Labor Comes to a Crossroads

Next Monday, under hundreds of poplar trees and atop thousands of platforms, union leaders and politicians will ringingly praise the vigor of organized labor. The rhetoric will bear little resemblance to reality, for the truth about America's union movement has become too embarrassing for a holiday oration. On the 84th U.S. Labor Day, the movement seems in parlous shape: its membership, as a percentage of the non-farm work force, down to a 41-year low; its legislation repeatedly blocked by newly potent business lobbies and skeptical, inflation-wary legislators; its national leaders inspiring less confidence in the public than those of almost any other major American institution.*

In 1978 labor is at a crossroads. It must find ways to resume the expansion that brought new members, and ideas, through the 1940s and early 1950s--or it can continue to decline. The few signs of change still point downward. Last year unions lost 51.8% of all bargaining elections. That was the worst showing since 1973--and the fourth year in the past five that unions have lost more representation votes than they won. Politically, AFL-CIO President George Meany, 84, has succeeded in making labor look like the dog in the manger of the Administration's anti-inflation policy. Latest example: the apparent unraveling of the postal settlement. The White House is sure to trace some of the blame, and properly so, to Meany's startling remark three weeks ago implying that the postal unions should reject the moderate 6 1/2% wage package that had been worked out with the Administration's coaching.

As it happened, at about that time Meany was supposed to announce his agreement to the formation of a labor committee to consult with the Administration on methods to control inflation, in order to do away with the need for the public jawboning of labor that had become a specialty of Barry Bosworth, director of the Council on Wage and Price Stability. But last week, whether or not it indicated White House exasperation with Meany, Bosworth was back swinging his jawbone again. This time he told trucking executives that the Administration would keep a close watch on their negotiations with the Teamsters next winter, and indeed sit down with both sides in advance "to discuss the issues--and the public interest." His goal: to hold wage-and-benefit increases to 7% or 8% a year, vs. 10% under the current contract.

To be sure, the unions still retain a tight grip on a core of vital industries including autos, steel and transportation, and they set the wage-and-benefit pattern for the whole labor force. At campaign time, no other organization can match the armies of volunteer doorbell ringers the unions can muster. That is becoming increasingly important as new laws limit the amounts of money that candidates can raise from big contributors.

The sheer passage of time should shortly lighten one of labor's greatest burdens: its rule by aging, parochial leaders of whom Meany is the curmudgeonly symbol. Seven of the 35 members of the AFL-CIO executive council are over 65, and cannot cling to power much longer. Already, some slightly younger and far more aggressive leaders are rising in prominence on the council and talking of new organizing drives, new methods of enhancing labor's political push. Among them are Sol Chaikin, 60, president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers; William Winpisinger, 53, chief of the Machinists; Jerry Wurf, 59, head of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). But the new leaders will have to cope with powerful economic and social forces that have been reducing union power through the post-World War II period. The main problem areas:

MEMBERSHIP. The unionized portion of all nonfarm workers rocketed from 11.3% in 1933 to a high of 35.5% in 1945, held a bit below that through the next decade, then sank year after year to an estimated 23.8% in 1977. That was the lowest since 1937, and the figure probably has gone down further this year. Even in absolute numbers, union membership has changed only slightly through the 1970s. And much of the membership is concentrated in mass-production industries, where union jobs are threatened both by more efficient manufacturing techniques--it takes fewer workers every year to make a car or a ton of steel--and by a transfer of some operations to the largely nonunion Sunbelt. For example, General Motors has opened nine plants in the South since 1973--and kept the United Auto Workers out of all but one.

Membership is declining primarily because unions have failed to adjust to an enormous postwar switch in job patterns. Their prime appeal has always been to male factory hands. But manufacturing has gone down in importance, while workers have flooded into wholesale and retail trade, service industries and white-collar occupations like computer programming--all predominantly nonunion.

