Unions Down, Not Out, Leaders Insist : Labor Tries to Revive Embattled Movement

These have not been easy times for Bill Bywater, the energetic, 64-year-old head of an organization once known as the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers.

Last year, Bywater told his staff that the union, whose membership had plunged from 360,000 to 180,000 since 1970, no longer had an appropriate name because it no longer represented any workers making radios.

So Bywater took a step that he thought was long overdue and dropped “radio” from the title. “I first suggested that to our president, Jim Carey, in 1964 when I realized all the radio work had gone offshore to foreign countries,” Bywater recalled in an interview here. “He went berserk.”

That little step of changing the union’s name, in some ways the least painful of many tough decisions Bywater has had to make since he fulfilled a teen-age dream and became president of the union in 1981--is symbolic of the hard times that have befallen the nation’s labor movement.

And his reflective, realistic mood was typical of that of many of the union leaders who attended last week’s AFL-CIO executive council meeting here. In interviews, a number of them conceded that they are down, but insisted that they will not be counted out.

Bywater, now president of the renamed International Union of Electronic, Electrical, Technical, Salaried and Machine Workers, said he would love to launch a massive television advertising campaign to explain how simultaneous trends--plants moving abroad while imports of manufactured goods increase--are shrinking the nation’s industrial base, eliminating thousands of jobs and wearing away the fabric of communities across the country. But, he admitted, his cash-short union does not have the money.

“There’s no easy or magic formula to solve labor’s problems,” Bywater said. While he was here, he received more bad news: The Reagan Administration is likely to lift restraints on the number of Japanese cars that can be marketed in this country. “That will cost us another 10,000 jobs. It really hurts,” he said.

Nonetheless, Bywater insisted that he is not despondent. “I’ve never been discouraged in life. We’ll just have to work harder.” He said union leaders and staff members would have to revive the sort of dedication that their predecessors had shown in the 1930s and 1940s.

“We’ve been in crisis before, but this is a different kind of crisis,” said Jack Sheinkman, secretary-treasurer of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers. “It’s the most severe crisis in my 35 years in the labor movement. It’s been accumulating for 10 years. It’s a crisis as a manifestation of the changing nature of the economy.”

But, although the unionists face another four years under a U.S. President who they say is unsympathetic to their goals and a National Labor Relations Board that they consider hostile to their aims, they assert emphatically that they are not about to become extinct.

“We’ve got problems,” said William Winpisinger, president of the International Assn. of Machinists. “But I don’t fear for our long-range health.”

Guarded Optimism

In fact, most of the executive council members were guardedly optimistic. “I really think the labor movement has bottomed out and that we’re on an upswing,” John Sweeney, president of the Service Employees International Union, said. Some of Sweeney’s upbeat mood reflected the fact that his union does a good deal of organizing among government employees--the public sector--where unions have had considerably more success in recent years. Still, he acknowledged, “it will be a long process” of revival for the overall movement.

There are clear signs that revival will not come easily. In the last five years, organized labor’s share of the nation’s work force has dropped to 18.8%, down from 23% in 1980 and 35% in 1954. And, a number of experts say, organized labor’s prospects for the future do not look bright.

“If current trends continue, their share of the private sector work force will be down to 10% by the year 2000,” said Paul Weiler, a Harvard Law School professor who has made several studies of the decline of union membership.

He said one of his colleagues has calculated that unions lose 3% of their members to attrition every year. “Ordinarily, unions have to add new members in order both to replace the natural losses and to grow. But now, they’re replacing only one-sixth or so of what they’re losing every year,” Weiler said.

Management Resistance

A major source of difficulty in adding new members, he said, is “management resistance” to union organizing. And U.S. labor laws are ineffective in dealing with growing illegal resistance by employers, he said.

Still, Weiler does not believe that organized labor is doomed. “If you look back at the history of the labor movement, the periods of growth have all been very sudden, very sharp and very unexpected,” he pointed out.

During the worst of the Great Depression, in 1933, unions had dropped to half the size that they were at the end of World War I, Weiler said, and the president of the American Economic Assn. predicted that they would wither away. “But from 1933 to 1945, the union movement grew fivefold, from 3 million to 15 million,” because of the sudden, unexpected organizing triumphs of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Weiler said.

