Union Busting, Past and Present

...The piecemeal provision of health care left many people out, creating a gulf between the unionized and the unorganized...

...True to their history, they blamed workers and unions for their woes...

...The primary motivation of the Wagner Act was to establish industrial peace (secondarily to prevent the downward spiral in wages that worsened depressions...

...Loaded with debt, forced into extreme shortterm strategies, takeover companies typically slashed wages, smashed unions, and shut down or spun off unwanted businesses...

...The Tribune Company lost $400 million in its crusade to break New York Daily News unions, according to one analysis, $100 million more than the cost of a new printing plant that might have made the paper profitable and the jobs secure...

...Later the company's chairman testified on behalf of an anti-strikebreaker bill, arguing that using strikebreakers permanently poisoned labor relations, harming the company's long-term viability...

...Then, as automation increased, businesses tried to operate with skeletal crews of management, and one anti-union academic concluded from a study of businesses during strikes that replacement workers were not even essential...

...This was partly because individualistic employers were willing to band together, especially after the turn of the century, to combat unions but rarely to negotiate with them on an industry-wide basis...

...Unions had been strongest in these relatively noncompetitive—either regulated or oligopolistic —areas of the economy...

...Concerned that it had given up too much control over the workplace during the war and wary about both prospects for the postwar economy and labor radicalism, corporate management tried to reassert control not just in the workplace but in politics...

...But just as corporations that had no need for concessions took advantage of the climate to demand concessions from workers, so private employers were now encouraged to break strikes by hiring "permanent replacements...

...During the past decade public approval of unions rose slightly, while public opinion of business, despite all the Reagan propaganda, slumped...

...The company also took on heavy debt to buy one of its competitors...

...The limited accommodation of some companies in the early postwar years was at most tactical...

...Instead of a social compact for economic renewal, there was a massive effort—directly and indirectly —to shift the costs of adjustment onto workers...

...Given little attention at the time, that decision came back to haunt labor in the 1980s...

...The most important managerial victory was passage in 1947 of the Taft-Hartley Act...

...Finally, with the New Deal of the 1930s, workers won the right to organize and act collectively...

...America's liberal tradition (including early suffrage for most white male workers), the absence of feudal remnants, the relative hostility to a strong state, and the republican ethos of equality among citizen artisans and farmers all contributed to the creation of an individualistic culture...

...In the eighties, management opposition to organizing increased, but the biggest change was the dramatic decline in the number of union representation elections held—from around seven thousand to eight thousand per year in the seventies to around three thousand to four thousand in the eighties...

...Freeman and Medoff also reported that unionized firms are more productive, partly because workers quit less frequently, even though unions do reduce corporate profits...

...Even if conflicts of labor and capital are seen as endemic to capitalism, there are nevertheless distinct national styles to both capitalism and its battles with labor...

...For some years after World War II there was a consensus among labor leaders and academics that labor relations had "matured...

...Management accepted unions in principle, while vigorously fighting them over contract issues...

...After World War II many businesses did not even attempt to operate during strikes...

...They institute "quality circles," open-door policies, and peer-review boards for discipline...

...Yet it is fair to say that despite the fashionable talk about cooperation, the dominant corporate agenda is avoidance of unions, by genteel means if possible, by brutal means if necessary...

...Finally, managers would plead, we know we've made mistakes, give us another chance...

...Contrary to popular imagery, one of the least fertile places for a union to try to organize now would be a large factory in the Northeast with a mainly white male work force...

...labor law— fundamentally undermined the law's unconditioned right of workers to decide if they wanted a union...

...By 1987 the company was again very profitable, but still proposed to the union a drastic reorganization of work to boost productivity...

...Workers reluctantly decided to strike because they did not want to abandon their fellow workers in Mobile...

...But the price exacted under the War Labor Board, which set the precedent for postwar labor relations, was a system of workplace grievance settlement that reduced the direct role of workers and of collective action...

...Many managers are also trying to kill unions with kindness: when unionization threatens, they solicit worker opinions and beg workers to "give us another chance...

...Enlightened management employed "welfare capitalism," discouraging unionism with tactics ranging from creating "a corporate family" to sharing profits...

...There are no legal penalties, simply remediation, such as reinstatement of a fired union supporter with partial back pay...

...Employers had used permanent replacements — "scabs," to unionists—in the postwar era mainly in the South and in situations where unions were weak...

...Anticommunist hysteria and the postwar economic boom undergirded this battle to reassert corporate capital as the goose that could lay its golden eggs only if granted the untrammeled right to manage...

...In the mid eighties, just under half the managers in one survey said their primary labor relations goal was to be free of unions...

...corporations...

...Many high-tech firms, such as Apple and IBM, which had generated employee loyalty with promises of job security, have cut back their work forces...

...Whether certain forms of cooperation are desirable is an open question, but paradoxically quality circles and similar cooperative devices are more common in unionized workplaces than in nonunion...

...in east Georgia is unusual only in the tenacity and success of the workers...

...With certain exceptions such as organization of public employees, the labor movement's expansion was stalled...

...But that would come long after the union was defeated...

...Despite all the talk of cooperation, American management styles foster extremely high levels of distrust...

...Organizers are neglected...

...In another case a union organized a worksite of a Colorado high-tech company, American Laser...

...This gave business added financial incentive to do what they ideologically wished to do: crush the unions...

...After which could come the question: Which do you want...

...At its peak, collective bargaining may have affected about half the work force, but in most European countries 80 to 90 percent of workers were covered, even if smaller percentages actually belonged to unions...

...Out of some 7,000 union staff in California, one unpublished report concluded, only 112 were organizers...

...Under the banner of the assumed but unlegislated rights of private property, it took away the right that Congress had just enacted in law —the right of workers to act collectively without being fired...

...These new big businesses had unusually abundant resources to fight unions...

...If the Democrats had been willing and able to create a new sense of national purpose, the downward drift of labor might have been slowed...

...Employers could legally post leaflets with two pictures of an anonymous factory: one labeled "before the union" might have a full parking lot, another labeled "after" might have an empty lot...

...Is management really more hostile now than in the past...

...Management would pose outrageous demands or provoke workers—such as Pittston's decision to drop health care for the company's retirees or the New York Daily News's discipline of a sitting worker—to precipitate a strike...

...Often, however, companies decided that breaking the law to defeat a union was worth the small price...

...At the national level, unions commit only from about 3 percent to at most 8 percent of their budgets for organizing, one insider estimates...

...The current recession will be worse and the recovery weaker as a result of the continued depression of consumer buying power...

...Yet even in the 1920s unions were stronger than in the 1980s...

...Management, like labor, is not monolithic: the history, culture, market conditions, and technological options of different corporations contribute to diverse ways of dealing with unions...

...In both cases, the individualistic culture of American business undergirded corporate opposition to the idea of either an energy policy or an industrial policy...

...economy underwent repeated shocks, including the OPEC oil price hikes and a wave of foreign competition...

...During World War I labor gained government support and consequently made gains because of its support for the war effort, but the brief accord was shattered by a multifaceted attack on unions...

...Almost from the beginning the courts began asserting the primacy of vague common-law rights of private property over the new collective rights of workers...

...Although strike activity fell to a record low, a General Accounting Office study concluded that businesses threatened to use "permanent replacements" in one-third of all strikes and actually used them in one-sixth of all strikes...

...Mean" hardly does justice to management tactics at Eastern Airlines, Pittston Coal, Greyhound, Phelps Dodge, the New York Daily News, International Paper, and many other industrial battlegrounds...

...Other surveys showed that in 1977 employers preferred constructive bargaining to union avoidance by two to one...

...Here is one example of such judicial subversion of labor's new rights: Shortly after the Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act, it casually observed in the case of Mackay Radio & Telegraph Co...

...but the reverse was true by 1985...

...American individualism also gave employers an ideological tool against unionism, as business historian Sanford Jacoby argues in a perceptive essay, "American Exceptionalism Revisited: The Importance of Management...

...Organized labor has at its disposal roughly thirtyfive thousand staff workers and $4 billion a WINTER • 1992 • 77 Onion Busting year...

...Many unions massively lost members in the eighties, but overall union dues income rose in real terms...

...What kind of victory do American managers win by destroying unions...

...The Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers (ACTWU) mobilized political support and conducted a wide-ranging pressure campaign to force the company finally to sign a contract three years later...

...Even corporations like General Motors and General Electric, which seemed willing to live with unions, sought to locate new factories in the Sunbelt—or overseas—to avoid unions...