Women, who made up 28.1% of the work force in 1947, now account for 41.9%. By 1976 fewer than 16% of them had joined unions. Until recently, many women expected to work only four or five years; typically, they thought that the higher wages a union might win over the long run would not compensate them for income lost during strikes. Career-minded women, like white-collar workers generally, tend to identify with management, or at least to believe they have more in common with their bosses than with the stereotyped hardhat. Says Fred Kroll, president of the Brotherhood of Railway, Airline and Steamship Clerks: "We have to get rid of the old baseball bat, T shirt, tattooed image."

Labor's organizing tactics are also partly to blame. Workers in services are often transitory and largely scattered among thousands of small establishments. Unions have shown little interest in signing them up because they figured that the costs of an organizing drive would not be repaid by the dues from workers in, say, a boutique. Beyond that, says Glenn Watts, head of the Communications Workers, "soap box speeches outside the factory gate will not work any more. The American worker is more educated and has to be approached in a new way."

Unions also face stiff and growingly effective employer resistance. In the Sunbelt, it sometimes turns intimidating. Melvin Tate, a Southern organizer, finds employees of J.P. Stevens & Co., the textile giant, fearful that Stevens will close any plant that votes in a union. Stevens bosses, says Tate, do not make that threat directly because it is illegal, but their wives and relatives pass the word in gossip. In the West, Chaikin charges, owners of some garment plants have prompted the U.S. Immigration Service to raid their own factories and arrest signers of union cards as illegal immigrants--which many indeed were.

The employers' most effective tactic is simply to pay wages and benefits as generous as those a union might win. Union wages generally still exceed those in comparable nonunion jobs--by 16%, at last count in 1975--and are rising faster. But GM, for example, has increased pay in its Southern plants to parity with what U.A.W. members get in the North. Unions, ironically, have been victimized by their own success in making company-paid pensions, medical insurance, longer vacations and similar fringes universal. Even the sons and daughters of diehard unionists feel they have no need to sign a union card in order to enjoy high pay, generous benefits and pleasant working conditions at big, high-technology firms like IBM, Kodak and Texas Instruments.

POLITICAL WEAKNESS. Although unions did much to elect a Democratic President and Democratic Congress, labor has suffered shattering legislative setbacks. Last year the common-situs bill that would have allowed a single striking union to shut an entire construction site went down to a totally unexpected defeat in the House. Two months ago, the unions lost on a labor-reform bill that they regarded as vital to reverse their decline in membership. The bill, among other things, would have allowed organizers easier access to nonunion shops.

Failure to expand membership, of course, is one reason for this loss of power. The smaller the proportion of workers that he speaks for, the less influence a union leader has with a politician. In Massachusetts, the state AFL-CIO, hit by sagging membership, lacks the $150,000 that it needs to computerize its lists of voters. Knowing that the unions' ability to turn out the vote has declined, Bay State politicos feel less obligated to court labor.

The unions' lobbying tactics are oldfashioned. They still concentrate on buttonholing key legislators, such as committee chairmen. The increasingly assertive business lobby, in contrast, now does most of its campaigning around the country, urging owners of hardware stores, florist shops and bakeries to write their legislators. The flood of mail from back home played a key part in defeating the labor-reform bill.

Finally, the unions have again been victimized by their own success: the high wages that they have won have created a bourgeoisie whose members are more concerned about their taxes than about their unions' legislative goals. In California, blue-collar unionized homeowners last June voted overwhelmingly for Proposition 13, in full knowledge that the 57% cut in property taxes that it called for would wipe out the jobs of many of their brother unionists working in local governments.

LEADERSHIP. Even his harshest critics agree that he is as sharp as ever mentally, but George Meany has saddled the union movement with an unfortunate image. In what has to be the understatement of the year, Chaikin, an admirer of Meany, ruefully concedes that the AFL-CIO boss turns people off because, "he does not have the personality of an ever-smiling, ever-effusive, warm, merry-appearing man." One university expert on labor adds that Meany's performances on TV "must strike the 24-year-olds, a quarter of whom are college-educated, as something out of prehistoric ages."