Now labor is in the midst of another upheaval. Old industries--such as steel, rubber and textiles--are declining. Economists forecast that 75% of all of the nation’s workers will be in the service sector by 1990. Thus far, however, labor has not done well at organizing service workers, whether they be clerks in insurance offices or short-order cooks at McDonald’s. Only 10% of all service workers are now unionized, according to an AFL-CIO study.

But, in response to a question at the meeting here, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland said he was “quite confident” that unions ultimately would succeed in organizing those workers and others not yet recruited.

“You know, somehow, something--something mystical, maybe--tells me that when the vultures are circling out among the sea gulls, that is the moment in which we are on the threshold of resurgence, revival and growth,” he said.

Self-Critical Study

On Thursday, the executive council unveiled something quite unmystical, a candidly self-critical study entitled, “‘The Changing Situation of Workers and Their Unions,” which was 2 1/2 years in the making. It acknowledged that, “despite their accomplishments, unions find themselves behind the pace of change.”

The 30-page study said unions have to strengthen communications with their own members, devote more thought and resources to organizing the unorganized, consider new forms of membership, alter some of their bargaining techniques and goals, give serious thought to mergers to increase their economic power and vastly improve the way they present themselves to the public, through television and other modern communications tools.

“‘This represents a landmark decision by the American labor movement,” United Steelworkers President Lynn Williams said. Not all of the council’s 35 members described the study in such dramatic terms. But it was widely praised for its candor, forward-looking approach and emphasis on organizing, an activity that several union presidents said had been neglected.

“It is an essential blueprint for the foundation of labor’s future,” said Robert Harbrant, president of the AFL-CIO’s Food and Allied Services Trades Department, who was a member of the committee that assembled the study. “It concentrates on organizing as a priority.”

Organizing Strategy

Andrew Stern, the Service Employees’ organizing director, said that devising successful organizing methods is fundamental to his union and others. He said that resolving this problem depends partly on unions becoming considerably clearer about what they are and who they are trying to appeal to.

“IBM didn’t depend on just 30 salesmen to get where they are,” he said. “It’s a question of deciding who you are and going out and selling it.”

Unions have “got to target more and develop strategies that are more attractive to the previously unorganized--white-collar, technical and professional workers and people who move across traditional job categories,” said Thomas Kochan, a professor of industrial relations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, after hearing about the report. He was one of several academicians who made a presentation to the executive council’s Committee on the Evolution of Work.

Reasons for Decline

Kochan said that about 45% of the decline in union membership was attributable to structural changes in the economy and that the rest of the decline was caused by changes in management methods since the 1960s, when business leaders began to adopt more sophisticated tactics to prevent unionization of their workers.

Several union leaders acknowledged here that in recent years labor has been outfoxed in gaining the allegiance of new workers. “Management has done a much better job in reaching them than we have through a variety of gimmicks, propaganda and psychological approaches,” said Vincent Sirabella, organizing director of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees International Union.

“We must develop strategies which are unpredictable and unorthodox,” he said. An example of such an approach, he said, was the decision made by one of his union’s members to have strikers at Yale University return to work briefly during Christmas vacation. In that way, the strikers made some money and were not faced with the dispiriting task of picketing an empty campus.

About a month ago, the 2,500 Yale strikers won a contract that Sirabella and other labor leaders say demonstrates that office workers can be organized if there is good planning, persistence and adequate resources. Sirabella said the union spent considerably more than $1 million in the effort. “We were not impatient,” he said, noting that three previous organizing drives at the prestigious Ivy League university had failed.

“The Yale strike victory is a real catalyst,” said Jackie Ruff, director of the Services Employees clerical organizing division, who also attended the meeting here. Ruff said that if unions are going to succeed in organizing clerical workers, they will have to place more stress on issues that are of particular concern to women, such as pay equity, child care and the development of women leaders.

In addition, Henry Nicholas, president of the National Hospital and Health Care Workers, said there needs to be considerably more flexibility.

‘New Blood’ Needed

“A lot of new blood needs to find its way into the leadership of the various unions,” said Nicholas, one of only three blacks to head a national union in this country. “If we’re going to organize all the unorganized women and minorities, there are going to have to be a lot more women and minorities as leaders. If you spent any time down there (in Bal Harbour), you see that is still a highly visible missing ingredient.”

Nicholas and several other union leaders said that if unions are to prosper in the future, they will have to establish more integral relationships with community organizations working for change. “I’m not sure everyone in the union movement recognizes that what we do after the plant gate closes is equally as important as what we do when they’re open,” said Morton Bahr, a vice president of the Communication Workers of America.