...In either case, a coordinated public policy might have cushioned the blows by reducing energy costs through aggressive conservation or by refurbishing America's industrial base...

...Two years after walking out, the strikers called off their battle and offered to return to work...

...Both devastated the traditional core of union manufacturing strength through demands for concessions, plant closings, overseas flight of capital, and massive layoffs...

...Businesses used scabs more frequently in the 1980s than they had in the 1920s and at about the same rate as in the early decades of the century, although much less than in the 1880s...

...The inflation of the seventies, which deeply cut into nonunion incomes, increased the divergence in real labor costs between union and nonunion operations...

...Increasingly they pay a heavy price even in apparent victory: Eastern destroyed itself as well as its union while defaulting on several hundred million dollars owed to creditors...

...Even to the extent that this may be true, the language of consumer choice obscures, as it always does, the power relationships and history underlying these supposed freely expressed market preferences...

...This directly pitted unions against employers obsessed with control...

...Not every management makes the same strategic choice...

...As a description of the past decade, that's a grand understatement...

...But there is still a long way to go...

...When a plant in Mobile, Alabama resisted the work-rule changes, the company locked out the workers and operated with temporary replacements provided by B.E...

...The hightech firms may offer exercise programs, day care, and flexible work environments, especially for technical and professional employees...

...The NLRB, which took a markedly antilabor turn under Reagan, could not keep pace, and delays in processing charges grew, lengthening in the eighties to an average of two years...

...One of the most promising organizing prospects would be a small service establishment in the South or Southwest with mainly women or African-American workers...

...The War Labor Board encouraged unions to divert wage demands into a new area of benefits...

...But management adamantly insisted on its proposals...

...From 70 to 80 percent of representation elections in the forties and fifties, union victory 76 • DISSENT Onion Busting rates steadily dropped until the late seventies, when they bottomed out at about a 47 percent success rate that has remained fairly stable...

...K. was also a looming presence at Jay during those negotiations, conveying the threat of strikebreakers...

...In union representation elections in 1980, Professor Paul Weiler estimated, roughly one in every twenty pro-union workers was fired illegally...

...Shortly after they struck, IP began hiring replacements, mainly brought in from out of state...

...The bill failed and with it the illusion of a labor-management accord...

...So argued believers in "industrial pluralism...

...Richard Freeman and James Medoff of Harvard (seconded by Michael Goldfield of Cornell) estimate that from one-fourth to one-half the decline in union victories stems from increased management resistance...

...The union was decertified at two other IP mills where strikebreakers were used, but not yet at Jay because of charges pending before the NLRB...

...Despite their numbers, Senate Democrats and President Jimmy Carter were unable to stop a Republican filibuster...

...by 1985 one in ten pro-union workers was illegally discharged...

...When the union pursued him, he threatened to shut down the Idaho plant...

...But as economic pressures mount, employers may increasingly jettison some of the "positive labor relations" that served to keep unions out...

...University of Wisconsin professor of industrial relations Craig Olson estimates that employers have reverted to the methods of the era before the National Labor Relations Act...

...In the 1920s the courts enacted labor law by injunction, breaking strikes and unions...

...Yet even in victory the seeds of future reversals were sown...

...Such faked contriteness could work wonders...

...Internal union political power, however, comes from servicing existing members and winning their support, not from organizing new members...

...Is it all Ronald Reagan's fault...

...The number of unfair labor practices charged to employers in elections—and the proportion upheld by the National Labor Relations Board—soared from the late fifties to the eighties, and the average number of employer unfair labor practices per election continued to rise in the eighties...

...Another major Maine employer, WINTER • 1992 • 79 Union Busting Bath Iron Works, had used strikebreakers to impose a two-tier contract a few years earlier...

...The security forces—such as Wackenhut or the ominous-sounding Nuckols and Associates—frequently attempted to provoke violence in front of their video recorders in order to get injunctions...

...It is also a consequence of management's successful campaign to curtail, then finally crush, the rights of workers...

...Thus managerial individualism led to the creation of a popular culture, mass politics, and legal system that undermined unionism in favor of unrestrained property rights...

...After a strong organizing effort that started with a secret blitz of workers and continued with a communityoriented campaign, the workers voted for union representation in 1988 by a strong margin...

