COLUMN ONE : Playing Hardball in Workplace : Fear of job loss runs high as global competition and recession lead some top U.S. firms to adopt a tough line. Caterpillar’s confrontation with its workers underlines trend.

The Long Beach plant where Arturo R. Vidal worked as a furniture upholsterer was so hot in the summer that he would spend his days “all wet” in his own sweat.

Just as bad, the pay was maddeningly unpredictable. Vidal, 36, claims the boss always refused to say in advance what he would get for upholstering a new type of chair or sofa. When workers complained, Vidal said, the boss would silence them by arguing that they “should be grateful because they still have work.”

At one point, the boss shot back that “you can quit if you want because tomorrow I’ll have many people standing in line” for jobs.

Such a hardball approach to employee relations is increasingly common in American business.

“The motto of the ‘90s,” said an only half-joking UC San Diego professor Harley Shaiken, is, “if you don’t like it, find another job.”

In the eyes of some observers, that trend was underscored this week when Caterpillar Inc. crushed a strike by the United Auto Workers by threatening to permanently replace about 13,000 employees who had walked off the job in Illinois. Not only that. Despite the union agreement to return to work, the company stunned employees by declaring that not all of them would be rehired.

Rising global business competition and, more recently, the recession, have spurred layoffs, shrinking pay increases and benefit cuts. Still, unionists, academics and other critics say many businesses--even some of America’s biggest and best-known companies--have been unjustifiably rough with workers.

At the same time, fears of job loss are running high among blue-collar workers and executives alike, adding self-imposed pressures to those caused by the recession and increasingly tough employers.

General Motors Corp. is singled out as one of those tough employers. Among other things, critics say, GM publicly pitted its factories and, in turn, its employees in Ypsilanti, Mich., and Arlington, Tex., against each other before announcing two months ago that the Michigan plant would close and the Arlington facility would survive.

Sears, Roebuck & Co. abruptly slashed sales commissions in March, in a move analysts say was intended to induce some experienced and relatively high-paid employees to quit.

AT&T--once; lovingly known as “Ma Bell” among its employees--has transferred hundreds of workers around the country over the last year, only to dismiss them shortly afterward.

“We’ve always seen aggressive managements in many industries. What’s different now is that a number of companies who for most of the last 40 years operated on the basis of a certain social contract are redefining the terms of that contract,” Shaiken said.

“It isn’t just a back-alley machine shop with 200 workers going after its union. It’s AT&T; violating seniority rules. It’s Caterpillar threatening to replace its work force. . . . Public companies that would have shunned these tactics a decade ago are now using them.”

Firms Defend Actions

Business interests concede that in many ways life has gotten harder for the average American worker over the last decade. But companies defend themselves on the grounds that they must boost productivity and hold down labor and other expenses--not out of spite for workers but to stay alive.

The Caterpillar labor dispute “has never been about union-busting,” said company spokesman Keith Butterfield. “It’s about what we feel Caterpillar needs to be globally competitive.”

Jeffrey H. Joseph, vice president of domestic policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, added: “It does the worker no good to have an employer who can’t make it in the marketplace.”

Likewise, GM, Sears and AT&T; say they have had to take unpleasant cost-cutting steps solely to remain competitive. Burke Stinson, an AT&T; spokesman, conceded that some of the company’s recently relocated employees have found themselves “miles from home without a job.”

“No one is happy about that,” he said. But, Stinson said, such layoffs were necessitated by market conditions and union seniority rules. Also, he said, affected employees received up to two years of severance pay.

GM spokesman John Maciarz said before the auto maker decided to close its Willow Run plant in Ypsilanti that it simply wanted to give both that factory and the competing Texas facility a chance to say why they should be kept open. “We didn’t say: ‘This is what those guys said, can you do better?’ ”

Still, many employees and workplace experts feel employers are being tougher than they have to be.

Dan Lacey, author of the recently published book “Your Rights in the Workplace,” noted a rise in so-called job security programs at slumping companies. Under these programs, employees agree to work, say, one day less a week and take a commensurate cut in pay. Trouble is, Lacey said, many of these employees are pressured to do the same amount of work as before.

Employees now commonly complain of being pushed to work long hours of uncompensated overtime. Five current and former workers at Food Lion, one of the nation’s fastest-growing supermarket chains, testified before Congress that they were pressured to work as many as 30 hours of overtime a week without pay. A company executive denied the charge, saying Food Lion could not be “as successful as we are with an atmosphere of intimidation.”

Also cited as evidence of insensitive management have been some particularly extreme cutbacks in health insurance, far beyond what might be justified as a means of controlling escalating premiums. In one instance, a self-insured retailer in Texas reduced its $1-million maximum medical benefit for AIDS treatment to $5,000 once an employee began receiving treatment for the disease.

