ROANOKE TIMES 

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 17, 1994                   TAG: 9404190006
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: D-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By ROBERT RENO
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

STRIKE, OF SORTS

TWENTY years ago, a nationwide strike by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters would have been a major economic event. Its effect on the nation's commerce would have been vast and dislocating, and it would have sent warnings of another huge wage settlement that would have ignited inflation.

Few things better illustrate how much things have changed than the condition of the Teamsters, their backs to the wall, their numbers decimated, when they struck the nation's biggest trucking companies the other day in the desperate hope of merely salvaging their tenuous position in a deregulated industry increasingly dominated by lower-paying, part-time, nonunion work.

In the '70s, big strikes like this were common in all industries. There were 2,516 major strikes in 1971 alone. There were only 35 in 1992. And they are rarely about union demands and higher wages. They more often than not involve union resistance to more concessions that usually mean loss of jobs and job security. The steel, auto and airline industries are all part of a pattern where job security, not wage demands, have become the principal preoccupation of the labor movement.

So here we are in 1994. The Federal Reserve has signaled to Wall Street that there is danger of a new inflationary spiral. And Wall Street, spooked to apoplexy by visions of the inflation of the '70s and the punitive interest rates of the 1980s, is having its reactive fit, whether out of actual fear of inflation or fear of what the Federal Reserve will do to fight inflation.

Never mind that in the fourth quarter of 1993, unit labor costs fell at the steepest rate in 30 years. Never mind that part-time employees, those least able to enforce wage demands, are the fastest-growing segment of the labor force. Never mind that wage-driven inflation, a large part of the experience of the 1970s, is virtually nonexistent - not to say impossible - in the 1990s.

But, of course, it wasn't just wages that drove inflation in the 1970s, pushing it into the double-digit range in 1974, 1979 and 1980, and destroying two presidencies in the process. Crude oil prices began the decade at $3.18 a barrel and ended it at $31.77. This was the defining economic event of the decade. It rearranged the world as we know it.

Anyone who wants to imagine oil prices behaving similarly in the 1990s is welcome to try. But there is surely no sign of it in the current world oil glut, or in the weakened position of OPEC, or in the vast new oil discoveries in the non-OPEC world, or in the yet-to-be-tapped reserves of the former Soviet Union.still waiting for Western exploitation. Meanwhile, Iraq's huge production, removed from the global equation by a war, overhangs the market like a vast reserve.the not just overly cautious but positively nutty.

Robert Reno writes for Newsday.

L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service 


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