valid philosophy
and in a set of values in full accord with the moral precepts of our
nation and of this great university and its religious inspiration.
Our challenge-fully met by a vibrant and dynamic trade union
movement, born in struggle and reborn and revitalized in its second
hundred years, reshaped, modernized and united.
REMARKS OFA.H. RASKIN*
The fastest growing union in the United States, bar none, is the
Amalgamated Association of Entrail Readers, Crepe Hangers and
Necromancers. Its card carriers are kept fully employed by
cataloguing the maladies that afflict organized labor and solemnly concluding
that its demise is both inescapable and imminent. Tom Donahue and
many others among my good friends in the upper echelon of labor are
wont to put me well up front in that parade of pallbearers on the basis
of things I write from time to time about the troubles that beset many
unions.
On that basis I consider it important to start right off in my
comments today by declaring with all the earnestness at my command
that I think it would be a tragedy of monumental dimensions for every
one of us if the trade union movement did indeed disappear. I have
always believed that a vibrant, principled and purposeful labor
movement is an indispensable element in the fabric of American
democracy, both as a champion of the interests of wage earners and as a
social counterweight to the power of business and finance. Never has
the need for a dynamic labor movement of that kind been greater than
in these days of gigantic multinational corporations that skip nimbly
around the globe controlling the lifestream of whole communities or
regions by their decisions on where to locate or liquidate their
facilities. Their lodestar in all such decisions never flickers: It is the impact
on the consolidated profit-and-loss account, the bottom line.
Unfortunately, it is ostrich-like to pretend that organized labor
possesses at this stage in its history anything like the strength or
vibrancy required to insure that people get at least as much
consideration as money does in these determinations by the titans of industry.
The symptoms of labor's weakness are all too familiar: Only one
worker out of every five in the labor force belongs to a union, and the
ratio has been going down ever since the merger of the American
Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations
back in 1955-a merger that both of these erstwhile rivals hoped
would unleash a vast surge of new organizing akin to that which
brought millions of workers cascading into union ranks in the early
years of the New Deal.
This long slide in labor's ability to attract new members, except in
such fields of conspicuous organizational progress as the civil service
and health care, has encouraged many employers to abandon the
civility that prevailed on a broad scale in the 1960's and 1970's and to
* Former Chief Labor Correspondent, The New York Times.
go for the jugular in their relations with unions. This combative spirit
has been especially prevalent in industries beset by competitive
pressures born of imports, deregulation or the emergence of new products,
processes and managerial methods, and by the rapid spread of
nonunion operations in such fields as construction, transportation and
steel.
In the years of this country's industrial dominance, when
companies felt there was no tomorrow in their ability to relay the cost of
higher wages to the consumer in the form of higher prices, unions
called strikes with little worry that employers would even attempt to
operate. In the industry-wide steel strike of 1959, a half-million
unionists stayed out for 116 days and would have gone out all over again
at the end of an eighty-day national emergency injunction had the
industry not caved in its demand for a unilateral right to abolish
archaic work rules. Yet through all the weeks in which rust was
consuming the blast furnaces and open hearths, the union's confidence
that the mills would stay shut was so complete that no human pickets
patrolled outside many huge plants. A picket sign tied to a metal drum
at the mill gate was all the notice required to get the "keep out"
message across.
That is not the way things are today. The example President
Reagan set in the summer of 1981, when he fired 11,500 striking
Federal air traffic controllers and smashed their union to the
accompaniment of widespread public applause, has encouraged many
employers to keep their plants and offices open in the face of strikes.
There is no paucity of scabs available from the despairing ranks of the
unemployed; hunger is a powerful ally of the union buster.