...In the 1990s, the question is whether unions have it in them to persuade the American public that they have such a positive role to play...

...managers were unwilling to admit that their own shortcomings—inadequate research and development, poor design, outmoded manufacturing techniques, wasteful management, and growing strategic shortsightedness — were fundamental problems of American business...

...Starting with the end of Carter's regime, inflation was reined in by policies that produced both deep recession and a strong dollar...

...Most companies simply wanted to lower labor costs by lowering wages...

...In the eighties at least three additional major economic pressures developed, all of them consequences in part of the laissez-faire ideology of American business...

...Yet management's role in the union representation election—a complicated feature unique to U.S...

...During the seventies, the U.S...

...These judicial assumptions, legal scholar James Atleson has argued, include the overriding importance of continued production, the need to control workers to prevent irresponsible action, and deference of workers to management's rights to run the workplace...

...For unions the 1980s were like the 1920s, a time of management assault, organizational collapse, proliferation of corporate alternatives, and a hostile culture enamored of "freemarket" greed...

...Therefore top executives must weed out management troublemakers...

...Surveys consistently show that from 60 to 75 percent of nonunion workers say they would be unlikely to vote for a union...

...Although reliable statistics aren't available, it appears that employers dramatically increased their use of both "permanent replacements" and lockouts (during which, thanks to a 1986 Supreme Court ruling, employers could use temporary replacements...

...Unions would have to counter the current management ethos, which deities the market, with an alternative vision of social responsibility...

...In 1978, with a Democratic president and Congress, labor leaders tried to pass a mild reform of labor laws that would have tempered some of the most egregious management opposition to organizing...

...Workers, especially unionized workers, often have a longer term stake in a company's well-being than managers or even stockholders...

...They were engaged in a complex struggle for moral authority, not just a contest for power," observes historian Howell John Harris in The Right to Manage...

...Then they would rush in strikebreakers, often provided by antilabor consultants and defended by a new generation of Pinkertonstyle guards...

...Employers turned their individualism loose on each other in the decades after the Civil War, until the great trusts were formed to control competition...

...Even when unions win, it is often at great cost...

...Did unions bring the recent disasters upon themselves...

...Then in the early eighties the company lost overseas markets because of the strong dollar...

...Union membership soared from nine to fifteen million...

...That act gave managers the right to persuade their employees not to join unions and took from unions many essential weapons, including the secondary boycott, a powerful tool for building labor solidarity...

...Academics have debated the fine points heatedly, but the conclusion seems clear: even management opposition that is legal works effectively to reduce the likelihood of unions' winning representation elections...

...The anarchic attempt by corporations to shift costs rather than increase productivity met with union resistance and contractual cost-of-living adjustment clauses...

...And despite hard times for unions throughout the industrial world, in no other advanced industrial country—with the partial exception of Margaret Thatcher's Britain— have corporate executives been as hostile to unions as in the United States...

...A new anti-union chief executive took over, determined to cut labor costs and "increase flexibility...

...As Thomas Kochan, Harry Katz, and Robert McKersie concluded in The Transformation of American Industrial Relations, the new, more flexible organization of work effectively immunized factories against unionization...

...Workers were willing to cooperate, despite anticipated loss of jobs and income, if they had a voice in administering the new plan...

...The good news is that attacks on workers and unions may have begun to backfire...

...The bureaucratic, conservative character of most unions that makes them unwilling or unable to act now that their very existence is threatened is not simply a result of their internal evolution...

...By law management couldn't threaten to shut down the plant if they voted for a union, but the new wave of anti-union consultants showed how to make that threat without violating the letter of the law...

...High Cost to Union Success The recent experience of six hundred predominately black women workers at two textile fabricating factories of S. Lichtenberg & Co...

...Still, despite the great difficulties in organizing, there is no real excuse for organized labor's pathetic record...

...It will not be an easy battle to win...

...Then the takeover craze, a frenzied expression of the anarchic and predatory American business ideology, was fostered by a new era of financial unregulation...

...In the sixties and, especially, the seventies, employers took advantage of their new rights to campaign among workers against unions...

...Unions simply use their money badly...

...Decentralized bargaining in the United States exposed an employer who was unionized to a competitive disadvantage with 74 • DISSENT Onion Busting an unorganized competitor, giving added incentive to resist unions...

