COLUMN ONE : Finding a Dream Job in a Strike : Companies facing walkouts increasingly turn to permanent replacement workers. They find plenty willing to defy labor solidarity for more pay.

Put yourself in Sara Vasquez’s shoes. You’re 20, you live with your grandmother, you make $6 an hour working in a video store. Now--overnight--you have a chance to make $20 an hour operating a printing press at the strike-bound New York Daily News. The company will train you. It tells you the job is permanent. It says the strikers won’t come back.

A lot of cliches are swirling around New York about working-class solidarity and defending the right to strike. The 2,400 printers, drivers, mailers and journalists who are on the street are furious--they feel that they have been manipulated into striking so that cheaper, non-union people can take their places. Do you want to walk into the middle of this?

If you’re Sara Vasquez, you sure do.

“We didn’t take nobody’s job. They gave it up. If we didn’t do it, somebody else was going to,” Vasquez said the other day. “I’ve been working there since Oct. 25th and I’ve already bought my own car, and it’s pretty decent. I have a bank account. I can’t even believe it. No other job would offer this so quickly.”

Within the sagging realm of organized labor, Vasquez personifies the most dangerous and hated phenomenon: the permanent replacement worker, someone hired not merely to break a strike but to break a union.

Increasingly, American business managers confronted with a strike are offering permanent jobs to outsiders, trying to create in one fell swoop a new, less expensive work force. The strategy often wears down the resolve of strikers, causing many to drift away to other jobs rather than hold out for a settlement. The mere threat of permanent replacements often persuades unions to accept less favorable contract terms.

More than 80% of employers say they would consider hiring permanent replacements in a labor dispute, according to a recent survey of 204 businesses by the Bureau of National Affairs, a nonpartisan research organization. Managers contend that the tactic--which just a decade ago was largely regarded as too unwieldy and unpopular--is appropriate leverage in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Unions, which are pressuring Congress to outlaw the practice, say it violates the spirit of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which guarantees the right to strike without retaliation.

The strike at the Daily News has focused unprecedented attention on an issue that American labor leaders have decried for several years with little success.

At a rally of 6,000 union supporters outside the Daily News office one night last week, New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo declared that the hiring of permanent replacements “is not fair, it is not right, it is destructive of equitable collective bargaining--and it must be changed.”

The practice “can discourage, rather than encourage workers to bargain in good faith. They can well feel that management wants them to strike. Distrust begets distrust; hostility begets hostility,” Cardinal John J. O’Connor of New York’s Roman Catholic archdiocese testified the next day at a congressional hearing in New York conducted by Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), the co-author of legislation to ban companies from hiring permanent replacements.

But to Vasquez and millions of other insecure or dissatisfied workers, these are ethereal concerns, nearly irrelevant in a cutthroat economy in which the notion of job security is fast eroding and hourly wages have lost ground to inflation.

To this pool of people--a pool that is likely to grow in the coming recession--the prospect of a strike-vacated job is overwhelmingly tempting.

Which is why earlier this year, when the Daily News began running ads for permanent relacements in anticipation of a strike by its 10 unions, 17,000 people applied.

Traditionally, strikebreakers come from the ranks of the jobless and desperate, aware they will be dispatched after a strike ends. But prospective permanent replacement workers often have jobs, which they abandon because of low pay or poor promotion prospects.

“They fear being desperate,” said Robert Ross, an urban affairs professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

A generation ago these people faced a stronger social taboo. But in today’s era of overtly anti-union, lean-and-mean management, unions have become isolated from the overall economy. Union wages now average about 20% above non-union wages. Only one in eight private-sector workers belongs to a union. Fewer than half of all Americans, 49%, say they feel a “special obligation” to honor a picket line, according to a recent poll conducted for Time magazine and Cable News Network.

In New York, where 40% of the work force is unionized, unions were caught off guard by the huge turnout of potential replacement workers, said Stanley Aronowitz, a City University of New York sociology professor who specializes in labor. Even if the Daily News unions force management to settle, the replacement turnout was “a significant measure . . . of the deterioration of the position of unions in this city,” Aronowitz said.

A former truck driver who hired on as a Greyhound bus driver after Greyhound’s regular drivers struck last March rationalized his behavior by remarking on how common it had become.

“They’re breaking unions all across the country. Unions are dying,” he said while passengers boarded at the Hollywood depot.

The 51-year-old driver, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used, said he had been driving a truck off and on for 25 years but quit because the $12.79-an-hour Greyhound job paid better and allowed him to see his wife more often.

He had been a union member in other jobs but felt no loyalty to organized labor because unions “never do anything for you. They just take your money”--a complaint that rank-and-file union members often make about their locals. “The economy doesn’t support them anymore. I guess they ask too much.”

Ironically, the 6,000 striking Amalgamated Transit Union drivers that the trucker helped replace were not asking for more. They had accepted deep wage cuts in their previous two contracts--concessions Greyhound insisted were needed for the business to stay competitive--and were outraged when management demanded a wage freeze in the 1990 contract.

“Now I get home every six days, with two days off. That’s a piece of cake,” the trucker said. “You always have qualms about taking a job in a situation like this but it was worth it.”

In the eyes of labor, men and women such as these are even more hated than ordinary “scabs” because their presence often drastically prolongs a strike, or makes it impossible to settle. Unions routinely demand that all replacements be fired as part of a back-to-work agreement; management often holds out, attempting to protect the jobs of at least some replacements. Strikers are painfully aware that if they have to find work elsewhere, it is likely to be a lower-paying, non-union job.

