Unions’ Future Questioned After Summer of Setbacks
The crisis atmosphere was palpable around the Drake Hotel here last week, as top union officers found themselves muttering under their breaths as they walked out of the closed summer meeting of the AFL-CIO’s executive council.
The AFL-CIO’s leadership had just been listening to the worsening reports coming back from labor’s front lines: one presentation on the disastrous Eastern Airlines strike, followed by an equally grim update on the coal miners’ strike against Pittston Co.’s Eastern mines.
The news was all bad, and the union officers were thankful only that they didn’t have to hear more of the same from United Auto Workers President Owen Bieber.
“All I can say is thank God Owen didn’t give a presentation on Nissan,” one union leader said to another as they left the meeting. “That would have really been a disaster.”
This is the summer of Big Labor’s discontent. In industry after industry, highly publicized showdowns with management have left organized labor defeated and shaken.
Perhaps the most embarrassing defeat of all occurred late last month at Nissan, where Bieber’s UAW was routed in its attempt to organize the Japanese auto maker’s 2,400 non-union production workers. Despite an intensive 18-month campaign by the union, workers at Nissan’s huge assembly complex in Smyrna, Tenn., voted by a 2-1 ratio against joining the UAW.
The loss at Nissan, which received worldwide media attention, not only set back labor’s efforts to organize the rapidly expanding Japanese manufacturing presence in this country--analysts say it has also raised new and broader concerns that American workers have become turned off by unions, increasingly viewing them as less of a help than a hindrance in the modern workplace.
Many labor specialists believe that the union movement’s traditional organizing and bargaining methods--forged in the crucible of the Great Depression--seem badly out of date to workers raised in an era of a highly mobile work force, international competition and managements that have become far more sophisticated in the ways they deal with employees.
“A lot of people just feel that labor unions can’t do anything for them any more,” said Raymond Hilgert, a labor analyst at Washington University in St. Louis.
“What unions are not offering is up-to-date concepts that appeal to workers,” added Homer Deakins, an anti-union labor lawyer whose firm helped Nissan defeat the UAW in Smyrna.
“They are still pushing the 1930s issues.”
American labor leaders, of course, dispute that unions are in the throes of a permanent decline. They argue that key demographic trends--including the growth in the number of women and Latinos in the work force, groups that tend to be far more pro-union than white males--bode well for increased unionization in the future. They point also to a 1988 poll by the Gallup Organization that found public approval of unions to be at its highest point since 1981.
“In my view, we are in the early stages of a labor renaissance in the United States,” asserted Philip Comstock, executive director of the Wilson Center for Public Research, which conducts union-sponsored polls of workers during organizing drives.
“Every poll I’ve seen shows that many millions more workers want to join labor unions than are members today,” AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland added in a news conference here. “And we want to take advantage of that.”
Kirkland and others counsel patience; they note that organizing drives are rarely successful on the first vote. It took years, for example, for the UAW to organize Ford and General Motors in the 1930s.
“We are not short of breath,” he insisted.
Yet, outside observers see little evidence to support the AFL-CIO’s optimism. In fact, almost every available statistic shows that the labor movement has been unable to reverse the erosion in its membership and influence that began in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Unions now represent just 16.8% of American workers, down from 30% just 20 years ago, and union membership has stagnated at about 17 million during a decade in which the labor force has undergone explosive growth, climbing over the 100 million mark for the first time.
Such a dramatic loss of economic and bargaining clout has further convinced workers today that unions can do little to help--especially when they see labor forced to agree to steep wage concessions or risk disastrous strikes such as those at Eastern or Pittston.
Even AFL-CIO officers concede that many workers now believe that the potential benefits of joining a union do not outweigh the risk that management will simply shift its work overseas or to a non-union site. At the same time, union leaders charge, federal labor regulators move so slowly that workers feel they have little protection against companies that seek to delay or ignore union victories.
“I think there is a heightened fear among workers today of management retribution” for attempting to unionize, said Dick Wilson, director of organizing for the AFL-CIO. “There’s no question that is a major obstacle to organizing.”
In fact, unions now mount only about half as many organizing elections as they did a decade ago, according to the National Labor Relations Board.
“Non-union workers today see unions as almost irrelevant to them,” said David Sirota, chairman of Sirota, Alper & Pfau, an independent New York-based consulting firm that does extensive polling and survey work among employees of major corporations.
Improved labor relations at many corporations also have lessened worker interest in unions, Sirota and other researchers have found. As employee involvement programs have spread throughout American industry, management has been able to usurp one of the traditional functions of the labor union--providing a channel through which workers can voice their grievances.
Although in some industries--most notably the domestic auto industry--workers have rebelled against such employee involvement programs, they have generally led to reduced tension in the workplace, Sirota said.
“Most non-union workers we interview say they don’t need a union, in part because management has gotten better and more clever in their basic policies of how they treat workers,” Sirota said.
Treats Workers Well
“There is a reason, after all, that a company like IBM has 200,000 workers in this country that are all non-union,” he added. “IBM is not a vicious company with union busters. Their game is treating people well.”
Such practices clearly worked at Nissan. The popularity of the company’s Japanese-style worker-involvement programs, including an employee peer review process for workers threatened with being fired, helped turn the tide against the UAW.
During the organizing drive, Nissan successfully mounted an internal media campaign that sought to convince workers that they were part of “one team” that would only be splintered into two by a union. The pitch found a receptive audience--Nissan, following a practice gaining increasing acceptance among large corporations, had screened its employees before hiring them to determine their attitudes on labor unions.
“The company is giving me everything I need,” Nissan assembly line worker Farron Hendrix said at the time of the election in Smyrna. “I get a leased car, they’ve got an employee recreation center and a swimming pool. They treat me like a movie star.”
Indeed, treating employees fairly seems to be paying off much better than head-busting for companies interested in getting rid of unions.
“Pepsi has changed, they are more of a people-oriented company now,” said Gary Peshle, a route salesman for Pepsi-Cola, who voted last week to decertify his Teamsters local and revert to non-union status. “It used to be that management cracked a whip, and we had nothing but turmoil for five years with the union. But now management has more of an attitude where they ask us about things first.”
“The only people that were nasty here were the union people,” added Joan Bayan, a credit union loan officer who recently voted to decertify the UAW.
Still, as labor leaders wryly recall, the union movement’s obituary has been written many times before.
There are, in fact, several bright spots for the labor movement.
Perhaps most notably, organized labor--despite criticism by analysts who say it has refused to change--is finally taking the first fitful steps toward appealing to the needs of workers in the service sector, where virtually all of the job growth is now occurring in America.
Aggressive organizing among service and clerical workers has led to skyrocketing membership in the Service Employees International Union, for example. The union now represents 925,000 workers, up from only 250,000 20 years ago; it has just organized 3,000 janitors in downtown office buildings in Los Angeles, as well as 15,000 home health care workers throughout Los Angeles County.
Service Employees President John Sweeney says that the union has learned to target its organizing pitches to the specialized needs of workers in new types of service sector jobs.
For health care professionals, for instance, it seeks to bargain for better medical equipment and reduced patient loads. And, to appeal to its large numbers of women members, the union emphasizes that it can win improved child care benefits, flexible work schedules, better protection against sexual harassment and improved health insurance.
“The reason we organized was because we used to get $3.74 an hour with no benefits, no holidays and no paid vacations,” Los Angeles home health care worker Gabrielle Antolovich said.
“There is no question that there is a fear of organizing among service sector workers,” Sweeney said. “But we think that our success will depend on our flexibility to change the issues on which we organize.”
Researchers Leslie Eringaard and Tracy Shryer contributed to this article.