...In the 1980s, nearly four-fifths of all strikes, by some estimates, were conducted to defend health insurance...

...Violence erupted, with both strikers and scabs implicated...

...Although a few unions, such as the Service Employees, AFSCME (public workers), Food and Commercial Workers, and ACTWU, have vigorous organizing efforts and increasingly avoid the cumbersome NLRB election process, most unions have surrendered the field...

...Perhaps, union critics argue, labor's problem is not that employers fight back but that workers simply don't want unions...

...K., a Southern construction firm that specializes in strikebreaking...

...Only a few business leaders, notably in the National Civic Federation, were willing to incorporate labor into the new economic order—as a junior partner...

...To their shock, most of the blue-chip unionized corporations from the Business Roundtable and the LaborManagement Group—supposedly favoring "industrial pluralism" —joined with anti-union managers to oppose the reform...

...Under the "industrial pluralism" model, employers were viewed as a corporate "person" exercising free speech...

...Yet as one union organizer reports, in every representation drive in New England since 1987, employers have raised the specter of Jay to dissuade workers from joining the union...

...The winds of deregulation began to blow in the seventies as well, subjecting industries like trucking, telecommunications, and airlines to new competition, much as international trade was battering manufacturing industries like auto that had long been buffered from international competition...

...Especially in the era after the Civil War, businessmen succeeded in casting entrepreneurs as the embodiment of American liberty...

...Management Rebounds After the War After the war, management struck back...

...With the conventional strike failing, the union brought in labor consultant Ray Rogers to conduct a "corporate campaign" against IP...

...Linked with strong beliefs in the rights of property, untempered by older aristocratic convictions about the responsibilities of the wealthy to the social whole, and with a celebration of the "free market," this individualistic culture helped to foster an extremely hostile view of unions...

...Again during World War II the government supported unions in exchange for cooperation in the war effort...

...But management refused to bargain, fired or permanently laid off nearly two hundred prounion workers, and violated a wide range of federal employment and safety laws...

...Are the American people simply unsympathetic to unions...

...Are U.S...

...Historians have repeatedly emphasized the unusual virulence of American management's resistance to unions and how the establishment of both unions and the welfare state was relatively late and weak in the United States...

...80 • DISSENT...

...Compared to other industrial countries, our provision of social welfare was miserly...

...A great many employers in the United States are determined to use whatever techniques they can not only to prevent union organization but also to destroy existing unions...

...While some corporations fought back with force, others, such as Sears Roebuck, followed the advice of Nathan Shefferman, the progenitor of the contemporary school of antilabor consultants, who insisted that bad supervisors invite unionism...

...Economists Bennett Harrison and Maryellen Kelley of Carnegie Mellon University report that in the metalworking industry "non-union workplaces with joint labor-management problem-solving committees are significantly less efficient and less likely to provide job security than is a traditional union-based system...

...Many European labor movements, by contrast, evolved a pattern of high-level negotiation with employer federations that permitted both more managerial flexibility in local plants and universal protection for workers...

...Increasingly bureaucratized unions abandoned old notions of class struggle in favor of routine grievance procedures and collective bargaining...

...The owner promptly shut down the plant and moved to Idaho...

...One consequence of this fragmented pattern of organizing and bargaining is that American unions came to concentrate mainly on control of jobs and work rules...

...that employers could hire people to permanently replace strikers in order to maintain production...

...Despite the later rise of industrial unionism and forms of industry-wide bargaining, the fragmented model continued to dominate American unionism...

...American workers, like those in Europe, organized their first unions in spite of conspiracy laws, court injunctions, private armies and spies, and at times the armed might of the government...

...Thus one of the New Deal macroeconomic goals of the Wagner Act has been undercut...

...Employers were able, Jacoby writes, "to construct a growth coalition around the idea that business was a goose whose golden eggs would be laid only if the goose was left to labor undisturbed...

...Whether or not this description of the "mature" labor accord with capital was ever true, it is not now...

...The Paperworkers agreed to concessions in exchange for an understanding that the company would not cut wages or attack the union itself...

...The evisceration of organized labor has removed a check against the tendencies to inequality and depression of wages in recessions...

...Workers who find that management's promise of participation is not delivered may begin to look positively at unions...

