DATE: Monday, September 1, 1997             TAG: 9708290009

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B8   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial 

                                            LENGTH:   57 lines

LABOR DAY UNION FACE THE FUTURE

For those to whom Labor Day means more than a final summer picnic, the celebration today arrives in the happy glow of the Teamsters' strike against United Parcel Service, a sweeping job action that was scored as a complete success for the blue-collar - or, in this case, brown-collar - work force.

But a hard look at what was at stake, and what was won, during the UPS strike illustrates how far organized labor and the American work force have moved from the fundamental issues that molded and solidified the nation's union movement.

Labor Day became a federal holiday in 1894 as a sop thrown to the blue-collar class by President Grover Cleveland, who had just used 12,000 military troops to bring a bloody end to the Pullman railroad-car strike. Pullman workers lived in the perfectly post-feudal town of Pullman, Illinois, where they built Pullman rail cars, lived in Pullman company housing, and had their rents deducted from Pullman company paychecks that were drawn on the Pullman company bank. When a recession hit, the company laid off thousands of workers and lowered the wages of those who remained, but didn't bother to lower the rents. The workers walked.

The strike ultimately was crushed, the American Railway Union was disbanded, and its leader, Eugene V. Debs, was thrown into prison. The Pullman workers were forced to sign pledges that they would never unionize again. President Cleveland, in an election-year attempt to regain workers' trust, declared the first Monday in September as a holiday to honor the American laborer. Too little, too late. He was voted out of office two months later.

A century passes, and in the most celebrated labor victory of the decade, wages and working conditions were barely a murmur when the Teamsters struck UPS. The core issue was the company's growing use of part-time, lower-wage employees as an effective way to cut costs and maintain or increase profits.

How the dynamics have changed. Low unemployment, nearly nonexistent inflation and a hard-charging economy have put union-backed blue-collar workers solidly into the middle class, and in many cases the upper-middle class. But as American companies have developed strategies to stay competitive in an increasingly international economy, where workers' wages and benefits are now weighed against the labor costs in Myanmar, China or Poland, the result has been slower growth in pay and benefits at the entry level.

A wave of downsizing, cost-trimming and streamlining has made the American labor market a perilous pond in which to swim. Labor-intensive industry is disappearing in the sweep of computerization and mechanization, and union representation of labor continues to shrink. Cradle-to-grave security in job and benefits, common just 30 years ago, is increasingly rare. The one-paycheck family is becoming an endangered species.

It is likely that the Teamsters' victory against UPS, in time, will prove to be little more than a blip in the evolution of the American labor movement as it is reshaped to meet the challenges of a global marketplace. An individual's marketable skills, not solidarity, will emerge as the workers' trump card as the game is played out. Where the labor movement will fit in this picture is not clear, by any means. And its future was not settled to any significant degree by the victory in the UPS strike.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu