Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 1, 1990 TAG: 9003280580
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: BUS-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By PETER T. KILBORN THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
When 6,300 drivers for the Greyhound Corp. abandoned their buses earlier last month, management had 700 new recruits on hand to drive its fleet and 900 more in training.
Thousands of new pilots, mechanics and flight attendants who have been assured careers with Eastern are keeping the airline aloft.
And long after the end of the strikes in which they were hired, thousands of new workers remain on the job at the International Paper Co., the Boise Cascade Corp., the Phelps Dodge Corp. and at Continental Airlines.
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations has made prohibition of replacement workers its No. 1 labor law goal this year.
But legislation in Congress prohibiting such workers, introduced last month by Sen. Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio and Rep. William Clay of Missouri, both Democrats, faces tough going and a probable veto by President Bush if Congress should pass the bills.
High court weighs in
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has agreed to decide a case that could strengthen management's hand in using replacement workers to thwart unions.
The case involves a request by a small company in Texas that the National Labor Relations Board presume that permanent replacement workers oppose unions, thus expediting the company's effort to banish the union.
Labor experts maintain that management's wide use of permanent replacements has upset the symmetry that has been a tradition of labor disputes.
On the one hand, management has said it has a right to lock workers out at the risk of losing profits; on the other, labor has said it can withhold its services at the risk of losing income.
"The balance has shifted," said Mark Bernardo, director of the Labor Law Action Center at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. "Labor's trump card in a dispute, the strike, is no longer trump."
Robert Baptiste, a Washington attorney for labor unions, said that in a strike "there was always a sense that people would eventually say, `Enough, let's sit down and get serious.' " But he added, "Now, companies just want to get rid of unions."
One reason companies think that goal is possible is the lesson they drew from the illegal strike of 11,500 federal air traffic controllers in August 1981, seven months into Ronald Reagan's first term as president.
After the striking controllers defied a back-to-work order, Reagan dismissed them and filled their jobs with permanent replacements. The union collapsed.
The government's success in keeping the air traffic system working impressed many unionized companies.
"Reagan made it respectable to bust unions," Baptiste said.
Gary Burtless, a labor economist at the Brookings Institution, said Reagan emboldened management to risk the strain to its business of taking on less experienced workers.
"The fact that the president was able to keep the air traffic system going indicated that there was a lot more scope for replacing workers than people imagined," Burtless said. "If you can replace air traffic controllers you can certainly replace bus drivers."
Risks of replacements
The permanent replacements, often recruited from the ranks of the unemployed or from low-paid employees of other businesses, are a variation on the temporary substitutes vilified by trade unionists as "scabs" or "strikebreakers" but nevertheless regarded as a part of management's legitimate arsenal.
Temporary replacements leave at the end of a strike, but permanent replacements are assured the strikers' jobs. After a strike, the law allows strikers first claim on their old jobs, but only if replacements vacate them.
Many companies still shun permanent replacements, in part because they run some risk in using them.
Even if they decide they can get by without the expertise of skilled workers, companies must weigh the potential costs of incurring the wrath of workers who are not involved in the strike and of losing customers because of consumer doubts about the quality of the service provided by replacement workers.
This change in management's attitude has occurred along with a change in workers' loyalties, both to their unions and to their companies, which makes it harder for unions to sustain strikes and easier for management to persuade workers to move into the strikers' jobs.
Workers no longer think unions can deliver the gains in wages and benefits that made blue-collar members the world's best paid workers.
For several years, union workers in private industry have been winning smaller wage increases than non-union workers, and trade union membership as a part of the national work force has declined from 30 percent in the 1970s to 16.4 percent in 1989.
And for all that attention that recent strikes at companies like Greyhound, Eastern, the Pittston Coal Group Inc., Boeing and the Nynex Corp. have received, unions are increasingly wary of using their ultimate weapon, the strike, and risking both their members' jobs and the embarrassment of failing to win concessions from management.
The Communications Workers of America, which had planned an electronic picket line against the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. last year if it had failed to reach agreement on a new contract, is taking a long, hard look at the validity of a strike in modern labor disputes. The union warns against strikes that cannot guarantee results if the company is able to manage without the union workers.
R.V. Durham, president of Teamster Local 391 in North Carolina, had a similar message to his members recently regarding a strike by the local against Holly Farms. In addition to the strike, the union is trying to mount a boycott against Holly Farm products.
As far as the strike was concerned, Durham said "we really didn't have any options." Holly Farms drivers, who had voted to join the Teamsters but had yet to negotiate a contract, were told to either sign up for lower compensation or be fired. They struck.
But the strike has been largely ineffective, forcing the union to turn to other tactics such as the boycott. "I think we have to look at new approaches," he said. "If you've got the clout, fine. Unfortunately there are people who have no qualms about bringing in replacement workers."
In the 1970s the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded an average of 289 strikes a year involving 1,000 or more workers. In the last five years the average was 52.
Furthermore, some companies have found it easier than they expected to find replacement workers.
That is what happened in an especially vitriolic strike in 1987 and 1988 involving three International Paper mills in Jay, Maine.
The company proposed eliminating premium pay for work on Sundays and holidays, and the paperworkers union walked out. The company started bringing in permanent replacements just 13 days later, planting the seeds of acrimony that local officials say will persist for years.
"It's something you do only as a last resort," said James W. Gilliland, the company's director of employee relations. "It's not fun for anybody."
In Jay, he said, the company has reduced its work force from 1,250 to 1,062, and 80 percent of the employees are permanent replacements.
They started at $9 to $10 an hour, about $4 less than the strikers, Gilliland said, and premium pay was abolished.
Once the company decided to proceed, Gilliland said it found a surprisingly large pool of candidates for the strikers' jobs despite the nation's relatively low unemployment rate.
"As more and more young people have entered the labor market, they have found fewer and fewer high-paying industrial jobs," he said. "So when an industrial company enters the market to hire permanent replacements, it has no trouble whatever."
In the case of Eastern, the International Association of Machinists, knowing the probable consequences of a strike, used federal labor law to try to stretch out the strike deadline as long as possible, hoping to get the government to intervene on its behalf. The effort failed and almost all the IAM members at Eastern permanently have lost their jobs.
In the case of Pittston, the United Mine Workers of America stayed on the job without a contract for 14 months before striking the company in a campaign designed to bypass federal labor law and take the dispute to the streets in an effort to discredit the company with the public. Only a handful of the 1,700 union members at Pittston lost their jobs.
In the weeks before the Greyhound strike, leaders of the Amalgamated Transit Union were warned by other labor leaders not to go out on strike when their contract expired. Greyhound had amassed a multimillion-dollar war chest against the strike, appeared to be working deliberately toward a legal impasse and was beginning to train permanent replacements to allow the company to drive its way through a strike.
by CNB