Hard Times for Labor

...Labor should lay out its vision of an economy that relies on increasing both the skill and wages of its workers through constant innovation in products and production processes...

...Some union leaders worry that providing such rights by law might make unions unnecessary, but it is more likely that workers will decide that unions are needed to exercise these rights successfully...

...Even when the United Auto Workers accepted employee involvement and team approaches, the leadership could never completely agree on strategy and was unwilling to put the issue up for debate and decision by the membership...

...In the 1988 contest he took up the cause of strikers and plant closing victims and campaigned on an innovative "worker bill of rights...

...Still, parallels with the twenties are eerily compelling: membership decline and wage cuts, business attacks, corporate paternalistic alternatives to unions, desperate offers of cooperation from unions, governmental hostility, labor political impotence, and union leadership that too often is a dead weight dragging down any initiative...

...Why labor and the black movement could not have been more closely linked is a monumental question in its own right...

...But Freeman and Medoff also estimate in What Do Unions Do...

...In the past union leaders often argued that collective bargaining produces industrial democracy...

...But those who want such a movement must recognize that inevitably SUMMER • 1989 • 327 Labor unions are also organizations: They have members who want services, existing interests to protect, and bureaucracies that are necessary and need not be evil...

...Despite public deference to business and the market, there is considerable suspicion that big business does not represent the national good...

...Strategically, labor must redefine as its goal the old ideal of industrial democracy, expanding it to mean economic democracy and not just workplace issues...

...They had no strategy for their industry except to follow the companies' lead and fight for trade protection...

...And by narrowing themselves to a mildly liberal business unionism that rarely challenged assumptions about American economic life, unions have helped dig their own grave...

...Management has often tried to pay enough and attend enough to complaints to minimize the appeal of unions...

...Public approval of unions began to fall steadily in the sixties, but after hitting a low point in 1979 began to climb back a bit in the eighties, according to a recent Gallup poll...

...Belgian grocery workers recently struck to protest their employer's anti-union policies in the United States...

...In a few cases, such as the Bricklayers and the Clothing and Textile Workers, unions have taken or shared initiative to modernize an industry...

...The union revealed health and safety violations that led to huge fines, made IBP a major issue in the Iowa Democratic caucuses, and spread the word about IBP's hideous working conditions to dry up the regional labor supply it needed for its high-turnover employment strategy...

...Management ploys to beat unions have become notorious: illegally firing pro-union workers (at least one pro-union worker in twenty among those being organized was fired in 1980 for union activity, according to one study), hiring anti-union consultants, barely veiled threats of plant closings, captiveaudience talks, one-to-one supervisory antiunion campaigns, lengthy delays in holding elections...

...unions have...

...The balance of power has also shifted as New Deal ideology lost ground even in the Democratic party...

...Typically, unions attempt to "take wages out of competition" by enforcing a standard pay rate for an industry...

...SEIU (Service Employees International Union) has linked up with 9 to 5, the working women's organization, so far with limited success in organizing clerical workers...

...Politically labor and most liberal-leftpopulist movements (blacks, women, environmentalists, some farm groups, peace and anti-intervention groups, and the other usual suspects) have been tagged as special interests...

...As a result, there was no broad, cohesive opposition to the corporate power that devastated labor in the late seventies and eighties...

...Union membership in Canada has doubled, while it has halved in the United States...

...This story has, of course, a happy, if turbulent, sequel as the labor movement surged forward with the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) organizing drive of the thirties...

...If it cannot once again become part of a movement that challenges the overall control of society's basic resources, it is likely to continue its ghostly slide toward the margins of American life...

...An economic democracy recognizes that there are numerous stakeholders beyond the stockholders in business enterprises, especially large ones...

...Cooperation or not, unions must be prepared to criticize corporate shortcomings as part of the effort to deflect attacks on workers as the sole answer to competitive pressures...

...In recent years some unions have tried to expand the one-on-one contact lower-level union officials establish with members, soliciting their opinions, talking politics, discussing union issues...

...Beyond the formal structures of conflictandcooperation, unions above all need to have a sense of direction about where they want to guide the corporation, its investments, its technology, and its products...

