A Belief That the Worst Has Passed Sets Mood for AFL-CIO Convention : Labor: ‘Solidarity’ is the official theme and a speech by Polish union hero Lech Walesa the anticipated highlight at the biannual meetings.

Officially, the theme of this week’s AFL-CIO biannual convention is “Solidarity,” a testament to increased unity between America’s unions and to a long awaited convention speech by Polish labor hero Lech Walesa scheduled for today.

But a more pervasive, less catchy sentiment is also making the rounds. It was on display at a pre-convention reception, where a huge signboard spelled out the message: “We deflected the worst that business and government could muster,” it boasted. “They tried to kill the workers’ movement. We were wounded but we rose to fight again.”

In other words, goes this line of thought, the worst of the labor movement’s problems have passed, and what is left of the shrinking movement is being consolidated into a stronger, more militant core.

Labor is now “tougher in spirit” and “more united . . . than it has been for at least a half-century,” AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland said in the convention’s keynote speech Monday to 765 delegates from 80 federation unions, representing a membership of nearly 14 million workers. “We will not go away quietly.”

Such brave vows have been heard before at AFL-CIO conventions through the 1980s as organized labor tried desperately to pull out of a downward spiral. The spiral included significant membership losses due to layoffs and lax organizing, concessions due to threats of plant closures, unfavorable court rulings and the public relations nightmare that comes from being labeled a mere “special interest” group. One of the most publicized losses occurred in July, when workers at a new Japanese-owned auto plant in Tennessee voted against unionizing.

This time, however, labor leaders believe that a variety of circumstances make their optimism more concrete.

For one thing, while union membership nationwide is continuing to fall, virtually all major unions are, for the first time, under the AFL-CIO banner. The latest union to reaffiliate, the United Mine Workers, returned last summer after a four-decade absence.

In addition, labor leaders feel they are winning converts to their prolonged campaign of warning that the American economy is too dependent on short-term profits and heavy debt. Last month’s deep drop in the stock market focused attention on what some analysts consider to be an excess of poorly planned takeovers. Labor contends that layoffs brought about through mergers and leveraged buy-outs have cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Organized labor, Kirkland said Monday, stands “as a rallying point of resistance to this madness.”

Alluding to the recent congressional furor over anti-flag-burning legislation, Kirkland said the “real flag-burners” are business “sharks” who “have discovered how to buy a company with its own money and credit, turn equity into debt, strip assets and saddle the burden of servicing that debt on the back of a shrunken and weakened work force. They finance these deals by erecting a junk-bond tower of Jello whose every wiggle makes Wall Street quake.

“The bills are coming due and the ticking time bombs are going off,” Kirkland said, adding: “It is the morning after in America”--a twist on former President Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign theme of 1984.

In an appearance that has been awaited for years, Walesa today will accept the George Meany Human Rights Award. The AFL-CIO bestowed the award on him eight years ago but could never present it because Walesa could not leave Poland without fear of not being able to return.

Labor leaders hope to profit from his week of appearances in the United States, which includes an address to Congress Wednesday, by emphasizing the connection between Poland’s Solidarity union and the wave of political reform sweeping Eastern Europe.

Labor leaders are taking pains to note the role the AFL-CIO played in keeping alive Solidarity, led by Walesa, after the Polish government banned the union in 1981. American unions sent $5 million in money, equipment and food to Solidarity, which later grew into a political party that today runs Poland’s government.

It has long grated on American labor leaders that “our government’s fervent support of workers rights disappears when the workers are within our own borders,” as a resolution drafted for this convention by the AFL-CIO’s executive committee puts it.

Perhaps, Kirkland said Monday, “American labor’s movement toward democracy in the world will provide a new lesson for Americans regarding the role of trade unions in promoting and preserving freedom in our own country.”

After eight years of bitterness toward the Reagan Administration, convention delegates on Monday welcomed President Bush’s labor secretary, Elizabeth Hanford Dole, in a relative love fest. Dole told delegates she had found “inspiration” in Kirkland’s past words. Kirkland praised Dole for her recent appointment of a “super-mediator” to settle a seven-month-old strike by the mine workers union against Pittston Coal in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky.

From labor’s perspective, Reagan was a zero on a scale of zero to 10, while Bush is a 4, the labor federation’s director of legislation, Robert McGlotten, said in an interview. Bush is expected this week to sign a compromise bill increasing the minimum wage and will address the convention Wednesday--something Reagan never did.

Bush is facing another decision critical to labor. Congress has sent to him a bill to create a blue-ribbon panel to recommend solutions to the eight-month-old strike by Eastern Airlines pilots, machinists and flight attendants. The President has previously indicated he opposes government involvement in such disputes.

To the AFL-CIO, the Pittston and Eastern strikes have become symbols of what labor believes is unprecedented corporate hostility toward unions. At Pittston, the coal company cut off retirement benefits, saying it could not afford them because of the pressure of foreign competition. At Eastern, the airline laid off thousands of employees, cut wages and then, once the strike was called, sought protection from creditors under federal bankruptcy law, warding off the financial impact of the strike.

Another strike of symbolic importance is the six-week-long work stoppage by Boeing’s 57,000 machinists. After a decade of fights with struggling corporations demanding give-backs, the Boeing strike pits an extremely profitable company against a union that is demanding a larger share of the pie.

“Boeing comes closest to the traditional effort by a union to wrest from a healthy company some of the profits the workers have helped create,” said the AFL-CIO’s secretary-treasurer, Thomas Donahue, in an interview. “The worst of our experience with concessionary bargaining . . . is hopefully over.”

Still, for all the hopefulness that will sprout this week, there is the problem of membership. Total union membership in the United States is 17 million, about 17% of the national work force, according to the latest Department of Labor survey. In private industry, only 13% of the work force is unionized, compared to 37% of the government work force.

The AFL-CIO convention report says that 13.5 million of the unionized workers belong to member unions. That is an increase of about 800,000 from the last convention report in 1987, but it includes 1.1 million Teamsters, who reaffiliated with the federation two years ago and were not counted in the last report.

Not counting the Teamsters, membership in other AFL-CIO unions dropped by 307,000 in the past two years to about 12.3 million--the lowest figure since the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merged in 1955. The federation lost 649,000 members between 1983 and 1985 and another 407,000 members between 1985 and 1987.

The only major unions reporting significant membership gains were the Laborers International, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

More membership losses will occur at auto plants. General Motors last month notified workers that new shifts in vehicle production are likely to lead to the closing of several unspecified North American plants, and Chrysler Corp. earlier this month announced it was laying off nearly 3,600 workers at plants in St. Louis and Detroit. United Auto Workers officials have condemned both announcements as skirting job-security agreements