Unions Pin Future on Corporate Democracy

Western European unions are experiencing the same decline in strength and membership as those in the United States, and union leaders in all industrialized countries are urgently--some say desperately--seeking ways to revitalize their organizations.

The Geneva-based International Labor Organization has just issued the results of a worldwide study of what it calls “a general deterioration in the global labor situation.”

The organization’s research “paints a disquieting picture of falling or stagnating trade union membership, increasing violations of trade union rights, cuts in expenditures on training almost everywhere and alarming conditions of work in some developing countries, especially vis-a-vis safety and health.”

A measure of the problem in the United States was provided recently by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which showed that only 18.8% of wage and salary workers were union members in 1984, down from 23% in 1980 and a peak of 35.5% in 1945.

For many years, most union leaders in this and other countries responded to reports of declining membership by blaming outside forces, notably well-heeled enemies of unions and the two recent recessions.

In the United States, the union leaders would add, accurately, that much of the membership loss resulted from massive job reductions in “smokestack” industries.

But unions ceased shifting the blame in February when the AFL-CIO issued a blunt, well-reasoned self-analysis called the Changing Situation of Workers and Their Unions. In it, the federation acknowledged that its own failures were in no small part responsible for the membership decline.

Saying that “unions find themselves behind the pace of change,” the report recommended a wide variety of reforms, including union membership for workers in plants where a majority have voted against union representation, arbitration as a substitute for strikes and contracts providing minimum wages that would serve as a basis for bargaining between individual workers and their bosses.

John F. Henning, head of the California Labor Federation, praised these departures last week, observing that “only rebels, dissidents or worse have ever talked that way.”

As of now, though, the report is just that--talk.

The ILO report didn’t offer any firm suggestions of what labor can do to reverse the worldwide decline in union membership. (The organization, founded in 1919, is made up of management, union and government representatives from 150 different countries.)

But it did bluntly lay out some problems facing unions in Western industrialized countries such as the United States, as well as the far more difficult problems facing workers, usually without unions, in totalitarian nations and in non-totalitarian developing countries.

Since 1980, there have been substantial increases in on-the-job deaths in developing countries, and industries and “labor inspection services, if they exist at all, are unable to cope with this situation,” the ILO said.

“Even in the industrialized market economies, where fatality rates generally decreased during the 1970s, governments tend to cut down on labor inspections. If this trend continues, more accidents may be expected to happen in the 1980s.”

U.S. unions have contended that the Reagan Administration is neglecting the health and safety of workers.

In a section discussing progress toward the abolition of forced labor, the ILO report noted that only 126-member countries have ratified the Forced Labor Convention of 1930, which calls for an end to such practices, and that only 108 have approved the stronger ILO language adopted in 1967.

The report didn’t name the countries that the organization accuses of continuing to use forced labor, but said victims range from trade unionists and members of dissident political parties to indebted peasants and even employees who leave their jobs without their boss’ consent.

Thus, the ILO said, “trade unionism might seem in a bad way these days,” with membership stagnating and reduced negotiating power, and “there are those within (ILO) who declare that trade unionism has entered an irreversible decline.”

However, the report said, the trend toward giving workers and their unions a greater voice in making corporate decisions means that, “in fact, unions have never been so much a part of economic and social life.”

“They are being given ever-increasing responsibilities at all levels, (and) union members actually exert more influence than their overall percentage (of the work forces) might suggest.”

The report clearly suggested that focusing on such corporate democracy might well be a good way for unions to increase their strength.

That same suggestion was in the AFL-CIO’s set of proposals, although the labor federation warned against employers who would use industrial democracy as a “union avoidance” device, pretending to offer workers a real voice in the operation as long as they didn’t join a union.

Scrooge of the Year?

While General Motors has been getting praise for its innovative contracts with the United Auto Workers, an international labor organization says the company deserves the Scrooge of the Year award in its dealings with most of its 690,000 workers around the world.

In this country, GM and the UAW are working on implementing new ways of paying workers and giving them a larger-than-ever voice in corporate decision-making.

For the most part, union leaders here have either commended GM for its cooperative attitude or have been only mildly critical.

But the Geneva-based International Metalworkers Federation has just completed a study of the company’s labor relations in 15 countries in Europe, North and Latin America, Asia and Africa.

