COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Go Ahead and Strike--Just Don’t Win : Employers hold all of the cards, and most of the Congress.

In America it’s mostly legal to go on strike. But it’s mostly impossible to win. Exercise your right to strike and the boss can hire replacement workers--known in more forthright times as scabs--immediately. If these scabs are still in place after a year they, and they alone, can vote whether to keep the union.

You can’t do much in the way of picketing, either. The law forbids interfering in any way with scabs on their way into the plant. A friend of mine who took part in a strike--ultimately victorious--against a packing house in Watsonville told me they were allowed just three pickets at the plant gate. Everyone else had to stay at least 100 yards back. Of course, the employers had plenty of highly interfering pickets--in the form of police--right by the gates.

Often the only way to win a strike, or even put some pressure on the owner, is to get other workers to support you. The law takes care of that one, too. Sympathy strikes are illegal, as are “hot cargo” strikes, meaning that workers can’t refuse to handle stuff made by scab labor. Solidarity is against the law.

Now working its way through the House of Representatives is a bill that would make it illegal for employers to hire permanent replacement workers in order to break a strike. The bill, backed by the AFL-CIO, is unlikely to get on the statute books, though it would level the playing field only slightly from the present 90-degree tilt in the employers’ favor.

Back in April, the CBS Evening News ran a story on the replacement-worker issue. It was unusual in that it eschewed politicians, lobbyists, lawyers and experts in favor of ordinary workers. Jim Gully, a New York harbor tugboat captain replaced during a strike, said crisply: “You cannot be fired for exercising your right to strike but you can be permanently replaced . . . and I’m sure the semantics of this get lost on the guy who doesn’t have a job any more.” Rick Icaza of the United Food and Commercial Workers added, “We’re the only country in the industrialized world--except South Africa--that allows the employer to terminate the employee by replacement workers.”

The tugboat company boss refused to talk to CBS, but the news story did show James Molican, a senior vice president of the International Paper Co., which had “replaced” striking workers in Jay, Me. He said, “We’ve got customers, we’ve got suppliers, we’ve got shareholders and we’ve got to continue to operate a profitable business,” which is exactly what you’d expect an employer to say under such circumstances.

Howls of rage followed the little story. Republicans with committee jurisdiction over the TV networks expressed their fury. Rep. Dick Armey (R-Tex.) denounced CBS, Dan Rather and Ray Brady for “celebrating the virtues of labor strikes.” Network officials promised Republicans they’d have their day when the bill reaches the floor of the House.

You have the right to strike, but not to win. You have freedom of speech, so long as you don’t offend business, or business’ representatives in Congress. As for media coverage of labor issues, the playing field is as tilted as the one fought on by owners and strikers.

A study commissioned by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the media watchdog group, found that in 1989, during more than 1,000 evening news broadcasts by the three main networks, little more than 2% of total air time went to all workers’ issues, including not just unions but child care, the minimum wage and workplace safety and health.

One in 20 guests on ABC’s “Nightline” represented labor, as opposed to one in three for business. The mix was just as skewed on the MacNeil/Lehrer news show, part of a regular Public Broadcasting Service lineup tumid with business and money shows. There’s no regular labor-related show on PBS and National Public Radio, another “alternative” to corporate media, does an equally wretched and cowardly job of covering labor, a term that, after all, denotes the pressing concerns of more than 100 million people in America.

In September, 1989, members of the United Mine Workers of America took over a coal-processing plant in Virginia and held it for three days. It was the first occupation of a U.S. plant since the 1937 sit-down strike by auto workers in Flint, Mich. Even though the action took place an afternoon’s car ride from Washington, none of the networks and scarcely any newspapers covered it.

U.S. news teams were covering a miners’ strike that year, in the Soviet Union. Moral: To win a strike, to get backing from members of Congress and plenty of sympathetic play in the press, do it in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union, where the price of freedom isn’t going to come out of an American businessman’s pocket.