Labor Is Finding New Ways to Get Job Done : Unions: Tactics that precede or head off strikes are becoming more important than the strikes themselves.

Lost amid the big-ticket issues that dominated last week’s annual winter meeting of organized labor’s top leaders were three members of the Sheet Metal Workers International Assn. who flew here from Indiana.

They wanted to talk about a program that attempts to organize non-union sheet metal shops not by dispatching union staff organizers but by “infiltrating” the shops. Union-trained apprentices are placed in the shops, where they proselytize their colleagues into calling for a union.

This bit of strategy will never compete with labor’s delight in winning a contract last week in the Pittston Coal strike or its outrage at the stalemated Eastern Airlines strike. But ultimately, as unions struggle to redefine their place in American society, grass-roots tactics that precede or head off strikes are becoming more important than the strikes themselves.

Increasingly, the hundreds of labor leaders and union staff members who come here for the meeting of the AFL-CIO’s 35-member executive council are acknowledging that organized labor--like a weakened prizefighter who has lost much of his power to hit quick or hard--needs to fight in a craftier, more subtle manner.

The weakness that has put unions in a permanently defensive position lies not only in their continually shrinking share of America’s work force--16.4%, down from 22.1% in 1985--but also in how employers now respond to union organizing drives and strikes.

The number of workers fired during organizing drives soared in the past decade, as did cases in which striking workers were permanently replaced by strikebreakers--a practice permitted under a half-century-old Supreme Court ruling but rarely used by employers until recently.

Although the percentage of Americans who have fairly good or high opinions of labor leaders has risen substantially--to 50% from 37% in 1982--labor leaders still are less respected than any group except politicians and stockbrokers, according to poll results released last week by the Roper Organization.

What drew the most attention at the meeting was a tale of two strikes, a winner and a loser. The winner was the United Mine Workers’ contract settlement with Pittston in three Southeast states, which was hailed as a majestic 10 1/2-month, long-odds fight that brought an obstinate corporate foe to the bargaining table through a variety of innovative pressure tactics. The loser was the International Assn. of Machinists’ continuing 51-week-old strike against Eastern, rationalized now as a valiant try in which traditional strategies were simply no match for an employer skilled in aggressive anti-union techniques.

Buried in the discussions were people bringing stories of the new strategies--less dramatic but more pragmatic--intended to attract new members, avoid contract concessions and save jobs by keeping unionized companies from being sold to unfriendly owners. There was Teresa Sanchez, an officer of the Los Angeles-based California Immigrant Workers Assn., an “associate member” program designed to build affiliations with workers in non-union workplaces. The group has signed up 2,000 immigrant workers, offering them services ranging from discount credit cards and car insurance to legal aid. With ties to eight unions, the group is becoming a source of tips to union organizers about what shops are vulnerable to union drives.

There was Jack Sheinkman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, announcing a new “employee partnership fund,” the brainchild of the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Union Department. Managed by two labor-friendly investment bankers, the fund is soliciting investor interest in what managers hope will become a $200-million fund.

The fund would provide loans to unions that want to use worker stock accumulated through employee stock ownership plans to purchase majority ownership in their companies. Some unions have shown significant interest in buying companies, but they often have problems raising cash to accompany their stock.

As over-leveraged companies collapse, the ability of workers to step in and buy them will become crucial in avoiding plant closures, Sheinkman said. “Instead of sharks coming in and devouring companies and closing plants down, there’ll be a lot of opportunities for what I like to call worker ‘buy-ins,’ ” he said.

There was Sigurd Lucassen, president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, talking about the AFL-CIO’s recently opened organizing institute in Washington, D.C., which hopes to become a national clearinghouse for more sophisticated techniques, including the “blitz,” in which hundreds of organizers swarm into a community and attempt to quickly sign up a plant’s workers at their homes before management can react.

“The market demands we change our tactics,” Lucassen said.