...But some principles are unchanged, and many of the new strategies labor should adopt are updated rediscoveries of ideas long abandoned...

...Labor unions need to broaden their conceptions of membership, but they also need to see themselves as one part, albeit large and important, of a broader movement that they rightfully may try to influence but should not try to control...

...For example, left to its own devices, the market obviously encourages businesses to pollute the environment, but by overwhelming margins Americans now simply will not accept competition that results in pollution...

...Unions lost power in the United States in part because they lost ground with the general public, their potential allies, and the Democratic party...

...Now that pension plans are funding takeover bids that eliminate jobs and undermine contracts, the 330 • DISSENT Labor need for greater union control over the funds is even more pressing...

...The biggest problem with most QWL and work reorganization schemes is that workers as an organized force lose control: Most often it is management that initiates the program, defines the goals, and sets the limits...

...The work seems to pay off, but it is costly, time-consuming and sometimes given short shrift...

...Many people, including lower paid, nonunion workers, had come to blame unions for high prices, even though a stronger case could be made against management...

...Unions were unable, often unwilling, to organize the growing new industries and were losing in their old strongholds...

...Unions are starting to link together across boundaries...

...Organized labor ceased to be a labor movement, in the sense of providing a challenge to the "overall system of social control of economic resources," as French sociologist Alain Touraine defines it...

...Comparing several other industrialized countries, especially Canada, with the United States, sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset has concluded that the weakness of socialism and of trade unionism are associated...

...The more they advocate a comprehensive economic democracy, the more they appear to be speaking on behalf of all workers and all community interests, not simply their own...

...By the late seventies and early eighties, with Paul Volcker in command at the Federal Reserve and then Ronald Reagan in the White House, the business cycle was allowed to play itself out with full force...

...Worker-owned firms have occasionally demonstrated that plants that management was ready to abandon could be run profitably...

...The overwhelming majority of studies shows that such tactics are very effective...

...Increasingly, in the crisisridden eighties, employers have also used the "human resources" model and their own narrow readings of Japanese management style to transform relations with workers at unionized workplaces, usually in the name of meeting competition in the market...

...These other interests, mainly from the community and the workforce, must have a substantial voice in major economic decisions...

...Rather than fantasize about a labor party or simply accept whatever comes down the party pike, the most productive action would be for labor and allies to form a bloc within the party to push a coherent strategy of economic democracy...

...in 1988 it was barely noticeable, although within its own narrowed ranks it ran a far better campaign for Dukakis than the Duke ran for himself...

...But the unions were becoming a smaller island in a larger, increasingly hostile—or indifferent— sea...

...But what they must recognize is that collective bargaining is only one part of it, and economic democracy must be guaranteed to workers whether they're in unions or not...

...A once-stable corporate world has been broken up by international competition, deregulation, greater mobility of capital, and a new approach to corporate organization (constant reshuffling of assets, outsourcing and subcontracting of work, increased use of temporary and part-time workers...

...On balance, they have served management far better than workers...

...All those movements, and labor too, would have benefited from closer ties with the unions...

...Unions cannot be expected to second-guess all corporate decisions or design their products for them, although the workers at Lucas Aerospace in Britain undertook a justly famous project to develop alternative products for their plant...

...Especially in the context of a profit squeeze and harsher international competition, that growing wage differential meant more businesses calculated that it paid to avoid or break unions...

...Even when they win elections, a third of the time unions typically do not get a first contract...

...In the face of employers that are increasingly global, any revived labor movement must strengthen such ties and reverse the disastrous course of AFL-CIO foreign policy...

...Where labor and groups like environmentalists or community plant-closing organizers now work together, labor was often hostile at first and slow to join...

...It is in labor's interests to support but also to redirect the competitive forces in the economy...

...Managers have had a field day for attacks on workers...

...By their very nature, unions attempt to challenge some of these market assumptions, but the U.S...

...Other unions have branched out, working with citizen public interest groups or community movements against plant closings...

...A small academic industry has emerged evaluating the reasons for this decline...