Its conclusion: GM does for its workers only what it is forced by union pressures to do and that “opportunism” characterizes its labor relations in all of the countries surveyed.

Herman Rebhan, the federation’s general secretary who released the report after a two-day meeting in Vienna of GM union representatives, said the auto maker’s engineering, production and marketing operations are becoming almost uniform everywhere, “but just about anything goes as far as workers and unions are concerned.”

A General Motors spokesman in Detroit said that labor laws and conditions vary from nation to nation so that each country’s work force must be treated differently.

From 1981 to 1984 at GM facilities in Mexico, for instance, the company increased revenue by 47% but cut real labor costs--costs after accounting for inflation--by 18% through wage and benefit reductions, he said.

In the United Kingdom during that period, he said, GM’s revenue per worker jumped 76%, but labor costs rose only 7.6%.

Real wages of GM workers rose between 1981 and 1984 in Australia, Austria, South Korea and South Africa, but, in many other countries, real wages dropped as much as or more than in Mexico. In Brazil, the report said, real wages dropped 63%.

There are also marked discrepancies in working conditions and length of workweek, the report said. In Canada, workers put in only 7 hours, 40 minutes a day, while in Brazil, they work 9 hours, 40 minutes.

Overall, the report said, GM has “extracted increasing profit from a declining number of workers.”

“Worldwide, GM earned 16.4% more in 1983 than in 1981, but labor costs were cut 0.5%. To increase productivity is a good thing but not without sharing the results equitably (with workers).”

The International Metalworkers Federation called for a “common standard under which all increases in revenue per worker be fairly shared on a worldwide basis.”

Nevertheless, the federation is striving to minimize those “marked discrepancies” in wages, hours and job conditions and plans other international conferences to achieve that goal, Rebhan said.

Uphill Contract Battle

Many Teamsters Union regulars have joined dissidents in a campaign to get union members to reject the tentative three-year master contract agreement reached last week with trucking industry negotiators.

But they have, at best, an uphill battle.

For the pact, which covers about 200,000 workers, to be rejected, two-thirds of those voting would have to cast ballots against it in a referendum next month.

That system was installed for the logical reason that a large majority would have to support a strike for it to be effective.

Several of the nation’s largest Teamsters locals, including 208 and 63 in the Los Angeles area, are opposing ratification of the contract, along with Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a group of about 8,000 dissidents that has been fighting Teamsters President Jackie Presser and his predecessors for more than a decade on a variety of issues.

Leaders of some big-city locals who have no links to the TDU say they think they will have a difficult time getting members to reject the pact, although some TDU officers insist that there is a real chance of winning the necessary two-thirds vote.

However, many of the more militant TDU leaders will see it as a victory even if only 51% turn it down.

Rejection by a simple majority would not eliminate the tentative agreement, but it would be another blow to the prestige of Presser, who last week was ordered by U.S. District Judge Gerhard A. Gessell in Washington to answer questions from the President’s Organized Crime Commission on bribes, kickbacks, manipulation of union funds by organized crime and violence against dissident union members.

All critics of the pact complain that it gives more power than ever to the union’s top officers, including Presser, by taking power away from local unions to resist management changes in productivity standards.

They also complain that the pact will not, as Presser claims, stop or even slow the steady increase in non-union trucking that has already cost the Teamsters well over 100,000 jobs.

Opponents also contend that the pact eliminates the cost-of-living allowances; sets up a temporary, two-tier pay system under which new full-time workers would temporarily receive 30% less than veteran employees and allows hiring of part-timers at a lower wage scale.

Under the pact, a large force of part-time workers in locals here and in other large cities would be paid $11 to $12 an hour instead of the $13.71 regular base rate.

But Presser insists that the new agreement represents a major gain for Teamsters since it will increase job security for those already on the payroll and permit an increase of 31 cents an hour per worker for cost-of-living allowances in each of the pact’s three years.

It will add a minimum of $6,240 per worker in wages and benefits during the life of the contract.

Ken Paff, a spokesman for the dissident TDU, notes that the 31-cent maximum “cost-of-living” increase will be part of a straight 50-cent-an-hour wage boost in each of the next three years and therefore is not a true cost-of-living hike based on inflation.

Starting pay for new workers will be $9.60 an hour, and it will take them three years to catch up to veterans doing the same work.