The pressure on workers is difficult to measure, experts say, partly because workers fearful of losing their jobs also may be fearful of complaining to authorities about unsafe or unjust working conditions. “People are afraid to talk to us,” said John C. Duncan, deputy director of the California Industrial Relations Department.

But in a survey of 100 personnel executives by the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, 26% noted a tendency of employees to “work through” minor illnesses and take fewer sick days--apparently out of fear they could lose their jobs if they take off too much time.

Probably suffering the most are unskilled laborers in low-wage industries with little union protection. Farm and garment workers, long the targets of the cruelest labor abuses, filed about 8,000 complaints for back wages last year with California authorities, up 18% from three years earlier.

“When there’s more workers available in the labor pool, the workers are more vulnerable and there are more abuses,” said Steve Nutter, Los Angeles-based regional director of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Apparel manufacturing “is a lawless industry” getting even more lawless, he added, “because the workers will take anything. They’re desperate.”

On top of the longstanding minimum wage violations and hazardous work conditions, garment workers and their advocates say physical abuse and sexual harassment have become more common.

Benito Alvarez, a Los Angeles garment worker, told of a co-worker who was physically beaten by his supervisor and taken to the company’s office bleeding. But the next day, the employee was back on the job, working for the same supervisor.

“Either he does it, or he loses the job,” Alvarez said.

Worried About Job

For his part, Vidal, the furniture upholsterer, says he put up with miserable working conditions for nine months because he always “would be worried about not getting another job.” That fear, he said, pushed him to stay on the job without taking any time off even after suffering a painful back injury in January.

But Vidal was fired in February because, he believes, the boss regarded him as someone who could rally the workers to ask for more money and make other demands.

Mike Cims Sr., owner of the furniture plant where Vidal used to work, said he could not discuss the specific reasons for the firing, partly because of a pending workers’ compensation complaint filed by Vidal. “He was a problem, and that’s why he got terminated,” Cims said.

Vidal’s productivity apparently was not the issue: Cims said Vidal’s weekly piece work pay climbed significantly over the nine months he was with the company.

Cims said: “I often tell people if they’re not happy, they should not work here. But I say that to my son and daughter, and they work here.”

“Our business has progressed while others have gone down, and it’s not because I mistreat employees,” Cims added. “They come here because it happens to be a pretty good place.”

Executives, too, are wary of rough treatment. Kristine A. Morris, a partner in a Pasadena-based executive recruiting firm, said it has become tougher to persuade managers to consider changing jobs.

Many, she explained, are “scared” that working conditions could be worse at another job. Even when executives get attractive job offers, Morris said, they are skeptical of management promises. “People are saying ‘I’m not sure I can believe you anymore.’ That’s a fundamental shift.”

The tough line many companies are taking in personnel matters reflects a split in the attitudes of American business. At the other end of the spectrum are the growing number of companies that are permitting flexible work schedules, job-sharing and other programs to help workers handle their family needs.

Moreover, many of the pressures workers feel are self-imposed. Thomas E. Preston, a Los Angeles psychiatrist who often evaluates patients suffering from workplace-related problems, said living in fear of losing a job because of the recession is “devastating” for the average worker. Consequently, he said, workers often push themselves to work beyond their capacities during hard times--at risk to their health.

Even as the economy improves, pressures on workers aren’t likely to let up much. Among other reasons, there are widespread concerns that a management victory at Caterpillar could lead to more hardball negotiating tactics elsewhere. Union leaders, in fact, have been pushing for legislation to bar the hiring of permanent replacements--an option that has been Caterpillar’s key weapon.

Other companies over the last decade that have played particularly tough with their unions--such as Greyhound and Eastern and Continental airlines--generally have been on the ropes financially.

But Caterpillar, until posting a recession-related loss last year, had prospered for years. As one of the nation’s biggest exporters, many say, it sets one of the best examples of how to compete in the global economy.

This week the company reached an uneasy truce with the UAW, with Caterpillar agreeing to halt its effort to find replacement workers while allowing strikers to return to work.

And that, workplace experts say, could be destructive--at least in the short run. The hardball approach to employee relations, Shaiken said, “ignores the value of commitment, experience and worker input, and the irony is that we’re competing with countries like Japan and Germany.”

‘Spot Labor Market’

UCLA labor economist Daniel J. B. Mitchell described the changes currently rippling through the economy as the shift from a “career labor market” to a “spot labor market.” Employers have gone from taking steps to hold on to workers for the long run to adopting a “what can you do for me today” approach.

Yet, Mitchell said, parts of the motion picture and television industry have long operated on a spot basis, with workers moving from one project to the next, and drawing stable benefits through their unions.

Likewise, new institutions, Mitchell said, can be developed to protect the interests of workers in other industries, even in a spot labor market society. But until those new institutions arise, the transition will be painful.

“It’s the next 10 years I worry about,” he said.