Creativity Needed to Stem Unions’ Decline

Lane Kirkland, the country’s top labor leader, has been calling for repeal of the National Labor Relations Act, the federal law that did more than any other to promote the spectacular growth of unions from the 1940s into the 1960s.

Angered by the pro-management way that the law has been administered since President Ronald Reagan took office nearly nine years ago, the AFL-CIO president suggests abolishing it even though the 1935 measure was written specifically to encourage the development of unions to offset the enormous power of corporations over individual workers.

The law, which is administered by the National Labor Relations Board, never achieved that balance, and unions now represent an ever-diminishing proportion of the work force.

Too often, though, unions use their legitimate complaints about the pro-management enforcement of the law as an excuse for their own failure to recruit members fast enough to keep up with the growth of the work force.

Fortunately, many union leaders, including Kirkland, are now considering what more they can do to revive their flagging organizations.

They have started a host of new programs, from low-interest credit cards to free legal advice, to try to achieve that goal. They are also recognizing that they talk too much and do too little about the crucial job of organizing new members.

An organizing institute just opened by the AFL-CIO will study ways of recruiting members and training organizers. One innovation expected to come from the institute is a program to help unions pool their resources.

For example, a union that is training apprentice organizers will be asked to let its apprentices help other unions with major campaigns, thus making on-the-job training available to the new organizers and helping other unions at the same time.

Even though some progress is being made, Kirkland contends that unions would fare better under the “law of the jungle”--that is, no law at all--than the time-consuming and costly legal roadblocks that they have been facing under the National Labor Relations Act.

Few other union leaders go as far as Kirkland, and for all his radical rhetoric, neither he nor any other officer of the 14-million-member labor federation has officially asked Congress to repeal the law.

They should not. The law provides sensible general rules of conduct for both labor and management, though changes are essential to make it work more effectively, and it must be administered more even-handedly.

Unions often seem to put off major organizing campaigns in the vague hope of electing state and federal legislators who might pass new laws to make the campaigns easier to win, one union officer contends.

William H. Wynn, president of the 1.3-million-member United Food and Commercial Workers Union, recommends forgetting that hope because it won’t be realized in the foreseeable future.

Wynn does not say, as Kirkland does, that unions would be better off without the National Labor Relations Act, but he does suggest that, whenever possible, unions should simply ignore the NLRB.

An increasing number of unions are doing just that. They are less frequently asking the NLRB to conduct elections to determine if workers in a company want to be represented by a union, a process that can be lengthy and expensive.

Instead, a union often tries to get workers to sign cards saying they want a union, and if a majority of them sign up, the union goes directly to the management and demands recognition, bypassing the NLRB entirely.

Wynn says the UFCW has organized about 100,000 members in each of the past two years, and only 10% of those new members were won through NLRB-conducted elections.

The union actually made a net gain of only 40,000 members, however, because it lost thousands of others, mostly due to store closings that resulted from corporate mergers, leveraged buyouts and consolidations.

There are several effective ways to persuade management to negotiate a contract with a union that has not gone through the NLRB election process.

One way is to make it “prohibitively expensive” for a company to continue fighting efforts to negotiate a union contract after a majority of workers have signed union authorization cards, Wynn says.

The union can use the traditional picket lines around a target company’s stores to encourage a consumer boycott. But more interesting is the newer tactic being used by the UFCW and other unions.

They ask pro-union workers at a target non-union company to look for company violations of anything from health and safety and minimum wage laws to anti-discrimination and environmental protection laws.

When violations are found--and Wynn says they usually are--the union then can use the evidence it has gathered to push government agencies for a crackdown on the violators that often results in fines against the company and more protection for workers and consumers.

That tactic could cost the target company more in fines and lost time than it could expect to save by continuing to fight unionization.

The same tactic is being used in labor disputes at unionized companies, but its effectiveness is still being tested.

Nevertheless, with their new strategies, unions are gaining members without going through NLRB elections. And when they do go through the NLRB, they are winning increasing numbers of the elections, although still not a majority of them.

The self-criticism in which unions are engaging these days seems to be helping them in a limited way, but much more innovative thinking is needed before they can again become the powerful force that they once were in this country.