...The public has long associated union leaders with crime, corruption, and undemocratic practices...

...But without regaining members, power, and allies, labor is not likely to win this legislative battle, and it must first figure out how to organize successfully in a very hostile climate...

...They also have a clearer conception of what they want to change that would 326 • DISSENT h_l benefit both workers and, secondarily, the company...

...These "associational unions" would involve varied employee groupings in multilateral, continuing negotiation about the full range of issues from work life to corporate strategy...

...The market appears to render impersonal judgments beyond appeal...

...And labor leaders are more united as Democrats, although often divided on Democratic strategy...

...For many workers, especially the better educated, unions are valuable mainly as a way of providing a voice at work, not just letting some official do the talking...

...and small plants are easier to organize than large ones (although more costly per worker organized), as sociologist Michael Goldfield's studies show...

...Perhaps people no longer blame unions for economic problems and increasingly see the need for unions...

...Although some contracts, 328 • DISSENT Labor such as in auto, have shifted toward general employment security, they are usually too weak to provide protection...

...But the losses of union workers were not always the customers' gains, even by the narrowest calculation...

...Unions and community groups have organized protests around flagrant cases of "worker abuse," often mobilizing thousands even in small cities...

...Charles Heckscher, formerly with the Communications Workers, argues in The New Unionism: Employee Involvement in the Changing Corporation that unions should resemble associations so as to adapt to the new, participatory corporate style he calls "managerialism...

...Above all, this means organizing new members...

...business started seeking scapegoats...

...Much as labor must tailor its strategies to accommodate American culture, making guarantees for individual advancement and opportunities for autonomy at work central to its demands, it cannot avoid a direct confrontation with the assumptions of the free market and corporate capitalism...

...The flexibility and sociability of the team naturally appeal to many workers, but the team—like many other new joint programs—is often used as a way of getting workers to supervise each other on behalf of management goals...

...Success rates in union elections are higher in many parts of the South than in old midwestern strongholds...

...Other unions, such as the Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), are successfully relying on union workers as volunteer organizers who can talk workertoworker about what it means to have a union...

...Unions reeled before high unemployment, threatened bankruptcies, and pressures of international competition (worsened by Federal Reserve monetary policies used to break both inflation and the institutional protection of workers' incomes...

...With joint labor-management committees from the shop floor to the corporate level, occasional seats on boards of directors, increasing instances of access to corporate financial records, the unions that remain are helterskelter becoming part of the strategic management of corporations...

...But clearly labor lost the intellectual and moral position of liberal-left leadership it had during the New Deal epoch, as students, blacks, antiwar activists, women, and environmentalists captured the day...

...Many unions handle complaints in a bureaucratic fashion, often not involving the average worker, who typically does not file many grievances...

...Many labor leaders were more preoccupied with fighting radicals in their ranks than in saving a declining labor movement...

...The AFL-CIO report on "The Changing Situation of Workers and Their Unions" called for improved communication between unions and their members...

...Unions have been tempted—or pressured— to join in cooperative efforts with management in order to meet competition or to save jobs...

...Tens of thousands of workers have pledged to be ready to stand with other workers in need five times during each year...

...Was it because of a shift in jobs to the South, to women workers, or to smaller plants...

...second, developing a strategic vision of industrial democracy and a more cooperative, secure economy where competition is focused and markets viewed as useful economic tools...

...unions win a higher proportion of representation elections among service than manufacturing workers, but they have simply not made an effort in service industries commensurate with their growth...

...The economic boom was uneven, with agriculture and many industries, like coal and textiles, "sick" from overproduction and low prices long before the Crash...

...labor movement, has contributed greatly to labor's isolation from potential allies since the sixties...

...On balance organized labor is at least in as bad shape as it was in the 1920s...

...The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which often relies on big-budget, sophisticated television and print-advertising campaigns to organize state employees, crafted at Harvard University a one-on-one campaign in which workers organized for the goals of "selfrepresentation, power, and participation," according to organizer Kristine Rondeau...

...Labor joined big business in an aggressive foreign policy that was both anticommunist and, by extension, hostile to all Third World efforts at serious economic reform...