...When Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, he signaled the legitimacy of extreme tactics toward unions and strikers...

...Julius Getman, a University of Texas law professor who studied the Jay strike, said there had been a real possibility of cooperation at the Jay mill before the strike, but "the possibility of a more complete victory . . . made the company unwilling to take the necessary steps...

...The lesson seemed clear: if the government had a coherent national goal (fighting a war, ending a depression), and if labor disruption posed a credible threat, unions could gain protection...

...Consultants, advising management in about 85 percent of all representation elections in the early eighties, developed a standard litany that the frontline supervisors delivered as they talked to workers: unions just want your dues, always are out on strike, and provoke violence...

...One WINTER • 1992 • 75 Union Busting early and crucial battle involved blocking the right of foremen and supervisors to organize into their own unions...

...The medical and business establishment's campaign against "socialized medicine" stymied efforts to expand the New Deal's welfare state to provide health care for all...

...Unions were forced to win what elsewhere was universally assured through collective bargaining, thus contributing to the much higher incidence of strikes in the United States...

...Many corporations were willing to accommodate bargaining with unions, but none admitted any alternative to the hierarchical, authoritarian organization of business...

...Making Workers Pay U.S...

...John Sheridan, a veteran union buster, told of one recent close representation election that a union with impressive assets in the bank lost in part because it was unwilling to spend the money for an airplane ticket for the organizer to revisit the worksite and rally the troops before balloting...

...Contemporary management hostility to unions not only manifests itself over the picket line but also through popular culture, the law, and politics...

...If they had a stronger strategic voice, they might temper the ruinous short-term outlook of many U.S...

...Anti-union Popular Culture The roots of this "American exceptionalism" on the part of management run deep, forming the complement to—and a formative influence WINTER • 1992 • 73 Union Busting on—the much more analyzed "exceptionalism" of American working-class consciousness...

...On the flip side, however, if the 25 to 40 percent who would vote for a union now had one, unions would have a record membership...

...The union won again, and he moved again, this time hiring only Laotian workers...

...Scott Paper explicitly rejected IP's approach, choosing to build labor-management cooperation...

...It was such an uneconomic, ideologically inspired strategy that the company's major shareholder charged the chief executive with failing his fiduciary responsibility to stockholders...

...Anti-union analysts argue that unions are in trouble because they do a bad job of marketing a defective and outdated product that nobody wants to buy anymore...

...Managers provoked these strikes and then brought in "permanent replacements" to break both the strike and the union...

...The National Commission on Skills of the American Work Force found only one in twenty companies planned to compete in the global market by improving quality and productivity...

...The powerful myth of the "self-made man" legitimated both the business owner's total control over his enterprise and the freedom of laissez-faire competition...

...One study concluded that unions were likely to win around three-fifths of elections when there is no or light opposition, less than a third against an intense campaign, and less than one-tenth when management breaks the law...

...The Paperworkers Union and management bargained hard, but the union was accepted...

...Even before this dramatic drop-off, estimates are that a third of the decline in union organizing success resulted from decreased union organizing activity...

...The company offered to negotiate if the wide-ranging attack were called off, but when the union did so, the company refused to bargain on bringing back the strikers...

...The evidence is that violations are widespread...

...Unlike private employees, the controllers were not under the 78 • DISSENT Onion Busting National Labor Relations Act and had no protected right to strike (although previous presidents had not fired federal strikers...

...American business culture defines workers and, by extension, unions as the enemy with an ideological passion that surpasses cold economic calculation...

...International Paper's (IP) mill in Jay, Maine, had been organized since the early part of the century...

...B.E...

...Many businesses, especially new high-tech firms (IBM is the prototype) and those with few unionized worksites, developed a sophisticated nonunion strategy...

...Illegal tactics, especially firing pro-union workers, work better but may not be needed...

...economy in the global market...

...Ironically, as a result of labor's diminished efforts, the business of antilabor consultants has dropped off sharply in the eighties...

...While even the early American Federation of Labor (AFL), along with more militant latenineteenthcentury labor movements, envisioned a new cooperative commonwealth, the AFL eventually pursued a more fragmented, decentralized, job-oriented unionism...

...It shapes—and distorts—the conduct of business itself, undermining the competitive character of the U.S...

...But in the eighties almost all unions were weak...

...employers different from those in other countries...