Not surprisingly, strikes with replacement workers tend to be more prone to violence. Greyhound’s replacement bus drivers encountered numerous instances of sniper fire. A picketing striker was accidentally crushed to death by a bus driven by a replacement worker. In New York, scores of arrests have been made of both Daily News strikers and replacement workers.

Robert McGloin, 27, of Mount Vernon, N.Y., who left a fuel oil delivery job to become a delivery driver at the Daily News as soon as the strike began, said he was introduced to this reality in the middle of the night a couple of weeks ago when he stopped his truck, filled with 20,000 copies of the paper, in Bensonhurst.

“It was a pickup point for home deliverymen. As soon as I got out of the truck I got hit in the leg with a Molotov cocktail. There were about eight guys waiting. I heard ‘em throwing things; I ran. I was lucky. The jar that hit me broke but it didn’t explode,” he said. That same evening, another Daily News driver was dragged from a delivery truck and beaten and stabbed by a dozen men.

“I knew there were going to be a lot of problems,” McGloin said. “I didn’t think it was going to be this bad.”

The level of anger in the Daily News strike is particularly high because the newspapers’ unions had spent seven months working without a contract, attempting to avoid precisely the replacement scenario that is taking place.

Long before the unions’ contracts expired last spring, the Daily News sought unprecedented concessions in work rules, contending that old contracts were forcing it to pay tens of millions of dollars in unjustified labor costs. The paper sought a “management rights” clause to reduce staffing and wipe out many other jointly agreed-upon provisions that management said allowed some union workers to earn $80,000 salaries.

Like many unions, the Daily News workers were afraid to strike, fearing the newspaper would replace them. On Oct. 25, 200 drivers walked off the job to protest a minor dispute at the paper’s main printing plant in Brooklyn. Management, which had trained hundreds of replacement workers and supplied them with beepers, began bringing them in immediately. In protest, eight of the papers’ nine other unions struck. The unions contend that the newspaper manipulated the initial walkout in order to begin replacing them.

McGloin had applied in April for a Daily News job. He was given a driving test and told to sit tight. He said he had gotten tired of working for a fuel oil company, where he only made good money in winter. Today, he says he’s making $1,750 for a 60-hour week.

“I plan on making a career out of this,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere . . . the Daily News guaranteed me a permanent job. I’m pretty confident . . . I got a job as long as I want it.”

That is not always the case. The National Labor Relations Board says that employers can permanently replace “economic strikers”--workers who go on strike strictly in pursuit of higher wages or benefits. However, workers involved in strikes that the NLRB classifies as “unfair labor-practice” strikes must be given their jobs back if they ask to return to work. That is how the NLRB has classified the Greyhound strike. Often, these issues linger for years, leaving even unfair-labor-practice strikers in a state of limbo. Out of necessity they go on to other jobs, giving management a victory by attrition.

Management threats to permanently replace strikers came into fashion in the early 1980s when many industries began demanding concessions from their unions. Some were emboldened by President Ronald Reagan’s mass firing of striking air traffic controllers in 1981. Others were aware that labor’s public reputation was sagging.

The Supreme Court held as early as 1938 that companies had a right to act this way. But labor unions were such a strong force in post-World War II America that the tactic was seldom seen. Employers worried about alienating their unions and customers and angering unionized supply companies.

Exceptions began to occur in newly deregulated industries in which there was both harsh pressure to cut labor costs and a surplus of workers to replace strikers.

In 1985, when United Air Lines pilots struck to protest a proposed contract, the airline quickly declared its intention to “rebuild” with newly hired pilots.

United’s Denver training facility became a verbal battleground, with strikers trying to persuade new trainees to change their minds.

One of those in the fray was Ron Richardson, 51, who had been flying for $1,800 a month at a small Las Vegas-based airline but suddenly stood to make more than three times that much--$75,000 a year--as a United second officer.

“I gotta take my chances,” Richardson told a group of striking United pilots one night in a Denver hotel lobby. “I never made diddly-squat in my life. House payments--that’s why I’m here. I can barely make my $550-a-month rent payment.”

The strikers told him they would make his life miserable when they eventually came back to work. Richardson nodded. He’d be 60 years old--retirement age--in nine years. At $75,000 a year, “I could be miserable for nine years,” he told the strikers. “It’s still amazing you’re standing on the street and not going back to work and taking that money, ‘cause I’ve never had anything like that. Let me tell you something, it’s a whole different world out there.”

Five years later, Richardson is still a United pilot--a first officer on a United 737 based in San Francisco. The strike settlement allowed the trainees to keep their jobs.

Since the United strike, the Supreme Court has given management another powerful tool to use in fighting strikes. It held in another airline strike case that a company has the right to give preferential treatment to replacement workers. Trans World Airlines had given such workers seniority rights over union members who did not come back to work until after the strike.

Unless management is forced to pull back from such practices, said Rep. William Clay (D-Mo.), the author of the House version of legislation to outlaw permanent replacements, “I am afraid laboring people will have no alternative but to return to the streets and back alleys for redress.”

Sara Vasquez, now in her eighth week of work as a New York Daily News press woman, is not impressed.

She recognizes, she says, that the consequence of her action is to weaken organized labor. But she also recognizes that she has taken a phenomenal jump up the economic ladder, no matter how long it lasts. She and her new colleagues also boast that the newspaper’s presses are now run by six people, rather than the 14 that management said were required under union work rules.

“They had it coming,” Vasquez said of the strikers. “These guys should have just retired. They’re out there screaming their lungs out in the cold. They should be home with their wives,” she said in reference to the age of many of the paper’s veteran pressmen.

“These guys, sooner or later, are gonna croak. It’s about time they gave us a chance to get some of that cake.”