Labor's hopes for succor through the machinery for union
protection established under the National Labor Relations Board have been
torpedoed by the President's practice of packing both the Board and
the Labor Department with appointees whom the unions have every
good reason to consider flagrantly biased. Lane Kirkland, normally
the most temperate of men, has become so distrustful of the adequacy
of the governmental remedies at labor's disposal and of the good faith
of the officials in charge of their administration that he has taken to
suggesting publicly that unions would be better off if all the labor laws
were repealed and the "law of the jungle" were reestablished in
relations between labor and management. Despite such statements,
no one who knows Kirkland would think for a moment that this
eminently sober and responsible trade unionist actually wants to see
such a prescription for chaos adopted; his enunciation of the idea is
simply symptomatic of the feelings of frustration that abound in
labor.
I have no desire to extend this jeremiad, but before turning to my
own thoughts on roads it might be well to travel if labor-management
affairs are to move in a more constructive direction, there is one aspect
of the existing situation that requires discussion. I refer to the demand
now being made by many, if not most, employers that new contracts
provide drastic cuts in starting rates for newly hired employees while
those already on the payroll continue to get pay increases on a
business-as-usual basis. Unlike givebacks, plant closings and runaway
jobs, the issue of lower starting rates has received little general
attention up to now and yet may be most important in its implications
among all the adjustments that have come out of the recent upheavals
in the economy.
For companies under intense competitive pressure or in declining
industries, some form of wage relief is often imperative if they are to
stay in business. That is especially true in places where pay scales were
allowed in the years of plenty to push up to levels double or triple
those that prevailed in such laggard fields as garment manufacture,
textiles, retail stores, hotels, laundries and fast-food establishments.
Asking people who are currently on the payroll to take a cut is painful,
even in extremis. It is a lot easier to pass the burden of sacrifice on to
the next generation in the work force by establishing a two-tier system
of wages within the company. This form of adjustment has the further
virtue in terms of in-plant morale of taking the union leader, always
conscious of his vulnerability to becoming an ex-leader in the next
union election, off the spot of having to recommend to his dues-payers
that they pull their belts tighter after having become accustomed to
their existing standard of living.
The continuing high levels of unemployment assure a plentiful
supply of job applicants prepared to work at cut rates. But bringing in
new workers to do the same job in the same plant with older
employees, while getting a wage twenty-five to fifty percent lower, is not
only inequitable on its face but strikes at what is perhaps the most
fundamental of a union's reasons for being. The standardization of
wage rates-equal pay for equal work-has always been at the heart
of a union's function, both within an enterprise and among competing
companies in the same industry. The objective, of course, is to obtain
equity for workers and at the same time to remove differentials in
labor costs as an element whereby employers seek an edge over their
business rivals.
The exigencies of the market place have made employers
increasingly intolerant of this rationale. The settlement of the seven-week
strike of Greyhound bus employees calls for new workers to come in at
rates twenty to twenty-five percent below those under the old
contract. The slash for new employees is triple the 7.8% reduction the
union had to swallow for old employees. At Briggs & Stratton, an
automotive parts supplier in Milwaukee, a three-month strike ended
last November with a pact that dropped the wage rate for new hires
from $7.36 an hour to $5.
At Boeing Aircraft a month earlier, management banked
successfully on the eagerness of old employees to salt away immediate pay
increases as the bait on which the company could count for
ratification of a contract sharply cutting scales for "unborn" plane makers.
The negotiating committee for the International Association of
Machinists refused to recommend the pact to their 26,000 members, but
that did not prevent its ratification by a three-to-one margin. New
employees will come to work at Boeing at wages as much as 40
percent lower than those under the old scale. For those already inside
the protected circle of jobholders, the three-year contract provides
regular increases each year, a lump-sum productivity bonus and other
improvements.
What we are setting up through such arrangements is a war
between the ins and the outs, the young and the old, a built-in
unfairness in the wage structure. This year we are sure to see pressure from
many employers in relatively prosperous industries as well as from
those in acute distress to rein in future labor expense by adopting a
two-tier wage structure. Unions rightly caution that over the long
haul, the price of such attempts to build a permanent wall of
discrimination in pay standards between old and new employees is bound to
be high in generational conflict within the workplace. The adverse
impact on productivity may more than wipe out the anticipated
savings in the labor bill. Regrettably, such an outcome is only one
manifestation of conflict in the battle over entitlements and sacrifices
that will affect seniority systems and public and private pension
systems as well as wage rates. The rest of this century will see a bitter and
steadily intensifying battle between young and old workers over who
is standing in whose way-a battle that will challenge in the most
aggravating and divisive way the solidarity of the labor movement
and the capacity for statesmanship of its leaders.