Meany and his allies have followed parochial policies that turn off potential labor supporters. The AFL-CIO's dead-end support of the Viet Nam War is the standard example, but there are others. The union movement has lost touch with many rising forces in U.S. society. Feminists and civil rights leaders worry that seniority rules hinder the promotion of women and blacks; consumerists and ecologists find unions ranged against them out of fear that consumer-protection and environmental laws will cost workers jobs. Columbia University Industrial Relations Professor James Kuhn believes that to regain power, "labor needs the imagination to sit down and bargain with Ralph Nader's group and the Sierra Club environmentalists as well as with employers."

No issue holds such potential for further damaging labor's reputation as inflation. Though Meany has called inflation the worst enemy of workers, he has opposed every Administration call for wage restraint, while offering no proposals of his own. Jimmy Carter and his aides are furious because the AFL-CIO would not support the President's bill to put mandatory limits on hospital revenues and thus costs. They argue persuasively that the bill would have benefited the great majority of union members: the higher that hospital bills rise and the more that employers have to pay in medical-insurance premiums, the less money is left to raise wages. Yet the AFL-CIO insisted that legislators should do nothing that might hold down the pay of the tiny minority of union members who are employed by hospitals.

What are the prospects for change?

Whenever Meany steps down--his current term runs until 1979, when he will be 85--his successor is just about certain to be AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Lane Kirkland, 56. Kirkland has a reputation as both an intellectual and a pragmatist. He vows that labor's political support in this fall's mid-term elections will be determined by how legislators voted on the labor-reform bill, rather than going blindly to Democrats. For example, in Illinois the AFL-CIO for the first time will aid the re-election campaign of Republican Senator Charles Percy, who voted to end a filibuster against the measure. However, Kirkland has followed Meany's line so loyally so long that even his AFL-CIO colleagues are uncertain whether he has any ideas of his own.

Chaikin has demonstrated responsiveness to the concerns of women workers; his union has two female vice presidents, among the very few women labor leaders of any prominence. Also, though he argues strenuously that wage boosts are not causing inflation, Chaikin hints at willingness to go along with pleas for moderation, if the Government protects the poor by cutting taxes and business restrains the rise in its profits.

Wurf's foghorn voice offers even more hope. In the 14 years that he has been president of the AFSCME, he has quadrupled its membership to just over 1 million, and signed up people thought to be particularly difficult to organize: white-collar workers, women, blacks. His main pitch: an insistence that union membership is the passport not just to better pay but also to "dignity" for workers who, he contends, were long "at the mercy of irresponsible politicians."

Though Wurf has not hesitated to lead illegal strikes to win union recognition, he is now striving to set a statesmanlike tone. He proclaims himself "anxiously ready" to negotiate ways to improve the productivity of government employees, even if that includes reducing their numbers by attrition. He is actively pushing laws to give most government workers a choice of submitting disputes to arbitration, rather than striking, and to make arbitration compulsory for cops, firemen and other public-safety workers. Instead of simply decrying the tax revolt, as Meany does, Wurf calls for reforms: cuts in property taxes for low-and middle-income homeowners, higher and more progressive state and local income taxes to reduce the revenue loss.

Wurf, however, concedes that he has no chance of becoming AFL-CIO president, and some other new leaders do not go along with his moderation. Winpisinger is so frustrated by labor's loss of power that he hints darkly at a resort to violence. Says he: "In my lifetime, no group has ever gotten justice in this country without lawlessness. So if we want to see change, then we may have to stop having such a high regard for law-and-order."

It would be a tragedy if American labor were to heed that advice. For all the mistakes they have made, unions are an indispensable force for industrial democracy. No program to control inflation can succeed without the support of labor, which will not be forthcoming unless it has a public-spirited leadership. Unfortunately, if the unions follow their present policies, they can only decline further, to the country's detriment. -

* In a January Louis Harris poll, labor chieftains won a 15% confidence rating, tying them with leaders of Congress for next to last. Admen were in the cellar, at 11%. By contrast, 23% of those polled expressed confidence in business leaders.

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