Negotiations Taking Optimistic Turn : Labor: Aggressive move by baseball owners reflects a trend in American management’s negotiating tactics.

In locking players out of spring training camps because they wouldn’t accept drastic contract changes, major league baseball’s owners personify the increased willingness of American businessmen to fire the first shot in labor disputes, rather than waiting for their unions to strike.

A combination of pro-employer changes in federal labor law and a growing desperation among businesses to slash labor costs no matter how it might inflame employee relations have made the lockout a more frequently used tool, according to labor lawyers and other labor observers.

The lockout--in which the employer orders union members off the premises for failing to agree to his demands for contract changes--still accounts for only 5% to 10% of all work stoppages, experts estimate. But during the last decade, in which employers dealt with their unions more aggressively than at any time in the post-World War II era, the tactic surfaced more often.

“I’ve seen a lot of threats of lockouts lately,” said Robert Cantore, a Los Angeles labor lawyer who represents unions. “I’ve been practicing 16 years and the first eight I rarely heard of the threat of a lockout. In the last eight it’s happened a lot more often than I’d like to remember.”

Said Joel P. Kelly, a Los Angeles attorney who specializes in management-side labor issues: “Lawyers are more willing to advise it as a remedy if things aren’t moving.”

The Department of Labor does not distinguish lockouts from strikes because unions and employers on occasion disagree about how a work stoppage should be classified. However the Bureau of National Affairs, a private research organization, began tracking lockouts in the mid-1980s when it noticed their number growing. It found 160 lockouts between 1983 and 1988, affecting 120,000 workers.

Total U.S. work stoppages have fallen sharply. Until 1979, there were 200 to 400 every year after World War II, affecting 1,000 workers apiece. Since 1980, the figure has plummeted from 187 to 40 in 1988, an all-time low.

However, the percentage of those stoppages attributed to lockouts is believed to have increased. In 1986, for example, the six-month lockout of 22,000 employees at USX Corp. and a five-month combination strike-lockout affecting 12,000 John Deere & Co. workers accounted for nearly half of all workdays lost to work stoppages in the nation that year.

In both cases, the companies demanded further wage and benefit cuts, elimination of annual cost-of-living adjustments or an end to restrictions on their ability to farm out work to non-union suppliers. The lockouts put two powerful unions--the United Steelworkers of America and the United Auto Workers--on the defensive.

Rulings by the courts and the National Labor Relations Board have broadened the circumstances in which employers may lock out workers.

The 1935 National Labor Relations Act did not address lockouts, and employers were hesitant to use them except in “defensive” cases, such as several companies in one industry locking out a union in retaliation for a selective strike against one of the companies.

A 1965 Supreme Court ruling, in a case in which an Ohio shipbuilding company locked out its workers, strengthened the employer’s hand by holding that an “offensive” lockout--such as the baseball owners’--was a fair labor practice.

However, the power of unions in the 1960s and ‘70s, including their willingness to strike quickly, kept lockouts in the background. So did the fact that during a lockout--unlike a strike--management risked an NLRB charge of unfair labor practices if it hired replacement workers. A lockout meant lost productivity.

One noted lockout during this period, coincidentally, occurred in major league baseball. In 1976, after negotiations on a new contract had stalemated, the owners locked the players out of spring training. Two weeks before the season was to begin, then-Commissioner Bowie Kuhn ordered the owners to open the camps. They complied, and contract negotiations eventually resumed.

Commissioner Fay Vincent has been meeting with owner and player representatives but has refrained from taking any action.

In 1986, in one of several rulings during the 1980s that has severely weakened unions against aggressive companies, the NLRB said that temporary replacement workers could be hired during lockouts.

That ruling was part of a conservative swing in labor policy in which government retreated from the notion that it should “balance the weapons” between labor and management, said Richard Briffault, a labor law professor at Columbia Law School.

Encouraged by these legal trends, and determined to cut costs to compete internationally, managers in the early 1980s became more willing to threaten a lockout or permanent plant closure as they demanded unprecedented contract concessions from unions. The technique worked, as evidenced by the dramatic decrease in strikes.

In the last few years, as some industries began to show signs of increased profit, many unions have vowed to fight any more so-called give-backs. However, this often leads to months of endless tension, rather than a work stoppage, because most unions continue in their reluctance to strike, preferring instead to keep working without a contract, using in-plant tactics such as slowdowns or after-work demonstrations to put pressure on the company.

As a pressure tactic against these newly resolute unions, management increasingly threatens to lock out workers when the contract expires or shortly after--as in the case of baseball’s labor dispute.

A month before the players’ four-year contract expired Dec. 31, the owners insisted that the new contract introduce revenue sharing, in which 48% of the owners’ revenues would go to player salaries.

The Major League Players Assn. sneered at the idea, saying it was nothing more than a disguised attempt to inhibit free agency. The players favor the current system.

Determined to land the first blow--rather than risk a player strike during midseason--the owners said flatly that they would lock players out of spring training unless the union agreed to revenue sharing and to a system that paid less experienced players on a statistical scale.

If the players’ union does not budge, the owners could legally threaten to use replacement workers--in this case, minor league ballplayers--to begin the regular season. However, the owners have not even hinted that they would use such a tactic.

Regardless of the outcome, “there’s no question that what the owners are doing parallels the more aggressive position of management in this decade,” said Lawrence Mishel, research director of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank.

The one line that employers still can’t cross involves a lockout that is ordered expressly to “bust” a union. That happened two years ago in Washington, the NLRB found, when three liquor wholesalers locked 110 union truck drivers and warehouse workers out of their jobs after the drivers refused to accept wage cuts.

The NLRB determined that the wholesalers never intended to negotiate a new contract and ordered them to pay $3 million in back wages.

One reason that lockouts remain relatively rare is that although most states withhold unemployment benefits from strikers, more than 20 states, including California, pay them to workers who are locked out by management. This costs employers because the payment of unemployment compensation affects the premium a company pays to the state unemployment trust fund.

California pays jobless benefits to locked-out workers only in cases in which the employer uses the lockout offensively as a pressure tactic. In cases in which the lockout is called after the union initiates conflict by giving notice of a strike, or by selectively striking one or more members of an association of companies, the state will not pay benefits to union members.

However, don’t expect to see any California major leaguers lining up at state Economic Development Department offices. State labor officials classify them as independent contractors who don’t qualify, regardless of whether they’re locked out because of a dispute or simply released because they can’t hit the curveball.