If labor is to fulfill in the 1980's and 1990's the mission that so
distinctively belongs to it of strengthening the American economy and
our fidelity to democratic values, unions will have to reassess the
approaches they take in dealing with their own rank and file as well as
those they take to industry and government. No address by labor to
the larger problems of our society can be persuasive unless the
movement has a much more solid foundation than it does now in the esteem
of its members and of the vastly greater number of workers who ought
to be members but are not.
The bonds linking many of those with union cards to their own
organizations are paper thin. This is a fact of life that union chiefs are
understandably reluctant to acknowledge, much less face. Indeed,
Lane Kirkland launched the most venturesome and by all odds the
most successful initiative of his first three years as "Mister
Labor"the staging of Solidarity Day in Washington in 1981-principally out
of resentment over a statement by President Reagan a month after he
entered the White House suggesting that labor's leaders were out of
touch and out of tune with their members.
The response to Kirkland's call for a mass outpouring of unionists
and their allies to protest the callousness of Reagan's "soak the poor"
policies was doubly impressive because it represented such a departure
from the gospel as laid down by "Saint" George Meany that labor
should shun anything that smacked of taking to the streets of the
capital as a way of coercing government into abandoning regressive
policies. Kirkland's magnificent demonstration provided dramatic
proof that labor did have a mass constituency for which it spoke in
deriding Reaganomics. But it did not gainsay the reality that countless
workers pay dues only in order to hold their jobs under union shop
contracts, and that many more are divorced from any sense of genuine
involvement in their organizations.
It would be strange, indeed, if that were not the case in this cynical
era when all institutions are under challenge. The legacy of Vietnam,
Watergate, Abscam and a thousand lesser scandals has led to a
widespread conviction that nothing is "on the level" in public
life-governmental, judicial, corporate or union. This is a period of volcanic
change in the workplace and in society. For all that we hear about the
basic conservatism of the American people and the political
importance of staying in the centrist mainstream, we find individual
lifestyles and thought patterns shifting in ways that can only be described
as dizzying.
Workers today are better educated and more inclined to question
than ever before, and they find the traditionalist practices of their
unions hard to identify with. The notions that unions are locked in a
deathless struggle with the bosses and that the one-party
systemmeaning the exaltation and self-perpetuation of the guys who are in
union office-is the only right political structure for labor, do not
register as holy writ with many new-breed skeptics in unionism. They
don't like paramilitary lines of command in the workplace; they resent
them even more in organizations born to give workers a voice and
dignity.
The alienation felt by many rank-and-filers is fed by
disappointment over the meager yield of contract negotiations in these twilight
days of the smokestack industries and by the multiple woes that
plague many unions. No matter how often union leaders dig through
archives to come up with proof that Samuel Gompers was not just
talking about money when he said labor's objective was "more," they
find that the ability to deliver what Jimmy Hoffa used to call "the
highest buck" to the dues-payers has always been the cornerstone of
successful unionism.
Walter Reuther used to talk about the bigger slices everyone could
get out of an ever-expanding national economic pie, but it came to the
same thing that Hoffa was talking about. How potent an instrument
of revolt retreats on the wage front can be in even the least democratic
and most fear-ridden of unions was demonstrated last September
when rank-and-file truck drivers repudiated, by a seven-to-one
margin, a concessionary master contract urged on them by Jackie Presser,
the high-powered huckster, who currently wields the scepter once
brandished by Hoffa as president of the International Brotherhood of
Teamsters.
