LABOR / LOST BARGAINING CHIP : Workers Fear Losing Jobs to Replacements in Strikes

For years, organized labor has complained that its power is being slowly and effectively destroyed by the mounting number of companies that hire permanent replacement workers as soon as a strike begins.

While federal labor law guarantees a worker’s right to strike, the strategy of using permanent replacements often amounts to indirectly firing strikers. Once a strike ends, there may be only a few job openings left for the returning workers--a threat that management pointedly makes during contract negotiations.

The legal precedent for this practice dates back more than a half-century to a 1938 Supreme Court ruling. Yet it was not until President Ronald Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers en masse in 1981 and ordered them replaced with new hires that American businesses began to follow suit.

Previously, employers had been far more likely to hire short-term strikebreakers with the general understanding that employment would last only as long as the strike did. Common wisdom held that hiring permanent replacements was simply too messy--it would escalate the violence of a strike, alienate customers and anger unionized supply companies, to say nothing of the personal problems involved in the wholesale replacement of a work force.

But as the proportion of unionized workers in the United States continued to drop, and as competitive pressures heightened, the political cost of hiring replacements became an acceptable risk to business. A congressional study of seven unions found that while strikes in those unions dropped by 50% between 1980 and 1987, the number of strikers replaced by permanent workers rose 300%.

This trend has created a series of ripples dramatically affecting everyday relations between labor unions and management. Workers are far more fearful of striking. The number of strikes involving 1,000 or more workers, which ranged from 200 to 400 a year from the end of World War II through the 1970s, has averaged only 60 a year since 1982.

The erosion of labor’s most effective tool made it easier for American businesses to win unprecedented demands for wage and benefit concessions during the past decade.

“The strike is no longer an economic tool,” admits Robert McGlotten, the AFL-CIO’s legislative director.

Today, strikes are likely to occur only in cases of extreme worker outrage. That’s what happened at Greyhound Lines Inc., where drivers had accepted sharp wage cuts in their 1983 and 1987 contracts, only to find that the new owner, Fred G. Currey, wanted another wage freeze this year.

Nine thousand drivers and other workers struck on March 2. Greyhound beat them to the punch. A month before the old contract expired, the company placed help-wanted ads in newspapers in 36 cities, received more than 5,000 applications and began training courses.

Greyhound kept its buses running, but at an enormous cost. Unable to pay its bills, it filed for protection from creditors under the federal bankruptcy code this week. Strikers may eventually win the battle, but whether they will have a bus company to return to is another question.

Greyhound is typical of the life-or-death scenario that grows out of contemporary strikes. Unions, no longer able to make a short-term economic dent on an employer who chooses to hire replacement workers, follow a long-term strategy, trying to hold out long enough to drive management out, sometimes hiring investment bankers to try to help them take over weakened companies through existing employee stock ownership programs.

In Washington Wednesday, organized labor’s few remaining congressional partisans fired their first shot in what figures to be a years-long effort to amend the National Labor Relations Act and strengthen labor’s hand.

A U.S. Senate subcommittee on labor held a hearing on a bill by Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) to ban the hiring of permanent replacement workers during a strike. It also would mitigate the impact of a Supreme Court decision last year that gave preferential seniority to strikers who crossed a picket line and returned to work.

Business lobbyists sharply oppose the proposal, saying it would allow unions to hold them hostage during a strike. They clearly have the upper hand. National labor leaders believe it may take years to build a constituency for passage. Emotionally, however, the striker-replacement bill has touched a strong chord throughout labor.

“It is pure double talk to say that although workers can’t be discharged for striking, the worker can be permanently replaced,” United Auto Workers President Owen Bieber testified at Wednesday’s subcommittee hearing.

“It is the right to strike that makes collective bargaining work. . . . Without the protected right to withhold services, workers would be forced to accept whatever is offered,” Bieber said. “That’s not collective bargaining.”