Uniting Employees, Management

The Clinton Administration is about to name yet another commission, but there is a growing possibility that it won’t be just another innocuous one created to avoid dealing with hot issues.

This one will deal with labor laws and proposals to significantly change relations between workers and their bosses. The proposals could generate bitter controversy.

While Clinton is not regarded as anti-labor, he certainly did not make labor-management relations or labor law reform campaign issues. He rarely even mentioned the word union .

Yet it is beginning to look as though he might try to do more about the way workers and managers get along than any President since Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed through our first major labor law--the Wagner Act--in 1935.

With the President’s blessing, Labor Secretary Robert Reich will appoint nine experts to a commission that, for the first time in decades, will thoroughly review our pro-management labor laws that are failing miserably in today’s anti-union climate.

Clinton, Reich and those tentatively picked for the commission are sure that America’s future in the highly competitive global economy depends largely on dramatically increasing labor-management cooperation and labor skills, and giving workers a meaningful voice in the way companies are managed.

Most of them recognize this can be done best and most fairly when workers are represented by a union.

Since the expected commission members all favor the concept of collective bargaining and certainly are not anti-union, the outcome of their deliberations could help rejuvenate the labor movement that now represents about 11% of the private sector work force, compared to about 40% in the 1950s.

While listing names of the proposed commission members may seem of interest only to labor mavens, their identities give a pretty good indication of the direction they--and Clinton--may be headed.

They are all basically progressive. Two are Republican-appointed former Labor secretaries: Harvard Prof. John T. Dunlop, slated to head the commission, and William Usery Jr., now a management consultant. Another former Labor secretary appointed by former President Carter, F. Ray Marshall, is expected to be named. All three ex-secretaries are highly respected in labor and management circles.

Others include professors Richard Freeman of Harvard, Thomas Kochan of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Paula Voos of the University of Wisconsin and William Gould IV of Stanford, whose forthcoming book, “Agenda for Reform,” is filled with ideas for changing the labor climate in America.

The commission will also likely include Xerox’s chief executive officer, Paul A. Allaire, and former United Auto Workers President Douglas A. Fraser. Both men are enthusiastic supporters of the kind of labor-management cooperation advocated by Clinton and Reich.

The fight for meaningful labor law reform won’t be an easy or quick one. Yet it could be won, led by an enlightened commission, a sympathetic labor secretary and a President who says we need to overhaul our system of labor-management relations.

The obstacles are substantial and even include union opposition. Some union officials understandably believe that employers who advocate worker involvement in corporate decision-making usually do so as a union-avoidance tactic. Most unionists, though, realize it is a sensible way to rebuild both the economy and unions.

An even greater obstacle will be opposition from major, well-financed segments of corporate America that will fight any attempt to create more neutral labor laws, much less to strengthen the labor movement. These powerful anti-union forces are winning most labor-management battles under the current system, don’t want any change and have many influential friends in Congress.

On the other hand, the average worker has been battered economically by 12 years of the right-wing policies of the Reagan-Bush administrations. New polls show that these workers have a growing number of sympathizers in and out of Congress who believe that they need help that could come in part from unions.

That would require legislative and administrative actions to strengthen unions so workers are not left to rely for their economic well-being mostly on increasingly “lean and mean” management oriented primarily toward increased profit.

Reich set the tone for the commission’s goal last month when he told labor leaders at a meeting in Florida that “it is my intention, and the President’s intention, to restore a level playing field to labor-management relations.”

Reich’s sympathetic views about unions were emphasized when he commented that they are “the only front-line voice of working America.”

However, the only way management might be induced to reduce furious opposition to labor law reform is to couple it with labor-management cooperation and shared decision-making. These are increasingly popular in management circles because, when done properly, productivity can be increased substantially.

Already almost certain to win congressional approval soon is a bill to prohibit the “permanent replacement” of workers who exercise their legal right to strike.

Among many other controversial items that ought to be among the commission’s proposals are tax incentives for companies that enlist the talents of workers in the decision-making process and engage in meaningful labor-management cooperation.

To help reduce adversarial relations, the commission could, for instance, call for “card checks” that would require an employer to negotiate with a union if a majority of workers sign cards authorizing the union to represent them. That would avoid long, costly anti-union battles by management to persuade, or coerce, card signers to switch sides and vote against the union in representation elections.

If commission members don’t spend too much time in academic debates among themselves, Clinton may help bring about one of the many changes he says America needs so urgently: better, more cooperative relations between workers and managers.