...Labor's strategic vision must go beyond the issues of voice and power and lay out the kind of economy it wants...

...Despite labor's support for civil rights, with greatly varying degrees of fervor, the black movement since the sixties has largely displaced labor as the central social movement in America...

...But more often, management calls the tune, and unions respond from weakness...

...Clearly, there are sharp differences between U.S...

...But as allied forces they are well positioned if they can adopt a common strategy of economic democracy, to claim that they represent the national interest...

...Was it because of a shift from manufacturing to services...

...It is easier for workers to confront the boss, say a Henry Ford, or even a big corporation, like GM, or "Giant Mother," than to argue with the dictates of the market...

...For example, workers are allowed to stop an auto assembly line when they have problems...

...Two unions have filed lawsuits against corporate raiders for illegally interfering with their expected economic advantage by putting their employers "in play" with speculators, leading to heavily leveraged buy-outs and subsequent job loss...

...Much will depend on economic circumstances out of labor's control...

...In 1987 only 17 percent of all wage and 324 • DISSENT Labor salaried workers belonged to unions, virtually halved from the high point of 1953...

...Unions in all industrial capitalist countries have faced hard times during the eighties, but no labor movement has suffered as dramatic a SUMMER • 1989 • 323 Labor loss of numbers, power and influence as U.S...

...And those who think that the strategies of the thirties will work again are probably half-right at best...

...On top of persisting divisions of race, ethnic-religious heritages, gender, and region, American workers were also increasingly separated by subcultures of occupation, education, and styles of consumption...

...Part of the struggle for economic democracy involves expanding worker rights, such as are provided by laws against discrimination or to protect safety and health, whether or not there is a union present...

...But unions must move away from their traditional bureaucracy and put more decision making directly into the hands of workers...

...Ironically, the most forceful public voice on behalf of labor interests comes from outside organized labor: Jesse Jackson, who discovered the working class after his 1984 race...

...Competition that pays subminimal wages, endangers workers' lives, provides no health insurance or pensions, or provides no transitional pay and training for displaced workers should be equally unacceptable, as Congress finally decided last year with regard to plant closings and mass layoffs made without warning...

...In the 1984 presidential campaign labor was derided as a special interest...

...The teams or QWL can offer workers a new voice, especially since most unions do not enable workers very much to express their views...

...SEIU has also joined forces with ACORN, a low-income community organizing network, to unionize the increasingly numerous, extremely ill-paid home care health workers...

...unions...

...Partly the task for unions is to see that such shop-floor creativity benefits the workers and is not turned against them...

...Let us consider a few experiments now underway in light of these goals: first, broadening the labor movement...

...that one-third of the decline results from the unions' failure to commit enough resources to organizing...

...Is there anything it is doing...

...It's easy to say yet also true that labor must become a movement again, challenging the overall social control of economic resources...

...Unions do have some control over how they will respond to the course the economy takes...

...One of the most promising efforts that combines rejuvenation of unions and expanding community alliances is the Jobs With Justice campaign, supported by about twenty liberal public service and industrial unions...

...First, United Auto Worker (UAW) concessions imposed in the Carter administration's Chrysler bailout, then Reagan's breaking of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers (PATCO) strike, set the tone for the decade...

...The net social benefits of this market blitz are probably negative...

...For example, Steelworkers top officials first fought plant-closing opponents in steelworking communities, only later joining with them...

...Likewise, employers should be barred from interfering in union organizing drives and required to negotiate contracts after a union is recognized...

...Instead, the auto companies were able to use market pressures to play local unions against each other to gain concessions...

...unions, for example, pressured Coca-Cola on behalf of Guatemalan SUMMER • 1989 331 Labor Coke workers occupying a plant and continue to protest jailing of South African union leaders...

...Military Keynesianism," indirectly using cold war military spending as an economic pump primer, replaced the left-wing Keynesian strategy of planning for full employment...

...Profit rates began to decline...

...To renew itself, labor must adapt to a changed world: shifting employer strategies for an increasingly global economy, with a more educated, more female, more fragmented workforce, and the greater likelihood of continued market turbulence rather than the relative calm of the twenty-five years after World War II...

