Labor Redivivus

...RASKIN This 30th anniversary year of the merger that j oined the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, ending two decades of civil war, has become the jumping-off point as well for an impressive new effort to spark the renascence that eluded the brave architects of unification...

...The challenges are staggering, yet the great leaps forward taken in organizing Civil Service workers—the bulk of them in white-collar and professional jobs— support the federation's belief that the potential exists for a resumption of the sustained growth it rightly deems essential to the movement's health...

...We have not been sufficiently successful on either score...

...Unions that formerly set the pace in the earnings parade are still finding it necessary to accept income freezes or give back past gains...

...The industrywide steel strike of 1959 took a half-million members of the United Steelworkers of America out of the factories for 116 days, and would have resumed at the end of an 80-day national emergency injunction if the industry had not caved in on its demand for aunilateral right to abolish archaic work rules...

...What is more disturbing, brisk upturns in industrial profits and employment have not alleviated the problem...

...Almost at once bitterness over policy issues and status began to poison their relationship, severely undercutting the spirit of shared purpose that had been counted on to lend dynamism and inspiration to the newly unified organization...

...In terms of intellectual capacity at the top, the AFL-CIO has never been better endowed...

...And every departure from the bedrock principle of equal pay for equal work is a time bomb that must eventually explode in generational conflict inside the workplace...

...One is held by the nation's business and financial community, the second by the AFL-CIO and its constituent parts...

...For many old-line leaders in each camp, it quickly became clear, the merger compact's most attractive feature was the insurance policy its no-raiding provisions offered...

...The federation estimates that 75 per cent of the nation's employers currently hire professional consultants to guide them in opposing unionization, at an annual cost of over $100 million...

...Although the report minimizes the problems of alienation, it stresses that a union resurgence requires that individual members be given the fullest opportunity to participate and the highest possible quality of representation...

...Prominent in this regard is the suggestion that wherever employer attitudes permit, organized labor should move away from an adversarial role and place greater reliance on mediation and arbitration as alternatives to strikes...

...In the past a majority of top unionists reacted coldly to these ventures—thereby enabling hostile employers to pervert them into devices for keeping workers unorganized or promoting company unionism...

...Among the population at large, fully 50 per cent think most union chiefs no longer represent the workers in their organizations...

...Things are different now...

...It is not that the report presents a surefire prescription for reviving a movement seemingly run out of muscle and mission...

...Chairman Donald L. Dotson openly proclaims that collective bargaining often means "the destruction of individual freedom and the destruction of the marketplace...

...A corresponding open-mindedness marks each of the report's recommendations, and they extend to the practicality of providing job training, supplemental medical insurance and similar services to those outside the collective bargaining structure...

...At its February meeting in Florida the AFL-CIO Executive Council endorsed a frank report on the magnitude of the afflictions besetting organized labor and the importance of finding innovative ways to overcome them...

...industrial dominance...

...His second-in-command, Secretary-Treasurer Thomas R. Donahue, chaired the Committee on the Evolution of Work that prepared the report...

...All those who believe vibrant, principled, purposeful unions are an indispensable element in the fabric of American democracy must see this as an occasion for rejoicing...

...Another revealing expression of the revised approach permeating the report is its affirmative stand on quality-of-worklife experiments that give employees a greater voice in decision-making...

...Unity did bring internal transformations of great worth: The federation assumed centralized authority for the enforcement of admirable ethical practices codes directed at racket-infested affiliates and cracked down on others that clung to Jim Crow traditions...

...bers of men and women beyond labor's ranks...

...In the good old days strikes were called with little worry that the targets might attempt to operate...

...It is apparent from the foregoing," the report acknowledges, "that the labor movement must demonstrate that union representation is the best available means for working people to express their individuality on the job and their desire to control their own working lives," on the one hand, "and that unions are democratic institutions controlled by their members," on the other...

...The example President Reagan set in 1981, firing 11,500 striking air traffic controllers and smashing their union, has encouraged many enterprises to keep plants and offices open during stoppages...

...More than half of the nonunionists thought unions increased the risk of a company going out of business, stifle individual initiative and fight change...

...too many have depended on the closed shop and other forms of pushbutton unionism for their new dues payers...

...Special attention is focused, too, on the importance of developing techniques to organize the one third of the work force in businesses with fewer than 25 employees, an endeavor unions have generally avoided because of the relatively high cost...

...The recommendations for adapting to current realities proceed from a basic premise: "It is not enough merely to search for more effective ways of doing what we have always done...

...Not everything in the document, of course, is geared toward achieving a more mutually beneficial relationship between management and labor...

...The scars left by the bitter 1978 labor law reform battle—when big companies that had lived amicably alongside unions for a quarter century formed a united front with the labor haters to kill a modest attempt at making organizing easier—have never healed...

...Not only does organized labor reject the notion of an independent labor party and other forms of what AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland calls "revolutionary defeatism...

...Wage increases in major union contracts dropped last year to the lowest level in the 17 years the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics has been keeping score...

...we must expand our notion of what workers can do through their unions...

...Too many have lost contact with their rank and file...

...The power of unions to achieve their goals through strikes has fallen even more drastically...

...Competitive pressures born of imports, deregulation, innovative new products, and the rapid expansion of nonunion operations in fields like construction, transportation and steel—previously near-monopolies for organized labor—have banished the accommodating spirit many employers exhibited in the age of U.S...

...its proudest boast is its success in having given millions of Americans an expanded stake in the system by making them pillars of the middle class...

