New Form of Unity Enters the Union Halls

The fury, eloquence and number of dissidents within the American labor movement may have reached a low point on Labor Day, 1987, and the holiday might also have marked the bottoming out of labor’s decline.

Unions are probably more united today than at any time in recent history.

While they are still divided over foreign policy issues, those divisions are much less heated than in past years.

The major divisions within unions now are over collective bargaining goals and strategy--primarily over the degree of militancy needed in the struggle to regain labor’s past economic and political strength.

But they are not divided politically. They are maintaining close cooperation with one another in anticipation of the 1988 presidential elections, hoping that their united strength can help the Democratic Party put a pro-labor president in the White House and end the anti-union years of the Reagan Administration.

Battles are increasingly rare between unions in membership organizing campaigns and they are almost always together on their legislative goals. That unity may soon pay off in some progressive legislation at the national and state level. For example, there is a a strong possibility of a meaningful increase in the disgracefully low $3.35 an hour minimum wage.

Unions and their liberal allies have vainly battling for more than seven years against the Reagan Administration in Washington and in most states, including California, to raise the minimum. Now the call for a boost is growing so loud that it can no longer be ignored, and a hike is expected this year, despite the opposition of Reagan and several governors, such as California’s George Deukmejian.

Labor may also be regaining some strength because unions are the only major force in the country pressing hard to stop the steady decline in the average real income of American workers.

As consumers, many of us seemed pleased when employers forced workers in contract negotiations to take pay cuts and reduced benefits.

But there seems to be a growing awareness that the final result of those reductions has been to hurt not just the millions of workers directly affected but all of us who are so dependent on their still declining buying power. That new public awareness of labor’s role could help improve the strength of unions if they remain as united as they appear to be these days.

There are no signs, though, of a reduction in the endless debate over the effectiveness of militancy.

The public arguments over that question have been focused mostly on the United Auto Workers and the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Many auto workers, and some top leaders of the UAW, are concerned that the desire for labor peace and fear of losing a strike may pressure the union into accepting an auto industry contract that does less for the workers than it might if the union adopts an even stronger, more militant stance in current negotiations.

The most publicized current intra-union argument over union militancy has come out of the continuing strike by dissidents in the United Food and Commercial Workers Local P-9 against Hormel Co. in Austin, Minn.

No Correct Answer

The parent union, the UFCW, reached an agreement with Hormel that Local P-9 leaders charged was a “sellout.”

Another example of the debate over union militancy came recently during and after the UFCW’s now-completed contract negotiations with the retail food industry in Southern California.

The fundamental problem in all these debates is that there is no correct answer to a question like this:

Would the 65,000 supermarket workers in Southern California have won better wages and job conditions in their contract if all eight UFCW locals--not just two--had adopted a tougher bargaining position and seriously threatened a strike?

Michael Straeter, president of UFCW Local 1442 in Santa Monica, and Thomas J. Vandeveld, head of Local 135 in San Diego County, insist that the workers could have won a much better contract had it not been for “cowardice” and “weak-kneed leadership” of officers in the other six UFCW locals and top international officers who were involved in the negotiations.

Straeter said that if the local and international leaders had supported a strike that he and Vandeveld had proposed, “we would have obtained an even better (contract) than we did. But they (the other union leaders) simply didn’t have the courage.”

He added that officers of the other locals and the international “just wanted to get a settlement at any cost. They don’t seem to remember that the labor movement was built on militancy, not accommodation with management.

Matter of Militancy

“Too many union leaders these days seem more interested in the size of their golf scores than the size of their contract gains.”

Bunk, retorted Dave Barry, UFCW regional director and an international vice president, who said: “These two local presidents are just trying to increase their own importance by putting down their colleagues.”

Barry said that with the help of other local leaders, including John C. Sperry, head of Local 324, and Ricardo Icaza, head of Local 770, the union won “a big victory for UFCW members.”

He is convinced that more militancy would have brought grief for the workers, not more money or better contract terms.

But the truth is, none of the union leaders really knew--or knows now--what would have resulted from more militancy, because far too much contract negotiating is based on bluffing--a euphemism for lying.

Management often says, deceptively, that the workers can strike till hell freezes over and would not get another dime. The employees, for their part, often say they will strike an equally long time if management doesn’t improve its contract offer. And the workers are usually no more sincere than management.

But the bluffing usually results in compromises, More than 95% of all contract negotiations without a strike or lockout.

When the company guesses wrongly that the union is bluffing about a strike, it can result in hefty corporate losses.

Likewise, if the workers and their union negotiators make a bad guess, the workers can lose badly. That happened at General Dynamics in San Diego last month. More than 3,500 members of the International Assn. of Machinists struck for more that four weeks and finally went back to work after accepting the same contract terms they had rejected before the walkout began.

What is needed is joint decision making by labor and management, an end to bluffing, and an honest disclosure by the companies of their true financial condition and prospects so that both sides can negotiate contracts based on facts, not on guesses about the “bottom line.”

Until such basic changes come, unions are fortunate that the most serious internal fights they are having now are over the effectiveness of militancy.

Remember, the dissension within labor now seems like a love-fest compared to earlier times. In the 1950s, for instance, a dozen major unions affiliated with the old Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO) were kicked out of that labor federation by its leaders after lengthy, bitter labor trials on charges that the unions were dominated by Communists.

There were equally furious battles in the old American Federation of Labor (AFL) over alleged corruption in some of its affiliates. And when the two federations merged in 1955 into the AFL-CIO, they continued the purge of unions allegedly dominated by organized crime, including the Teamsters.

There is nothing like those devastating union wars going on today. Even today’s rhetoric is, relatively, gentle.

Unions still have serious problems, but fortunately the depth and breadth of their internal dissension today doesn’t compare to their internal battles of the past.

Heston Completes a 180-Degree Turn

Actor Charlton Heston has an increasingly harsh view of unions, which is unfortunate because he was an eloquent spokesman for organized labor in his early years as an active member of the Screen Actors Guild and as its president from 1965 to 1971

The change in Heston’s views of unions now seems complete. In an interview the other day, he contended that “Big Labor has little to do with meeting the needs of individual union members.” He is convinced that the AFL-CIO wants to create “a Big Labor Party,” and he wants SAG to disaffiliate from the labor federation.

He fumes about the “radicalization” of SAG, citing as his idea of “radical” the union’s financial support of the air traffic controllers after they went on strike in 1981. And he has become the nation’s best-known advocate of anti-union “right to work” laws.

There was a time when Heston was not only a charming, rich and famous film star, as he still is, but was also a liberal Democrat. He campaigned for President John F. Kennedy, and even now proudly recalls walking with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the historic Civil Rights March of 1964.

Today, though, he complains about “reverse discrimination” against whites, is a devoted admirer and friend of the conservative President Reagan and is as eloquent a spokesman against unions as he once was for them.

His views about labor and politics began changing in the late 1960s, and his more and more conservative opinions gained wide attention in the early 1980s when he engaged Ed Asner, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, in an often vitriolic debate about SAG’s role in politics. Heston wants SAG to stay out entirely.

Then he did question the value of SAG membership in the “House of Labor,” as the AFL-CIO is sometimes called. But he suggested only that SAG reconsider the merits of affiliation with the federation. He did not advocate an open break with the AFL-CIO.

But now he says SAG is “being treated as an errand boy for the AFL-CIO” that uses the fame of many of its members to “help meet Big Labor’s agenda, and we should get out.”

Patty Duke, current SAG president, and the union’s other officers, show no signs of adopting Heston’s views of labor or of taking his misguided advice.