The fragility of the bonds of solidarity that hold the movement
together was graphically illustrated when not one of the airline unions
respected the picket lines established by the Professional Air Traffic
Controllers Organization (PATCO) in the strike that led to its
annihilation as a union by President Reagan. That failure of the rest of labor
to close ranks behind PATCO in anything more than a conversational
way has contributed to the sense so rampant among hard-liners in
industry that unions are over the hill and ripe for the taking.
That is why, in my view, the first and most urgent task for labor is a
reexamination and redefinition of its purpose in light of the challenges
of the 1980's, and then a reconstitution of unions in ways that make
the membership feel that the union is genuinely their organization,
responsive to their interests and their will. That same effort will
provide a long head start toward meeting the second paramount
challenge-organizing the unorganized. Techniques and slogans
carried over from the 1930's are never going to persuade today's workers
of the benefits of unionism, and the fact that these slogans are now
being copied on word processors and relayed to the field via satellite
does not make them any more credible or convincing.
My own judgment is that the necessary reorientation cannot be
made, on either the organizing or the bargaining front, unless the
initiative comes from the central federation, acting with the same
forcefulness and commitment it has just displayed in coordinating the
energies, resources and aspirations of all its affiliates on the political
front. The collective decision of the AFL-CIO's ninety-five
international unions to surrender to the parent organization the pivotal
responsibility for strategy and action in this most crucial of Presidential
campaigns, and to do it before the first vote was cast in a state
primary or caucus, represented the latest in a long series of
recognitions by the haughty worshippers of tradition in command of major
unions that considerations of autonomy must take second place to the
larger needs of labor in the present period of economic, political and
social trial.
That recognition had been crucial in ending twenty years of civil
war within labor at the time of the 1955 merger. When corruption or
Jim Crow practices in individual unions threatened to bring discredit
to the entire movement, the feuding industrial and craft unionists
decided to pool their forces, writing into the AFL-CIO constitution a
broad grant of authority for intervention by the central body. That
power was invoked to expel the teamsters and other tainted unions
when they refused to rid themselves of racket domination.
The challenge we presently face is very different in nature but even
more compelling in urgency. New economic realities make it
impossible for unions to function on a basis by which each organization
looks out for itself and the devil take the hindmost. Interdependence
makes it necessary to reassert solidarity in a way that alters the whole
framework of relationships within the movement as well as with
employers. The shift has to be away from the adversarial stance of
yore toward a cooperative industrial society based on democratic
values and an equitable sharing of gains and sacrifices.
I do not underestimate the obstacles to such a shift, which is
precisely why I feel the federation must be the catalytic agency in
bringing it about. "Hate the Boss" sentiments are deeply ingrained in the
workplace, and unions can scarcely be faulted for hesitancy in
combatting them when so many employers are openly engaged these days
in attempts to reestablish absolutism by keeping unions out. But the
need for active enlistment by workers and their unions in the effort to
make their companies more competitive is so compelling that labor
will cut its own throat if it fails to take the lead in promoting a
transformation of attitudes that looks toward an enduring, good-faith
partnership with the responsible elements in industry.
The reality is that in many fields we are well into a period in which
bargaining will have to be enterprise-oriented if companies are to
survive. Changing market pressures and the investment requirements
engendered by drastically enhanced technology mean the demise of
economy-wide and industry-wide patterns of rising wages and
benefits, a painful adjustment for workers in industries that, since V-J
Day, were in the vanguard of the wage parade. Now that the
economy is well advanced toward recovery for business generally, the
response to further belt-tightening is becoming as negative among
unionists in the sick industries as it is among those in industries with
healthy profits.
In the absence of action by the central federation to win consensus
on a new institutional approach, conscientious union leaders bent on
realistic accommodations will find themselves vulnerable to
demagogic attacks when the wages of their members lag significantly
behind those of other unionists with whom they had always moved in
tandem toward the promised land. The cost will be great-in wildcat
strikes, shattered employee morale, low productivity and intensified
management hostility toward unions-unless the federation acts.
