Unions Using Strikes Less Than in Past

Richard Northrip boasted the other day in Bal Harbour, Fla., that, despite what he saw as serious attempts by the National Cement Industry Assn. to force a strike, “our members stuck together and stayed on the job. We did not let them provoke us into a walkout we could not win.”

Northrip, vice president of the AFL-CIO Boilermakers Union, said that “management thought if they pushed us hard enough to take tremendous wage cuts, we would strike and they could then hire strike breakers at low wages in a ‘union free environment.’ ”

But, he said, the union finally got contracts that provide slight wage gains with firms that employ about a third of the nation’s 14,000 unionized cement workers. “The rest of our members are working under old contracts, and the union has survived to fight another day,” he said.

Beyond the labor issues involving cement workers--a spokesman for the industry association had no comment on the “provocation” allegation--Northrip’s remarks help explain the lack of union militancy today. Fearful of management successes at breaking strikes, unions now are calling fewer of them than at any time since the Department of Labor began keeping strike records in 1941.

58 Major Strikes in ’84

Government figures show that, in 1984, there were only 58 strikes of 1,000 or more workers, compared to the record 470 in 1952.

Such strikes have declined gradually since 1979, although some highly publicized walkouts--such as those at Continental Airlines, Greyhound, New York City hospitals and Phelps Dodge Corp.’s copper mines in Arizona--have given the appearance of substantial labor strife.

The Phelps Dodge strike, which began in July, 1983, and continues, has demonstrated both the difficulties in using the strike weapon and the reason that wage concessions are often accepted instead.

Like the cement, airline and auto industries, the copper industry has long followed a system of pattern bargaining under which one pacesetting firm negotiates a union contract that is followed by other companies. But the system is breaking down.

Some companies are reaching union agreements that other firms in their industry say they cannot, or will not, accept. While previous attempts to break away from pattern bargaining almost automatically would have meant a strike against recalcitrant firms, that isn’t necessarily the case anymore.

In part, that is because of the disastrous example set when 2,200 miners went on strike against Phelps Dodge--which, like others in its industry, has suffered losses that stem largely from depressed copper prices.

Other copper companies reached agreements in the summer of 1983 with their unions, the largest of which is the United Steelworkers.

The workers agreed to accept a three-year wage freeze, but they kept a clause that provides cost-of-living adjustments.

Phelps Dodge, however, refused to go along and demanded elimination of the cost-of-living clause and other contract benefits. The unions struck, knowing that not to do so would invite demands from the other companies for similar concessions.

So far, however, the strike has failed badly. The unions are now decertified as bargaining agents for the Phelps Dodge workers. Because a decertification election was held more than a year after the start of the strike, federal law permitted only currently employed workers--strikebreakers--to vote, thus excluding the strikers’ voice.

The union has already spent more than $10 million in strike benefits. And other copper companies now are demanding additional contract concessions, even before the expiration of current labor agreements in 1986.

While the unions, anxious to avert trouble, recently offered to accept substantial pay cuts, the companies wanted even greater ones. Both sides are beginning to brace for a major industrywide strike in a year and a half.

The failure of the Phelps Dodge strike arose in part because of the success of the company in recruiting strikebreakers but also because of serious mistakes by the unions.

Union leaders generally agree that they were preoccupied with a fight for the presidency of the steel workers’ international organization, which has lost almost half of its 1.4 million members in the past five years, and therefore did not press the strike as forcefully as they could have.

Frank McKee, now secretary-treasurer of the international union, was in charge of the Phelps Dodge strike but also unsuccessfully running at the time for the presidency of the union against Lynn Williams. Williams said last week that he thought that the union should have played a more active role in supporting the strikers but that he did not do anything about it because he didn’t want the strike to become a major issue in the election.

Another union mistake was the level of benefits paid out to striking Phelps Dodge workers, argues I. W. Abel, past president of the union. Abel said strikers should have been paid $1,000 a month in benefits instead of the $160 a month they got when the walkout began. They are now getting $240 a month. A number of strikers went back to work for Phelps Dodge because the level of strike benefits was so low.

Workers can’t live on such small amounts of money, Abel said. The union has more than $200 million in its strike fund now, Abel said, and the $10 million paid out so far to the strikers “doesn’t even add up to the interest the strike fund is drawing.”

The latest union mistake came just last week during a meeting of the AFL-CIO executive council in Bal Harbour, even as the union began to take a more active role in the Phelps Dodge dispute.

The union opened a major “corporate campaign” against Phelps Dodge--meaning, among other things, that the union will put pressure on banks that lend money to the company. The hope is that the banks in turn will pressure Phelps Dodge to end the labor dispute.

A news conference--called by Williams of the United Steelworkers, Howard Samuels, head of the AFL-CIO industrial union department, and Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers--was designed to show that the union still has the strength to pressure Phelps Dodge.

Shanker announced that the New York state teachers retirement system removed $450 million of $1.5 billion in the fund’s assets that Manufacturers Hanover Trust of New York manages for investment purposes. And, he said, the retirement fund plans to remove the remainder. Three of seven fund trustees are representatives of Shanker’s union.

While the bank’s “dismal” investment performance “did not inspire confidence of the fund trustees,” Shanker said, the unions also were distressed because George Munroe, chairman of Phelps Dodge, is also on the Manufacturers Hanover board of directors.

The bank, he said, has made loans to Phelps Dodge at a time when the copper company “has been engaged in a concerted effort or campaign to break unions.”

But a spokesman for the teachers retirement fund quickly denied any linkage between withdrawal of the retirement fund money and the campaign against Phelps Dodge. He said that the pension fund actually began withdrawing money from the bank nearly three years ago, long before the strike started, in order to handle some of its own investments and to diversify management.

Union leaders scurried about trying to correct the conflicting versions, but it was yet another indication of the confusion in the unions’ operations.

Both Phelps Dodge and Manufacturers Hanover say they will never give in to pressure exerted by the unions, but that could change. The union campaign against Phelps Dodge has intensified. Shanker says various unions, including his own, expect to withdraw a total of at least $3 billion from the management of Manufacturers Hanover.

The unions’ major hope is that the campaign will discourage other companies from taking a strike. If the corporate campaign against Phelps Dodge works, it may help unions avoid the use of the strike weapon, which has been so unsuccessful in recent years.

Grape Boycott Gets Aid

The AFL-CIO last week voted unanimously to once again resume support of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers in its boycott of California table grapes.

After a long and bitter boycott from 1965 to 1970, the farm workers union won contracts with almost all of the California table grape growers. Since 1973, however, the growers have refused to sign contracts. Now, less than 1% of the workers in the table grape industry are union members.

The union recently started a new boycott against California table grapes, but the campaign has barely gotten off the ground.

The UFW hopes that the promise of the national AFL-CIO to give full backing to a worldwide consumer boycott will force the growers to go back to the bargaining table.