NEWS ANALYSIS : Greyhound Strike Becomes Fertile Field for Violence

To expect that one dependent upon his daily wage for the necessities of life will stand peacefully by and see a man employed in his stead is to expect too much.

--Industrialist Andrew Carnegie

“Why take it out on the passengers?” Mark Lawson demanded last week after somebody fired a small-caliber rifle at a Greyhound bus that was carrying him and 50 other people between Roanoke and Christiansburg, Va.

That question is being asked with increasing desperation in the wake of 21 reported bus-sniping incidents--two of which have caused injuries to passengers--during the 3-week-old strike by 9,000 Greyhound drivers and other members of the Amalgamated Council of Greyhound Locals.

If the polarized history of American labor relations is any judge, no one is likely to find a satisfactory answer.

Greyhound, echoing generations of employers who view organized labor as a “cartel” that uses strike violence to keep wages artificially high, claims the shootings are orchestrated by union leaders to discourage ridership.

The Greyhound locals, echoing generations of union leaders who believe much strike violence is provoked by management, claim the shootings are the work of a handful of “fruitcakes,” as one Los Angeles striker described them.

However, according to the few academics who have studied patterns of strike violence, there is little reason to be surprised that the Greyhound strike has grown so nasty. Although no more than 5% to 10% of strikes involve violence to people or property, according to various estimates, the nature of the Greyhound strike makes it a virtual breeding ground for an eruption.

The strikers--unable to slow down the pace of replacement hiring and unable to draw their employer back to the negotiating table--suffer from an intense “vulnerability” that classically motivates most strike violence, said Michael Wallace, an Ohio State University sociology professor who co-authored an article on strike violence to be published later this year in the American Journal of Sociology.

Dispassionate observations like Wallace’s are rarely part of a strike. Strike violence seems to defy such analysis because it traditionally takes place in war-like settings in which the propaganda arms of management and labor struggle for public sympathy.

Wallace and co-author Don Sherman Grant said strikes become violent because unions exist in “ambiguous circumstances.” In contrast to “outsider” groups seeking political recognition, such as 1960s student demonstrators, unions are “weak insiders”--part of the system but always at risk of losing ground.

Unions, which have won only marginal public acceptance as a vital institution, cannot afford to employ violence in an offensive manner without “alienating allies and sympathizers,” Wallace and Sherman said. “However, if their position within the system weakens to the point that past gains are jeopardized,” or if “the union’s very existence is jeopardized,” violence may be employed by frustrated union members.

Wallace said the Greyhound strike meets virtually every test of such a scenario:

* It involves workers who can be relatively easily replaced, as opposed to auto workers or aerospace machinists, whose training is more extensive and specialized.

* It involves an employer who has continued operating, the tactic “most likely to provoke a violent response.” Greyhound has been hiring permanent replacements, not merely strikebreakers. As a result strikers may not get their jobs back unless the National Labor Relations Board upholds an unfair labor practices complaint. By contrast, the last time Greyhound was struck in 1983, its owners responded slowly and were forced to shut the system down entirely for two weeks before gradually resuming operation with replacements.

* The people who pose the most direct threat to the union--the 1,100 replacement drivers and a far smaller number of union drivers who have crossed the picket line--are spread across the country, rather than concentrated at a single work site. That creates unlimited potential for attacks on isolated targets.

* The longer a strike is prolonged while the company stays open, the worse the union’s chances look. As the strike entered its fourth week Friday, Greyhound was showing little enthusiasm for resuming negotiations, and many strikers had already been forced to seek part-time jobs to support themselves.

* Strikers were on the defensive even before they struck. Their union had accepted wage cuts of 8% and 23% in the 1983 and 1987 contracts in response to company pleas that Greyhound could not survive in a deregulated market unless it cut fares. The current strike came when workers demanded some of the money back.

* Strikers have suffered the only fatality of the strike. Veteran driver Robert Waterhouse was killed on the second day of the strike when a bus driven by a replacement worker pinned him against the wall at a bus depot in Redding. No criminal charges have yet been filed against the driver.

Neil N. Bernstein, a labor law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, suggested that the shooting at buses is a last-ditch effort to discourage what he called “a stampede” of picket-line crossing by union drivers.

“If it hadn’t been for people shooting at buses, you would have had a substantial amount of (crossing) by now,” he said. “That’s what’s really holding the strike together. That’s what in my mind makes the whole thing very troublesome.”

Bernstein said a 1985 Supreme Court ruling allowing union members to resign from their union during a strike and return to work without having to pay heavy union fines took away a union’s traditional power over its membership. “The unions have no legal recourse to save their integrity and their supporters’ jobs,” he said. “The only thing they can do is resort to illegal tactics. . . . It’s a clear sign that the system has broken down.”

That Supreme Court ruling is only one of a variety of rulings by courts and the National Labor Relations Board in the last decade that have weakened the institutional power of unions. These changes, along with more aggressive tactics on the part of employers--including the hiring of replacement workers instead of temporary strikebreakers--are responsible for a drastic decrease in the frequency of strikes. They are also responsible, organized labor leaders say, for considerable frustration.

Greyhound passengers, many of whom continue to ride the strike-plagued system because they cannot afford alternatives, have been relatively lucky. Although many of the shots have pierced bus windows, the only serious injuries occurred March 11 when glass and bullet fragments hospitalized seven passengers on a bus near Jacksonville, Fla. So far only one union member has been arrested. He has been charged with shooting at a bus in Connecticut.

As a brief attempt at renewed negotiations fell apart last week, both sides in the strike portrayed themselves as victims of intentional violence.

Greyhound executives flatly accused union leaders of sanctioning “acts of terrorism,” ranging from the shootings to nearly 50 bomb threats. Union leaders accused Greyhound’s replacement drivers of running their buses into nearly 50 bus-terminal pickets. Greyhound said it would not talk to union negotiators until the shooting stopped. Union leaders said they had condemned the violence and called Greyhound’s demand a dishonest justification for the company’s intransigence.

James Fox, professor of criminology at Northeastern University, said union members who commit violence during strikes “aren’t necessarily violence-prone, but given the right conditions they can justify violence, the same way we rationalize it in wartime.

“Scabs are the enemy. Where the usually violent person is more expressive--violence makes him feel good, he gets a feeling of control, of power--this kind of (strike) violence is instrumental violence. It comes from what criminologists call an appeal to a higher loyalty.”

Robert Bleiweiss, a Calabasas union consultant, said he was offended at the suggestion made frequently by opponents of unions that unions are particularly prone to violence.

“Violence is an integral part of the American psyche,” he said. “We talk a good game about being pacifistic, and nonviolence is very much in the vocabulary. But when you examine any era in American history, when people want something passionately enough, they fight for it. It’s unfair to say that just labor unions do this. Violence in America is a cultural thing. We send our children to movies at age 6 and they learn it’s perfectly all right to carry a gun and use it before the end of the movie.”

Management lobbyists, led by the anti-union National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, have long insisted that changes in federal law are needed to crack down on strike violence. They have pushed unsuccessfully for a bill that would make strike violence punishable by laws covering extortion.