...This involvement, along with the proliferation of QWL programs, has led to a fruitless debate about cooperative versus adversarial labor relations...

...Often unions find that QWL emerges as a challenge to the union for worker allegiances...

...Borrowing a page from the environmentalists, since cuddly mammals and sparkling lakes evoke more empathy than economically bludgeoned workers, labor strategist Tony Mazzocchi has argued for the creation of a Worker Superfund to provide university education and income support for displaced workers...

...Once competition rushed through these industries, workers found it hard to defend their past gains...

...Yet the public is of at least two minds, liking the general idea of unionism and feeling sympathy for workers but viewing less sympathetically the actuality of unionism and greatly distrusting union leaders...

...But over the past couple of decades many large corporations have also developed a new, nonunion style of "human resource management" that includes such features as an "open door" complaint system, teamwork, qualityofworklife programs, encouragement of individual initiative, and flexible work rules...

...economic superiority nurtured a revival of the always strong culture of competitive individualism...

...Within the collective bargaining relationship, the terms for cooperation can be set and enforced...

...There was a succession of hostile, anti-union Republican presidents, including one who had made his fame breaking a public-employee strike...

...There is obviously some overlap of this strategy with contemporary management emphasis on increasing flexibility and innovation...

...As defender of the public, unions must be seen not only as advocates of innovation, increasing productivity, and improved quality but also as the guarantors that workers and consumers will be the primary beneficiaries...

...If there is a deep economic crisis in the coming years, many Americans will rediscover the limits of individualism and the need for some kind of communal action...

...The most significant progress has been made with some multi-employer pension funds where union representatives have equal power with management, especially construction unions using their pensions to develop moderate-income housing or union-labor development projects in anti-union states...

...Yet it is important to remember that the decline started much earlier: In terms of union density (the percentage of the workforce in unions), U.S...

...Unlike most unions of the twenties, today's unions strongly believe government should help protect workers and regulate the economy...

...By contrast, Japanese unions are weak, fragmented, and company-oriented...

...Foreign Policy Changes Last April a group of liberal unions that had already broken with the AFL-CIO's right-wing foreign policy joined with a variety of other groups to protest U.S...

...In the long run, unions should shift from their traditional orientation of protecting property rights in jobs toward guaranteed employment for all workers without loss of pay when losing previous jobs...

...Many unions are also trying to influence the use of the huge pension funds their bargaining has won...

...Even when unions and the AFL-CIO have recognized their problems or developed new strategies, they have been slow to introduce them...

...First, unions, as in Canada, should be able to win recognition after simply showing membership cards for a majority...

...Although the AFL-CIO has seized upon the provision for its cold war foreign policy (in Nicaragua, for example) and some unions are tempted to use the provision for protectionist ends, the laws could instead be part of a new worldwide effort to strengthen unions...

...In what has now become standard for many unions, the UFCW, in organizing the notoriously anti-union meatpacker IBP, Inc., employed a many-faceted corporate campaign...

...Much of that already goes on at the shop-floor level, as companies finally try to tap worker expertise...

...Labor joined in the extirpation of the left, wiping out not only the Communists, who were frequently discredited by their own actions and even more so by their Soviet model, but also the shreds of socialist thought...

...Add to all this the recent "market for corporate control," otherwise known as the Wall Street roulette of takeovers and divestitures...

...As it develops, it will have to come to terms not only with the crises of the past few decades but also with a deep-seated American cultural history of competitive individualism and faith in the ideology of free enterprise...

...Black South African workers for 3M walked off the job in solidarity with Freehold, New Jersey, workers fighting a plant shutdown...

...But it said nothing about the desperate need to expand union democracy, end the tradition of union "one-party government," guarantee open debate, and make it easier for dissident groups to organize...

...Finally and reluctantly, top officialdom admitted that organized labor had flaws and needed new strategies...

...The relative absence of the left from American life was nothing new, but it is one powerful explanation for the weakness of U.S...

...One top UAW advocate of QWL reportedly lamented, "We started out trying to be like Sweden, and we ended up like Japan...