There was Edward J. Cleary, president of the New York State AFL-CIO, describing how the leaders of numerous chapters of retired union members are preparing to launch a letter-writing drive among hundreds of thousands of retirees in Florida.

The strategy is keyed not to a labor dispute in Florida but in New York, where the Tribune Co. is attempting to squeeze new contract concessions from 10 unions at its biggest paper, the New York Daily News. The retirees are being asked to write local newspapers owned by the Tribune Co. and express their disapproval of the company’s bargaining position.

The kind of indirect pressure described by Cleary--what union leaders refer to as a “coordinated campaign”--is an attempt to compensate for the fact that a simple threat to strike carries considerably less weight than it once did.

“At Pittston and Eastern, we (organized labor) were united behind them 100% after the fact. We need to get in that position before” labor disputes end in strikes, Cleary said.

Added Lynn Williams, president of the United Steelworkers of America, “We need to find ways to put economic pressure on the other side, to balance the system.”

Many of these new ideas, still blips on a landscape that remains slow to change, are rooted in a self-critical study the AFL-CIO executive council released in 1985. It flatly stated that unions were “behind the pace of change” and had to find new ways to improve organizing techniques, communication with their members, and labor’s own public image.

The standards by which union effectiveness is judged have changed dramatically. Simply being able to negotiate a pay raise is less important in a stagnated economy. The average collective-bargaining agreement negotiated in 1989 settled for a 4% annual raise in 1990, a figure below the cost-of-living increase for the year. That was acceptable because it was a sharp increase from the 2.4% average increase workers got the last time most of those contracts were negotiated.

What most unions now find themselves fighting hardest against are employer demands for cuts in health benefits, which unions regard as the equivalent of a pay cut. The number of strikes caused by labor-management confrontations over soaring health costs tripled in the last three years, and was a prime factor behind 78% of all strikes last year, according to a report released last week by the Service Employees International Union. The union is leading a national union campaign for government-controlled health insurance.

Also changing are the types of people joining unions as the industrial sector of the economy continues to weaken, with plant-closings and layoffs undercutting union membership. This is reflected in a new Labor Department report that showed male union membership fell by 200,000 in 1989 while female membership--largely in the service sector--increased by 160,000. Male union membership has fallen 500,000 since 1985 despite the addition of 6.9 million males to the U.S. work force.

In the midst of these changes, the Pittston strike, which ended when miners ratified a settlement last week, proved heartening to labor. In addition to being that rare commodity--a success story--Pittston was chock-full of new strategies--”the best experience we’ve had yet of all the things that have been developed in the ‘80s,” steelworker leader Williams said.

The miners tried to pressure Pittston not by immediately striking but by working 14 months without a contract while staging slowdowns. When they did strike, they used massive civil disobedience, including the takeover of one mining facility, to keep themselves in the public eye. They spread pickets beyond the mines of southwest Virginia, to the Connecticut headquarters of Pittston’s corporate parent. The miners made phone calls to the home of the corporation’s chairman. They obtained support from international labor groups.

It was a visit to the coal fields last October by a delegation of the 88 million-member International Confederation of Free Trade Unions that, in the AFL-CIO’s view, embarrassed Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole into making her own trip to the coal fields and ultimately intervening in the strike.

AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland has for years refused to panic when confronted by statistical evidence of labor’s decline. He talks about the long haul. He was still talking about it last week.

“We have gone through an era in which greed and self-interest has been exalted over the collective good and the mutual progress of society. And . . . I think we have emerged from it with a high degree of solidarity,” he said. “We’ve been tempered, I think, by a period of fire and, in the net result, it’s strengthened us.”

As evidence, Kirkland pulled out one good number of his own.

The new Roper survey asked people which side they instinctively side with--labor or management--when they first hear news of a strike but know no details.

In 1981, people sided with the company, 32%-29%. Today, they side with the union, 33%-25%.

“I think public perceptions and public opinion is changing, is shifting and moving closer to reality in terms of the real equities of the case,” Kirkland said.