Clinton Is Only Hope for Unions : The Democrat is not ideal, but he is much less of a threat than Ross Perot and George Bush.

Now that the relatively conservative Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton is almost certain to be the Democratic presidential nominee, organized labor last week finally endorsed him, and labor leaders will find qualities in him that even his mother didn’t know he had.

If they know what’s good for them, they will put everything they can behind the Democratic candidate-to-be.

The anti-labor policies that prevailed during the 12 years of the administrations of Presidents Reagan and Bush were key factors in bringing unions down to their sad standing now.

Unions represent only 12% of the private sector work force today, the lowest percentage in modern U.S. history. Unions represent fewer workers in this country than in any other industrialized nation in the world.

The unions’ goal for all these years has been to bring an end to the Reagan-Bush era, not just to end the union-bashing. They want to reverse the debilitating trend that has steadily reduced the real income of the average worker while boosting the income of those already at the top of the nation’s economic ladder.

The few unions that were backing former California Gov. Jerry Brown as a protest against the status quo are beginning to realize his furious denunciations of Clinton are simply making it more difficult for Clinton to beat Bush. Brown hasn’t a prayer of getting the nomination.

His labor supporters had hoped Brown would stalemate the Democratic convention so a more liberal candidate would have a shot at the nomination. But now they have joined the drive to elect Clinton.

Some confused progressives in and out of unions were and still are tempted to back the multibillionaire Texan Ross Perot as a third party nominee because he, like Brown and so many millions of other Americans, says he is sick of the status quo.

Backing Perot would be a foolish mistake. He may or may not try to further eviscerate unions as Bush can be expected to do. However, based on his record, Perot himself would do nothing to help revitalize unions, and even his friends say he would veto any pro-labor legislation passed by Congress.

Unions have political activists in every major city in America, and in most small ones, so they can help Clinton get into the White House if Perot doesn’t attract too many votes from unhappy union members who aren’t sure of Clinton.

That possibility can be averted if Perot’s record on labor is spread to every union member and among those who believe that unions still have a role to play in a democracy.

Perot first attracted some labor attention nearly 20 years ago when workers voted to be represented by a union at a California facility of his giant Electronic Data Systems (EDS), the computer service company he founded in 1962.

Perot foiled the workers by closing the facility, killing the union. The ploy revealed his views of unions, but not any lack of shrewdness on his part.

He sold EDS to General Motors for $2.5 billion in 1984, becoming GM’s largest stockholder and a company director.

Then, as a tough individualist who apparently loves a brawl, he publicly denounced GM with such fury and frequency (with some considerable justification) that the other directors realized that he was badly damaging the company of which he owned such a large part.

Maybe he wanted it all, but true or not, the directors decided to pay him an astonishing $700 million more just to get rid of him after he promised to stop bad-mouthing GM.

GM’s chief of industrial relations then was Al Warren, who was pushing the wise idea of labor-management cooperation and giving workers a meaningful voice in the way the company operated.

That idea hasn’t flourished under Warren’s successors, but Perot got a lot of laughs by his description of GM’s bureaucracy and the time the monolith takes to act on a proposal, especially when more and more people--including workers--are asked to help make a decision.

He compared GM with EDS: “The first EDS’er to see a snake kills it. At GM, first thing you do is organize a committee on snakes. Then you bring in a consultant who knows a lot about snakes. Third thing you do is talk about it for a year.”

Perot says he likes to consult with others, but his decisions, he says, are businesslike, quick and final. None of this nonsense about democracy in the workplace for him, it seems.

Kenneth Riedlinger, EDS senior vice president and close associate of Perot, wrote letters to EDS employees shortly after GM took over EDS “to share with you my intentions and plans to defeat this effort by the United Auto Workers” to represent them.

“Never before in our 22-year history have any of our (employees) found it necessary to have a union interfere in the personal relations” between workers and managers, he wrote, and “we do not intend to lose or even jeopardize” EDS’ non-union status.

“I intend to oppose union efforts until total victory is ours,” wrote Perot’s top assistant, who told me the other day that, while he signed the letter, it represented the views of Perot too.

EDS workers, now part of the highly unionized GM, still have no union.

If the truth about Perot’s views on labor is spread, he isn’t likely to drain many labor votes away from Clinton in the general election. Maybe anti-union voters would like his views, but why vote for Perot when Bush is doing a number on unions already?

All in all, then, it’s time for all progressives in and out of unions to dump Jerry Brown as a spoiler and Perot as an anti-union autocrat and rally around Clinton, knowing that he will be far better for workers than labor’s real enemy, George Bush.