...It was an important, if modest, break in the insularity of the labor establishment...

...But restoring corporate profits through the exercise of power and redistribution of national income away from workers was the name of the game all along...

...But the rule of the market has hit labor with SUMMER • 1989 • 325 Labor a vengeance...

...For the cost of occasional disruptions, management ultimately can squeeze more out of its workforce...

...It is a strategic vision that can help broaden the base and increase the power of labor...

...and decades of prosperity and U.S...

...At the very least, labor must limit the range of decisions dictated through the market and focus the competitive market toward constructive ends...

...The flexibility of the teams can increase pressures through what Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter call "management by stress...

...Thomas A. Kochan, Harry C. Katz, and Robert McKersie, MIT industrial relations specialists, argue in The Transformation of American Industrial Relations that many companies in recent decades fled from or failed to invest in unionized locations, attempting to shift production to new sites where they would head off unionization with this new system...

...The union still bargained over the terms, but management was in the driver's seat...

...Others pursued a form of "welfare capitalism," a paternalistic scheme designed to block unions by providing some combination of higher wages, limited employee stock ownership, a measure of job security, discounted basic necessities (housing, medical care), and a personnel system that was more orderly (if still very authoritarian) than the erratic shopfloor autocracy of the foreman...

...The "divergence in the trajectories of union density across the border [of Canada and the United States] reflects the undermining of the social democratic forces unleashed by the Great Depression in the south [the U.S.] and their maintenance in the north [Canada...

...But the labor movement could make great progress by making full membership available to anyone who wanted to join and by organizing to represent workers at workplaces even where there isn't a pro-union majority (ideally with new legal recognition...

...The important question is not whether to cooperate but on what terms labor and management should cooperate and what power each side has...

...The AFL-CIO's hawkish foreign policy, which arrogantly tries to impose its conservative model of unionism everywhere despite the obvious failings of the U.S...

...Likewise, just as professional associations of public employees, teachers, and nurses have evolved into unions, new professional associations of technical, engineering, computer, and other highly skilled workers could also evolve toward a form of unionism...

...In Sweden unions have real political and industrial power and have long espoused a socialist philosophy...

...labor movement rarely made explicit intellectual assaults on these principles...

...An otherwise undemocratic Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union is scoring gains among low-wage service workers by bringing in young, highly motivated college graduates as organizers...

...It was a time of rampant individualistic materialism and wild financial speculation...

...Many of the biggest employers adopted an "American plan" to crush unions, create the open shop, and break strikes...

...Is there anything the labor movement can do to stop its downward slide...

...Even now most union efforts to reach out for allies involve the same few, important unions, often against the wishes of the top AFL-CIO leadership...

...But there is no reason why union dialogue and either conflict or cooperation with the company need compromise unions any more than acceptance of certain language on health and safety...

...Once the postwar economic boom began running out of steam in the late sixties and early seventies, the isolation of the labor movement caught up with it...

...policy in Central America and Southern Africa...

...But management usually seeks cooperation only when labor is weak...

...But labor must criticize, bargain, protest, or otherwise influence major decisions on investment, technology, or products that affect workers...

...But it also means "unionizing" existing pro forma members and developing greater solidarity among unions and their members...

...Unions, especially in the airline industry, have attempted to influence potential buyers or made offers themselves during corporate takeover bids...

...The biggest danger is that there can often be a conflict between what is good for workers in an industry as a whole and what is good for a particular company...

...Once chary of worker ownership, some unions, like the Steelworkers, have embraced the strategy more enthusiastically as the best way to save jobs...

...The Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) organizers in the South, like many others, have tried to build a sense of union within textile plants even before an election and have linked themselves with community civil rights efforts and the Jackson campaign...

...Labor's predominant focus on negotiating and administering contracts for organized workers delivered well, for a while...

...Few unions now have the resources to challenge corporate strategies, but the ability to do so is as important as having a research department that understands comparative contract language and wage schedules...

...At times a few liberal unions have joined groups like the Progressive Alliance and the Democratic Agenda as left pressure groups within the Democratic party, but they have never taken such actions seriously enough and certainly never organized a systematic base within the Democrats...

