Kirkland, in Fiery Speech, Hits Reagan Import Stand

AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland on Monday keynoted the labor federation’s 16th biennial convention with a blistering attack on President Reagan’s opposition to import restrictions, accusing the Administration and “its business and banking allies” of a “studied policy . . . to ‘buy foreign and fire Americans.’ ”

Kirkland told 1,000 delegates at the Anaheim Convention Center that Reagan and his supporters were attempting to “disguise and enforce this policy by wrapping themselves in the mantle of pious concerns for the rights of consumers.”

But, he said, “much of America has suffered devastation as a consequence of our surrender to the aggressive mercantilism of other nations and vital sections of the trade union movement have suffered with their communities and their countries.”

The nation’s top union leader said employees, unlike business, are “one with the communities in which they live. . . . We cannot join capital in its flight to tax-free havens overseas. We cannot run up the Liberian flag (on U.S. ships). We cannot heed the beckoning pimps and pursue the prostitution of other lands and people. Unlike the world of business and finance, in the world of labor, patriotism is not only our duty and belief, but our necessity.”

The comments by Kirkland, a longtime Reagan Administration critic, also seemed aimed at bolstering congressional support for import restrictions. The characterization of Administration trade policies was part of a broad attack on White House programs.

Reagan’s policies, he said, are “designed and contrived to wither away the benign domestic functions of the state which shield the people from the deadlier aspects of the jungle of the marketplace. It is meant to kill new programs aborning far into the future.”

But Kirkland also voiced concern about the number of congressional Democrats who have given some support to Reagan policies, particularly those who have backed a measure designed to increase the national debt ceiling and ultimately mandate a balanced federal budget by 1991. The Administration-backed measure, known as the Gramm-Rudman Amendment, has been getting so much support from Democrats, he said, it is “getting harder and harder to tell our friends and enemies apart.”

He ridiculed the President for saying the nation is enjoying an “economic miracle, even though today, at the peak of Reagan’s ‘boom,’ unemployment officially is at 7.1%, which translates into a real rate of 12.6%.”

Kirkland arrived at “the real rate” of unemployment by adding in those unemployed who have given up looking for jobs, and therefore are not counted in the official rate.

When the AFL-CIO was formed in 1955 by a merger of the old American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the unemployment rate was 4.4%, and the delegates to the founding convention said that that was “much much too high.”

Kirkland denounced the Reagan-appointed National Labor Relations Board for its “anti-union” decisions, but said, “We are going to outlast (them) . . . and sign up their undertakers on our way forward into the future.”

In noting the setbacks faced by unions in recent years, Kirkland said these trends can be reversed. He cited how union membership fell from 4 million in 1920 to 2 million in 1933, and unions were written off as an unimportant sector. The AFL-CIO today lists 13.2 million members.

He said, however, that unions and their allies can rejuvenate the economy and the labor movement, and “we shall do it in the face of a business community whose organizations are proving, once again, that the phrase ‘business ethics,’ like ‘military intelligence,’ is a contradiction in terms.”

In denouncing Administration trade policies, Kirkland cited a letter that Timothy Hauser, a Commerce Department official, recently sent to the Southwestern Furniture Manufacturers Assn. saying the economic challenge called for “adjustments such as the transfer of manufacturing facilities to foreign countries, where production costs, primarily labor, may be less expensive.”

Reagan, Kirkland said, is still living in the “mystical dream world of ‘free trade’ with which this Administration stands enchanted.”

But that concept of “free trade” never existed and never will, he said.

Much of the world, he said, disavows a market economy and “even more of it practices the most brutal form of protectionism--the protection of mercantile power and profit through the suppression of trade union rights and the ruthless exploitation of human poverty and desperation.”