Bill to Strip Firms of Strikebreaking Tool Passes House

Under the threat of a presidential veto, the House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill banning employers from permanently replacing striking workers, a management tactic that has contributed to some of the nation’s most bitter labor disputes in recent years.

The Workplace Fairness Act, the most fervent legislative goal of the 14-million-member AFL-CIO, passed 247 to 182--considerably short of the 290 votes needed to override a veto that the Bush Administration has promised for months. With even less support in the Senate, the bill’s backers may delay a vote there until next year.

Wednesday’s vote was the most significant congressional action on national labor legislation since 1978, when a bill that would have made it easier for unions to organize new members passed the House but died in a Senate filibuster. That defeat was an early signal of organized labor’s ongoing deterioration as a political force.

The most recent example of that weakness occurred this spring, when numerous Democratic congressmen traditionally loyal to labor approved the Administration’s request for broader power in negotiating a free-trade agreement with Mexico. Unions opposed the free-trade agreement, saying it would cost American jobs.

The replacement-worker bill would prohibit employers hit by a strike from offering permanent jobs as they search for workers to keep their companies operating. Business critics said restricting such companies to temporary workers would make it unduly hard for them to continue operating. They also said the change would encourage unions to call more strikes and would give unions--which now represent less than 12% of private-sector workers--power beyond their numbers.

The bill is aimed at resolving a conflict between the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which guarantees workers the right to strike once contract negotiations break down, and a 1938 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that employers could hire permanent replacements during a strike. Labor has long contended that the practice amounts to firing strikers.

That legal distinction was viewed as moot for decades because employers generally rehired strikers once a strike was settled. But in the wake of then-President Ronald Reagan’s firing of 11,400 striking air traffic controllers in 1981, an increasing number of large companies responded to strikes by immediately hiring permanent replacements.

The threat of being permanently replaced is regarded as a major reason why the number of strikes in the United States has fallen to 1,250 a year from 2,660 in the 1970s.

In a lengthy debate Wednesday, supporters of the permanent replacement bill--virtually all of them Democrats--said the use of permanent replacements has effectively robbed workers of their right to strike and has permanently poisoned many companies.