...They also attempt to temper the hardships imposed by market fluctuations, redistribute income (for example, between current wages and pensions), guarantee at least a minimal standard of living, and provide a measure of security...

...The loss of union members during the early eighties recession was predictable, but unions continued to lose ground at nearly the same rate during the long recovery of the mid-eighties...

...But the market is also a proxy for corporate power, and in any case its judgments are made according to certain value-laden assumptions...

...Labor has made less progress in developing a strategic vision...

...women are at least as willing to join unions as men...

...But there are seeds of a potential new labor movement within the decaying body of the old...

...But increasingly unions have realized that their collective bargaining efforts are superseded by struggles at other levels...

...The United States can suspend trade preferences for countries violating such rights...

...The most important symbolically were reports by the AFL-CIO Committee on the Evolution of Work in 1983 and 1985...

...They benefited from dominance of their largely unionized industries in the international market or a domestic market partly insulated from competition by, for example, the cost of shipping heavy products like steel and the American taste for gas-guzzler cars...

...Frequently, unions have demanded that management trim its own fat first, fought disinvestment from factories in order to head off plant closings, or showed management how it could save money without cutting wages or jobs, as the Machinists did at Eastern Airlines or the Clothing and Textile Workers at Xerox...

...Those who take comfort that organized labor somehow managed to bounce back must remember it was far from easy and involved a great upheaval within labor itself...

...Only a government labor-market policy, such as exists in Sweden, can provide workers with the security and retraining to be able to accept change...

...But labor and left political movements throughout the world, most of which have been far more successful in tempering capitalism, are now rethinking their old ideas on the role of the market...

...The crucial difference is that labor needs to engage that debate at a strategic level—for individual firms, industries, and the nation as a whole—in order to redefine the "restructuring" of the American economy in a way that maximizes benefits for workers and consumers...

...Government, labor, universities, and businesses can all be part of more cooperative endeavors to make such innovation continuous, but in order for that to succeed there must be security for workers and limits to the range of competition (focusing on ingenuity, quality, product price, satisfying customer needs, and reducing costs through technological innovation and worker creativity...

...labor has been losing ground for the past thirty-five years...

...Meanwhile, as the number of poorly paid jobs increases and the number of middle-income jobs shrinks, discontent will grow, giving unions new opportunities...

...the tilt of the law toward unionization was undermined by commonlaw traditions of the superiority of private property rights...

...Although the numbers do not yet reflect any great change, there is a new vitality in organizing...

...Can Labor Stop the Decline...

...Without greater internal democratization, unions cannot credibly claim to be champions of economic democracy, and many otherwise organizable workers will shun them...

...If management wants labor cooperation, it should agree to make traditional managerial prerogatives a matter of collective bargaining—and labor law needs to be changed to require that...

...And workers often don't have much of a voice within their own unions, let alone within the workplace...

...In its most benign strategy, management has tried to recruit workers to cooperate in increasing efficiency through innovations like quality-of-worklife (QWL) programs and work teams...

...Obviously that change undermined traditional union strongholds, but other countries, such as Canada, have gone through comparable or greater shifts, and their labor movements have grown or held their own...

...Despite some improvements, these new concepts usually are so restricted that they never deliver on the promise of a dramatically better worklife or tap the productivity gains that seem possible when workers have a real stake in their jobs...

...Others, like IBM, succeeded in keeping out unions altogether...

...For every story of hopeful beginnings, there are many more stories of union leaders asleep at the switch, uninspired bureaucrats hunkering down and watching their unions decline, wholesale capitulation to management demands, attempts at backroom deals with business executives, abuse of union resources to fight dissidents, lackluster or nonexistent organizing efforts, suppression of creativity from below, and simple-minded business as usual...

...Those who seek recent villains to blame for labor's troubles must come to terms with the deeper roots of the problems...

...But strong as the values of possessive individualism are, there has always been a countervailing, if weaker, tendency toward community and collective action...

...A few union organizers, discouraged by the ineffectiveness of strikes, have mobilized members for innovative, disruptive in-plant tactics or as part of corporate campaigns...

