COLUMN LEFT : America Retreats on Labor Laws : The replacement of strikers not only threatens collective bargaining but erodes the notion that there is an American dream open to all.

In the coming years, Latinos increasingly will be turning to the trade-union movement to test the grand notion that America is the land of opportunity and fair play. Unless public opinion can be brought to bear upon the National Labor Relations Board to change rulings that give employers carte blanche to break strikes, Latinos may find that they are staring at an illusion.

More than two-thirds of all Latinos in this country now toil in blue-collar and service-sectors jobs. Anglo-Americans, most of them now employed in white-collar pursuits, may view trade unions as dinosaurs from the country’s smokestack past. But for most Latinos, collective bargaining is still their only hope for even a subsistence-level standard of living.

Consider the Latino representation in the following California industries, based on the 1980 census: more than 70% of farm workers, 40% of assemblers and hand-workers, one-third of laborers, more than one-fourth of cleaning and building-service workers and more than one-fifth of the food-preparation and services work force were Latino.

These are the areas in which unions can deliver the greatest benefit to Latinos. But they are also the areas in which employers have a long history of exploiting labor surpluses by ruthlessly cutting wages and benefits.

Under the pro-business climate of the Reagan Administration, employers gained a powerful ally in the National Labor Relations Board--and in turn the federal courts--to break strikes through the tactic of hiring replacement workers.

Take the recent injunction against 60 employees of the Royal Truck Body Co. in Paramount. The employees, most of them Latino, had been picketing the company for 90 days, seeking recognition for Local 1010 of the Furniture Workers Union.

While the injunction halted the union’s right to seek recognition, organizers privately admit that the strike was dead two weeks after the workers walked out when Royal hired “permanent replacements.”

Workers call permanent replacement--a tactic popularized by President Reagan when he fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981--the preferred option of employers and their union-busting law firms.

Indeed, employers have used it against Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, Greyhound Bus drivers, copper miners in Arizona and employees of the Hormel Meat Packing Co. In the case of the copper miners, the Phelps Dodge Co. changed a work force of several thousand miners from 70% Latino to 70% Anglo. In the process, Greenlee County, Ariz., went from voting Democratic to Republican.

Since the National Labor Relations Board and the courts have upheld the replacement-worker practice, about the only way to check it is if an employer fears public reaction to the basic unfairness of the tactic.

But that has rarely happened during the Reagan and Bush Administration years. The political risks of using unfair labor practices have been minimized. Also, a growing nativism toward Latinos and other minorities who seek to organize has extended the boundaries of public tolerance for union-busting tactics.

In order to restore some semblance of fair play, Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) has introduced a bill that would ban the hiring of permanent replacements and the giving of preferential seniority to strikers who cross a picket line. Fair-minded Americans should support the bill, since it is hypocritical for us to applaud the trade union movement in Eastern Europe while we have the most regressive labor laws in the industrialized world.

Under the present rules, fair labor practices are an illusion. The Century City “Justice for Janitors” campaign was won not because the strikers beat the system, but because Angelenos were horrified at seeing protesters mercilessly clubbed to the ground by L.A.’s finest.

The Royal workers were clubbed down by the NLRB and the federal courts, denied their right to organize by unfair labor laws. If changes don’t take place and workers are not given a fighting chance, Angelenos should not be surprised to see a lot more brown people, clad in red T-shirts, marching through the streets of L.A.