Why Cheers for a Polish Union, Scorn for Ours?

“Bush goes to Poland and embraces labor leaders over there, yet he won’t give us the time of day,” said a striking Eastern Airlines pilot the other day.

A West Virginia coal miner, on strike since April, echoed him: “Our government will stand up for the rights of people in Poland, but when it comes to the coal fields of Appalachia, they turn their backs.”

U.S. union workers, in other words, are asking why Americans who cheer Poland’s Solidarity trade union and the recent victory of Soviet coal miners, cross picket lines to fly Eastern Airlines here at home.

With declining membership, U.S. unions are embattled. But it’s the same in every Western country. In France, unions represent less than 16% of the work force, roughly the U.S. level. In Britain, union membership “will continue to decline in the 1990s,” says a report by the Trades Union Congress, the British equivalent of the AFL-CIO. In Japan, union membership has gone from 35% of the work force to 26% and the trend is down, as it is in Italy and West Germany.

Yet what is going on is not the decline of labor but the culmination of its success over the last half-century in the Western economies--and widespread rejoicing at signs of such progress appearing in the East. If we look at 50 years of change for U.S. labor, it will tell us a lot about what lies ahead for the East and the West, too.

Workers Are Different

Today, Americans cheer Solidarity and other Soviet bloc unions because they see them as representatives of all the people in those societies. Fifty years ago, they cheered U.S. union efforts to establish decent wages and working conditions for Americans.

In the 1930s, when industrial workers made up one-third of the U.S. work force, a steel worker or a coal miner earned 20 cents an hour. That meant they worked an hour and a half to earn the price of a pound of ham, and another hour and a half for a dozen eggs. (Today the rough equivalent is seven to eight minutes each for the ham and the eggs.) Moreover, their pay was comparatively low--one-fifth to one-seventh that of white-collar workers or professionals such as engineers. (Today the gap, if there is one, is much narrower).

U.S. industrial workers were becoming a proletariat, a working class in the style of the European countries that were then falling under fascist or communist dictatorships.

To prevent that from happening here, the New Deal Administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt was determined to lift wages and living standards. The unions, legally recognized by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, became the mechanism of that reform.

And they succeeded admirably. Practically every reform the unions advocated has become law in Western countries--pay, pensions, hours of work. “Today, even if companies are non-union, their wages and policies are influenced by unions,” notes Harley Shaikin, a labor expert at UC San Diego.

But with success has come a shift of issues, from a living wage to better living. In the telephone workers’ strike against the Bell companies, and even the bitter coal miners’ strike against Pittston Co., the issue is whether employees should share in paying rising medical costs. That’s an issue in which both sides have a common interest: adequate medical care, economically priced.

And the workers are different. Industrial workers now comprise less than 20% of the labor force; service workers from lawyers and engineers to office cleaners and home repairers account for more than 70%. Such workers are hard to unionize, either because they work in thousands of small companies or because they see their work as more personal than collective. A 1950s attempt to form an engineers union quickly fizzled on professional pride.

Finally, the world economy has reduced unions’ ability to set wages within one country. Producers of metallurgical coal in Australia, Brazil and even Poland say as much as the United Mine Workers about the economics of Pittston’s coal mines. In industries like airlines, terms are dictated by deregulation. “Often workers are unconvinced unions can achieve anything,” says the British trade union report.

The fact is Western economies now stress self-reliance. From economies of groups and social classes half a century ago, the Western democracies are evolving--with admitted flaws and shortfalls--economies geared to individual choice.

And that is the road Poland is starting out on today. It takes a Polish worker 2 1/2 hours to make the price of a pound of stewing beef, but his first problem is not the money. It is the fact that the beef won’t be there, that members of his own government will have taken all the scarce beef for themselves. The Soviet miners went on strike for soap--the system won’t give its people the simple dignity of soap.

The East starts from a long way back. But as Poland’s new prime minister, Solidarity’s Tadeusz Mazowiecki, said, “We must reject the feeling of hopelessness and helplessness. We must believe that life will be better in Poland.”

Across 56 years you could almost hear an echo of “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”