...Drop in Membership Overwhelmingly, recent studies conclude that growing employer power and resistance to unions is the major reason for the decline in union membership, accounting for one-fourth to half of the drop, according to economists Richard Freeman and James Medoff...

...The current supremacy of conservatives and business over unions is simply one chapter in an ongoing struggle...

...That surge was aided by new labor legislation and, even more, in the 1940s by wartime government encouragement of union recognition to keep war production flowing...

...unions today and those of the 1920s...

...Also, in The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States, Goldfield concluded that unions with a strong tradition of rank-and-file combativeness generally have fared better in their organizing than more conservative or autocratic unions...

...Fundamentally, labor needs two things: (1) a broader, more cohesive base of members and allies and (2) a clearer, more ambitious strategic vision...

...As unions tried to protect their members with cost-of-living adjustments, the difference between union and nonunion wages and benefits grew...

...Workers and their unions inevitably cooperate with management to varying degrees, simply by virtue of going to work or making contracts...

...Union membership declined sharply during that decade...

...Its basic conclusion is that the balance of power has steadily shifted toward business executives who, never happy with unions, increasingly acted to tame, avoid, and, where necessary, crush unions...

...SUMMER • 1989 • 329 Labor As a prescription for labor as a whole, Heckscher's ideas seem inappropriate—more a capitulation to management power than a way to create a distinctive, worker-oriented participation...

...In recent years there has also been new attention to labor rights in other countries, including provisions in four different laws governing trade and foreign investment...

...Several top union leaders worked closely with Jackson, and others privately cheered his willingness to speak out for workers, even if some loathed his foreign policy ideas...

...Predictably this restructuring through the force of the market is leading to greater economic inequality...

...Above all, most union leaders still devote more attention to controlling members than to inspiring and mobilizing them...

...In the 1920s critics of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) "pointed repeatedly to the same weaknesses: the emphasis on a craft structure, the ignoring of industrial unionism, jurisdictional disputes, inertia in organizing the unorganized, weak or tyrannical or corrupt leadership, philosophic individualism, fraternization with businessmen, and political impotence," observed the historian Irving Bernstein in The Lean Years...

...Some of the most hopeful trends include the mobilization of rank and filers to organize, links with other community organizers, the use of comprehensive corporate attacks to broaden support, emphasis on building a union through organizing before a representation strike or election rather than just signing up duespayers, and tailoring campaigns and activities to the diverse needs of varied workers...

...332 • DISSENT...

...Heckscher argues for a workplace bill of rights to due process (such as firing only for just cause), speech, association, and information (advance notice of closing being a minimal example...

...Increasingly unions have come to seem irrelevant to most people's lives, more ignored than vilified...

...the lack of such ties hurt both...

...Labor's complete dependence on the Democratic party, which has drifted away from even a fuzzy, mild social democratic alternative to unrestrained corporate capitalism, obviously has hurt immensely...

...If they cooperate without having their own agenda and a readiness to fight for their views, they may indeed hand management their own noose...

...There are small signals of potential change now, pointing in different directions...

...Unions obviously also need drastic labor law changes...

...Although little has been done so far, the AFL-CIO has recommended extending some form of membership to former union members or other interested workers at nonunion workplaces— the beginnings of a needed break between having a contract and union membership...

...When corporations were winning concessions from labor earlier in the decade, Mazzocchi, now secretary-treasurer of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, argued for a "campaign for corporate concessions...

...But that signal of stress can alert management to the need to fine-tune assignments for the maximum tolerable workloads...

...Unions had often taken advantage of imperfect markets, pushing up wages more easily in oligopolistic or regulated industries...

...Some unions, under pressure, signed cooperative agreements with companies to improve business efficiency, although Bernstein concluded the effort was a "failure" largely due to weakness...

...If unions fail to tackle more ambitious bargaining or other strategic interventions in corporate investment decisions, they risk rendering themselves marginal...

...Some union strategists insist that anything other than the old-style approach of "letting management manage and unions grieve (or strike)" inevitably compromises unions...