...No longer do companies feel their ability to pass on higher wages to the consumer in the form of higher prices and profits is limitless...

...For two and a half years it solicited ideas from experts in business, technology, economics, and social policy...

...The guarantee that they would remain securely in possession of their turf, no matter how unhappy their members might become over slack representation, bulked larger to such deadhead officials than any sense of obligation to reach out to the vast numA. H. Raskin, for many years the chief labor correspondent of the A'i'ir York Times, is a frequent contributor to The New Leader, and the co-author of David Dubinsky: A Life with Labor...

...Lane Kirkland possesses one of the most brilliant minds in public life...

...More than half the members of the Executive Council participated in the sessions, along with the heads of all major federation staff departments...

...But a return by employers to the live-and-let-live approach most took in the 1950s and 1960s will be of scant avail unless union officials at every level translate the new creed into an effective program...

...In addition, greater use should be made of the kind of coordinated campaign that brought about the 1980 cease-fire in the long war the J. P. Stevens textile empire waged to exclude unions...

...In the last two years such drives, which substitute threats to move pension funds and other financial pressures for strikes, have proved effective against Litton Industries and the Beverly Enterprises chain of nursing homes...

...If the implementation of their joint endeavor proves as uplifting as thevademccum they have produced, the country will be the gainer...

...Two-tier contracts, allowing new hiring at rates 25-50 per cent below those paid to employees already on the payroll, are being forced on many unions over their vehement objections...

...This miscarriage of the founders' commendable desire to prevent the dissipation of energies in sterile interunion piracy created an impetus toward stagnation, made worse by the steadily widening rift dividing Meany and Reuther...

...Nearly two thirds of the nonunionists questioned said they felt unions forced members to accept decisions they didn't like, and almost as many expressed the belief that union leaders, not the rank and file, decide whether a strike should be called...

...On that basis alone, the virulence with which hard-liners in many sectors of industry are trying to push unions into the grave is as much a threat to the stability of capitalism as it is to the organized labor movement...

...To further satisfy the computer-age desire for individual expression, the federation advises that in some bargaining units affiliates may find it wise to abandon the rigidity of standard contracts prescribing hard and fast terms concerning every condition of employment...

...Labor's hopes of securing relief through the National Labor Relations Board machinery established for its protection have been torpedoed by Reagan's packing of the board with flagrantly proman-agement types...

...It would be unrealistic, indeed, if no recognition were given to the need for sophisticated new weapons to counter companies bent on confrontation...

...The AFL-CIO is still awaiting some convincing evidence that industry accepts its right to exist...

...Unfortunately, nothing of the sort occurred...

...Rather, it is that everything about the document's preparation and approval bespeaks a readiness on the part of the federation's dominant forces, for the first time since 1955, to undertake the rigorous re-examination of frozen practices and the bold experimentation needed to regain labor's lost momentum in the face of volcanic change in the nature of work, society and the global economy...

...All the notice required to get the "Keep Out" message across was a picket sign tied to a metal drum at the mill gate...

...Until a change in the political climate improves the prospects for passage of the labor law reform that it considers indispensable to a true redress of the balance, the AFL-CIO says affiliates should try to neutralize employer hostility through skillfully prepared appeals to public opinion...

...That skepticism on this score is justified is especially remarkable because free enterprise has no more resolute defender...

...Here the labor movement is urged to step up the spread of such programs as instruments to enhance worker dignity and equality...

...Some envisioned an initiative that would rival conquest of the open shop made possible by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal during the Great Depression...

...But a combination of tired blood and deteriorating personal relations at the top effectively stifled any resurgence of the missionary spirit that had assertively spread unionism throughout our giant basic industries in an era of 25 per cent unemployment—despite the private armies of thugs and spies employers maintained to keep organizers out...

...The decline has accelerated alarmingly in the 1980s, diminishing not only enrollment but also economic clout at the bargaining tabic and on the picket line...

...Against this dour backdrop, the AFL-CIO's willingness to remove its institutional blinders, and receptivity to the new ideas that shine brightly in all 28 pages of its report on "The Changing Situation of Workers and Their Unions," constitute a clear message: Today's union leaders are determined to keep the movement from becoming an anachronism in a period when a better-educated generation, skeptical of the claims of authority, is—in the words of the report—"less likely to see work as a straight economic transaction providing a means of survival and more likely to see it as a means of self-expression and self-development...

...When the AFL's George Meany and the CIO's Walter P. Reuther solemnized the fusion by bringing down a giant gavel at the founding convention in New York, hopes were high that a consequent burst of organizing zeal would spur millions of workers to enroll under the union banner...

...Throughout the shutdown the union was so confident the mills would stay closed that no human pickets patrolled outside many huge plants...

...The document is refreshingly candid where candor hurts most: It discloses the results of a poll taken by Louis Harris and Associates showing that most unaffiliated workers do not view labor as pursuing an agenda drawn from the needs and desires of its members...

...Members might be better pleased, it is pointed out, if the union simply negotiated minimum guarantees and left them free to bargain on their own merits for pay and benefits above that level...

...All of which makes it plain that there are two keys to full realization of the admirable initiatives and analysis contained in "The Changing Situation of Workers and Their Unions...

...Some actually appear to provoke them in the effort to get rid of a union altogether...

...In the wake of these early disappointments came a chain of demographic, economic, political, and social developments that contributed to a downhill slide in the ratio between organized workers and the total labor force—from one in three at merger time to fewer than one in five today...