September 7, 1998

Unions, Growing Bolder, No Longer Shun Strikes

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By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

The recent strikes at Northwest Airlines, General Motors, Bell Atlantic and US West represent the biggest surge in major walkouts in years and, industrial relations experts say, point to a new aggressiveness on the part of the nation's labor unions.

For years unions were so discouraged by several disastrous strikes, most notably the Caterpillar and the air controllers' strikes, that they had generally shunned large-scale walkouts. And even though union membership rolls are slipping and the slowing economy threatens workers, unions have grown bolder, labor experts say, because of the tight labor market, more combative union leadership and the teamsters' gains in last year's UPS strike.

In 1996, the number of strikes nationwide had fallen to its lowest level in 50 years, 374, before rising to 394 last year. Even before the prominent strikes of this summer, the number of work stoppages increased this year, rising to 226 in the first six months from 214 the first six months of last year, according to the Bureau of National Affairs.

Even more significant for labor, striking unions have emerged more successful than in recent years, pressuring US West, for instance, to scale back mandatory overtime and Bell Atlantic to stop making most new jobs nonunion.

"All this represents a more confident and aggressive labor movement," said Harley Shaiken, a professor of industrial relations at the University of California at Berkeley. "In the 1980s, so many highly visible, pivotal strikes ended somewhere between disaster and debacle, but what we've seen this year is a number of important successes for unions. It might not be time to crack out the champagne bottles, but it's probably time for a couple of cold beers on Labor Day to celebrate what's taken place."

But many business leaders assert that the recent eruption of strikes stems not from an emboldened labor movement, but from coincidence -- many collective bargaining agreements in industries with volatile labor relations have expired this summer.

"I don't see a trend," said Patrick Cleary, vice president for human resources policy at the National Association of Manufacturers. "I don't get a sense of any change in the national Zeitgeist."

But one cause for the surge in strikes is that many corporations continue to demand concessions. For instance, the 34,000 workers at US West went on strike after the company insisted on replacing the across-the-board pay increases that unions favor with a pay-for-performance system, which would give management total discretion over each worker's raises -- an idea abhorred by unions. And the General Motors strike began after the company refused to make good on promises to invest $300 million in a metal-stamping plant in Flint, Mich.

"All of these strikes show unions' willingness to fight back more," said Richard Hurd, a professor of labor relations at Cornell University. "But it's not clear to me whether these strikes are caused by newfound aggressiveness on the part of unions or newfound aggressiveness on the part of employers."

John Sweeney, the president of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations, attributes the increase in strikes to both sides: greater labor confidence and to management hardheadedness. He said it was understandable that workers opt to strike when many corporations are making record profits and union members feel they are not getting their fair share of the expanding pie.

Sweeney called the current Northwest Airlines pilots' strike an example of this, asserting that the airline had made a stingy offer to its 6,200 pilots despite the company's booming profits and soaring executive pay. But the airline maintains that it cannot meet the pilots' demands, which management says would make them the nation's highest-paid pilots.

"What we're seeing is a complete lack of respect for workers, for the jobs they do," Sweeney said in a telephone interview with reporters. "We're seeing so many examples of how insensitive corporate America can be to their workers."

Labor leaders also note that workers' wages are finally climbing faster than inflation, after years of lagging behind. Despite recent wage gains, the average worker's inflation-adjusted wages remain 3 percent below 1989 levels.

But they fear that the slowing economy and reeling stock market will soon cause corporate America to clamp down on wage increases.

"If there is an economic slowdown or a recession, then wages won't fully recover to where they were in 1989," said Lawrence Mishel, research director of the Economic Policy Institute, a union-backed research center.

Despite the unions' new aggressiveness and their recent strike successes, labor is still faced with a declining membership.

There were victories in recruitment of new members, like organizing 19,000 passenger-service workers at United Airlines. So far, however, labor has fallen short of the goal Sweeney set upon becoming elected president of the AFL-CIO nearly three years ago: to increase the labor federation's membership of 13 million by 3 percent a year.

Nonetheless, Sweeney predicts that the labor movement will be adding, not losing, members overall within a year or two largely because unions are pumping much more money and manpower into organizing.

Unions now represent 14 percent of all workers, down from 35 percent in the 1950s, and Sweeney has repeatedly warned that unless labor recruits millions of workers, it risks fading into irrelevance and losing its bargaining clout. Under him, the AFL-CIO has allocated $20 million a year for organizing, up from $2.5 million before he was elected.

The federation says that unions recruited nearly 400,000 new members last year, but nonetheless, union membership is down by more than 200,000 since early 1996, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The recruitment gains have been outweighed by membership losses caused by layoffs, plant closings and other factors.

Organizing faces other problems. The highly publicized campaign to unionize 20,000 strawberry workers in California has made little headway largely because of fierce employer opposition. And the teamsters' financial scandals and unions' tradition of holding lavish conventions in places like Hawaii have hardly helped labor burnish its image or woo new members.

"They're up against some pretty daunting challenges," said Cleary of the manufacturers association. "You look at where the new jobs are -- data base administration, systems analysts -- and unions have not had much luck penetrating those occupations. And if you look where the job growth is geographically -- in the South and Southwest -- these are areas where labor hasn't had great success."

Nonetheless, Sweeney predicts that the labor movement will be adding, not losing, members overall within a year or two largely because unions are pumping much more money and manpower into organizing. He boasted that eight unions had membership growth of at least 3 percent last year, but that's a small fraction of the 70-plus unions in the federation. He also boasted that a handful of unions, like the Service Employees International, have met his goal of devoting 30 percent of their budget to organizing.

But many labor experts are unimpressed. "My assessment is that union organizing efforts have only been modestly successful," said Cornell's Hurd. "There's not a tremendously significant movement building for a wholehearted shift in commitment to organizing. You can't blame Sweeney. The bottom line is decisions have to be made by people in individual unions, and in most of those unions, hard decisions are not being made."