The pivotal thing that I have felt the federation should have started
doing long ago is to endorse in positive fashion what is already a
promising movement toward injecting more democracy into industry
by giving workers a more assertive voice in all the decisions that affect
their jobs. Call it quality of worklife, employee involvement, worker
participation, joint production teams-the name and form are
unimportant. The important thing is the acceptance by both union and
management of the notion that the whole climate and culture of the
enterprise must change in a manner that makes real to the workers a
sense that they are recognized and respected as adults with brains and
worthwhile ideas to contribute, not as barely animate appendages to
the assembly line or typist pool awaiting replacement by less
troublesome, more efficient robots.
I would have thought that promoting such a concept was the very
essence of sound trade unionism, a movement built on increasing the
dignity of the human condition as well as elevating economic rewards.
But the truth is that the labor movement has viewed the experiments
in quality of worklife with utmost suspicion and even now gives most
of them only grudging support. The result of this foot-dragging and
outright coldness on the part of the great mass of union leaders has
been to hand anti-union employers a golden opportunity to move into
the vacuum and set up teamwork operations of their own as a shield
against unionism. They tell the workers: "See, I, the boss, appreciate
you. I recognize you as a real person capable of useful thoughts on
how we could do things better around here, not like those union
characters whose only interest is in collecting dues and running your
lives their way."
How much wiser it is for unions to make themselves crusaders for
democratically conceived and executed programs that call for shared
authority and equitable distribution of gains in the
workplaceinstead of letting unionbusters take over the franchise by default-is
illustrated by a look at some of the successful programs now in
operation at Ford and General Motors (GM). The United Auto Workers
(UAW), largely through the social vision of such leaders as Doug
Fraser, Irving Bluestone and Don Ephlin, has been fully involved in
the Ford and GM programs from day one.
The extent to which the cooperative spirit has taken hold in these
experiments was highlighted in a mid-December joint announcement
at GM of what I would classify as the ultimate in worker involvement:
A teaming-up by management and labor, from drawing board to final
assembly, on a brand-new concept in cars. It involves nothing less
than a joining of hands and intellect to break Japan's dominance in
the subcompact car market by proving that the United States can
build a small car that will, in the words of the joint union-company
statement, be "highly competitive in cost, quality and consumer
value." This so-called Saturn project will have a steering committee
made up of equal membership from GM and the union, and the
pattern of total involvement of workers and the UAW in
decisionmaking will carry through every phase of planning, manufacture and
assembly.
The project is especially heartening because its unveiling coincided
with the approval by the Federal Trade Commission of GM's
controversial joint venture with Toyota, under which the Japanese company
will build 200,000 subcompa 9 ts a year in an old GM plant in
Fremont, California, to be sold under the Chevrolet emblem. The project
was bitterly opposed by Ford and Chrysler as an anti-competitive
gesture that all but surrenders the American small car market to the
Japanese. The UAW itself was all set to fight the venture until former
Secretary of Labor W.J. Usery, Jr., acting at the instigation of
management, mediated a deal under which displaced GM workers at
Fremont will be the mainstay of the new work force and the UAW
will have an inside track for recognition as sole bargaining agent. Now
Ford is throwing in the towel by making plans of its own to invest
close to a half-billion dollars in a new small car plant in Mexico. More
power then to the Saturn project, and to the space-age concept of
industrial relations on which management and union are counting to
put it in orbit. It is the only hope for United States competitiveness in
this field.
Another place where the benefits of employee involvement are
conspicuously in evidence is the Ford transmission plant in
Sharonville, Ohio. It ranked next to last in quality among all Ford
production facilities a couple of years ago when both labor and management
concluded that Sharonville would go under unless attitudes changed
all around. A sixty percent improvement in quality has now been
recorded and grievances have declined from over 500 to almost zero.
Jim Miller, chairman of the local union's bargaining committee, sums
up the change in a single crisp sentence: "Give a person on the line a
feeling he's wanted, and he'll give you 100% ."
There are also encouraging instances of the dividends of
cooperation outside the auto industry. Eastern Airlines and its unions rescued
the carrier from bankruptcy last fall by deciding that trust made more
sense than warfare. Bill Usery proved a helpful middle man at
Eastern, just as he had in the confrontation over the GM-Toyota joint
venture. An independent auditor was brought in to convince the
skeptical unions of the genuineness of Eastern's financial squeeze and
a climate of cooperation was established where all had been
animosity. Now the 37,000 Eastern employees are on their way to becoming
owners of twenty-five percent of the company and securing four seats
on its twenty-one-member board of directors.
In exchange, the employees will give up for this year eighteen to
twenty-two percent of their normal pay, but they will have access to
every type of confidential financial information including plans for
major capital outlays and expansion of subsidiaries and affiliates. If
the unions believe that any of these spending plans are "not in the best
overall interest of Eastern," they have the right to carry their
objections to the board for consideration before any final decision is made.
If all this makes it sound as if Frank Borman is turning Eastern into a
socialist cooperative on the model of an Israeli kibbutz, let me note
that Wall Street's reaction to the peace pact was enthusiastic. The
company's sixty major lenders signaled their approval in the most
tangible way: They gave Eastern more time in which to pay its $1.8
billion in long-term debt.
Another hopeful sign of progress toward amity in industrial
relations came as 1983 melded into 1984. It took the form of the hoisting
of a truce flag by Litton Industries in what had threatened to become
as protracted a union-company siege as the one in which an armistice
was reached in 1980 at J.P. Stevens & Co. The AFL-CIO had
proclaimed a boycott against Litton to protest the multifariousness of its
labor law violations. Everything seemed set for a bruising conflict,
replete with exercise of pension power to isolate Litton from the rest of
the business community. To everybody's relief, Litton's chairman
defused the situation by proposing the establishment of a joint
factfinding committee, with an impartial chairman, to explore how
bargaining between the conglomerate and its unions could be improved
and how they could work together to spur productivity. The unions
have leaped at the offer.
The really important advances through quality-of-worklife
programs have been in the abolition of special privileges and of command
structures more appropriate to an army than to an enterprise whose
prosperity depends on community of effort. Executive parking spaces
and johns have disappeared in many places, along with time clocks
and other badges of servitude. Workers have even been empowered to
stop the assembly line, that ultimate symbol of dehumanization, when
they detect a condition menacing to quality or safety. Autonomous
work teams rotate the foreman's function. And the partnership idea is
carried into profit-sharing systems and employee stock ownership
plans that provide a sensible avenue away from the invidious kind of
wage differentials embodied in two-tier wage systems.
Flexibility is the key to competitiveness and job satisfaction alike,
whether applied to wage structures, fringe benefits, work schedules or
mobility in job assignments. Healthy accommodations are easiest to
obtain and most successful in practice when the worker is convinced
that he has a direct stake in the company's prosperity-doing well
when the company does well, less well when it does poorly. That was
brought home to me on a recent visit to Hyatt Clark Industries, an
employee-owned company, just across the Hudson River in Clark,
New Jersey.
Hyatt Clark used to be a unit in the Hyatt-New Departure
rollerbearing division of General Motors, which GM decided to close four
years ago in large measure because its record for productivity and
quality was so bad. The UAW local and the plant supervisors at Clark
got together on an employee buy-out plan: the workers took a
twentyfive percent pay cut; work rules were revised in the interest of
efficiency; worker representatives sat in on planning sessions at every
level up through the board of directors; and, a bonus system was
instituted to give everyone extra earnings when profits were recorded.
5. Id. at 1781.
6. AFL-CIO Comm . on the Evolution of Work , The Future of Work 16-17 (Comm. Report Aug . 1983 ).
7. English , Wanted! 20 Million New JobsBy 1990 , U.S. News & World Rep., Sept. 5 , 1983 , at 22.