Put Teeth Back in Workers’ Right to Strike : ‘Permanent replacement’ makes a mockery of a basic protection for employees.

President Clinton should press Congress to pass legislation it is now debating that would take away the ability of management to permanently replace strikers--a privilege that mocks the law that says workers can strike without fear of being fired.

It will mean another hot political battle for the President, but that should not deter him from urging the Senate to approve the House-passed bill removing a dangerous management tactic that not only weakens workers’ weapon of last resort--the strike--but threatens the existence of unions themselves.

A case in point is the strike by nurses at the City of Hope hospital in Duarte. The registered nurses union went on strike June 15 over contract disputes; when word got out that the hospital was going to hire permanent replacements, some returned to work. But 51 who did not--some of them 20-year veterans at the internationally known cancer hospital--were replaced last week by nurses just out of college. The nurses still have no contract. (It’s ironic that organized labor has been one of the biggest supporters of the City of Hope; that relationship is now jeopardized.)

When President Franklin Roosevelt was pushing his New Deal ideas, Congress passed a law in 1935 stipulating that workers may strike without fear of being fired. Strikers can temporarily be replaced, in a struggle between workers and their bosses, but cannot be fired under that law.

Even when the Supreme Court illogically decided in 1938 that permanently replacing strikers was somehow not the same as firing them, that illogic wasn’t widely used by companies to break strikes.

It became a more popular management weapon in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan permanently fired thousands of air-traffic controllers for striking illegally.

Because the President seemed to condone the firing of strikers, more and more private-sector employers realized that they could do the same thing by permanently replacing them--or by threatening to do so, without saying the workers were actually fired--as though there was a difference.

Clinton can win the striker-replacement issue if he fights hard for a relatively simple measure dealing specifically with unions. That might break the lock the filibustering Republican minority has on other legislation and lead to overhaul of our outdated labor laws.

Union membership today is less than 12% of the private-sector work force, and dropping. Unemployment is high, real wages for the average worker are down significantly and the number of low-paying, involuntary part-time and temporary jobs are rising ominously. All the while, of course, the rich get richer, the poor poorer.

Clinton doesn’t have to go back to Roosevelt’s 1930 ideas to find answers. In those days, the ungridlocked government experimented fearlessly to counter the Depression, trying everything from allowing the government to become the employer of last resort to increasing taxes on the very wealthy. F.D.R. didn’t solve all our problems, but he made the kind of start Clinton should be making. As of now, however, it looks as though Republicans, with corporate leaders and other allies, are effectively stymieing him.

With Clinton in the White House, workers and their allies may win a few, such as the family-leave bill. Like other Clinton-backed measures, it is mild, providing only unpaid leave to care for a new baby or a seriously sick member of the family--just when workers needs their paychecks most. It’s better than nothing, but far short of the range of benefits all other major industrial societies provide their workers.

The President will soon revamp the conservative National Labor Relations Board, which has generally helped employers fight unions legally by pro-management interpretations of the nation’s basic labor laws, already tilted toward management. By next November, the President will be able to name three of the five board members and a new general counsel.

But the basic problem of jobs and an unfair economic system, which Clinton talks about often, remains. An increase in the minimum wage has been put on hold; the President’s job-creation, or economic stimulus, bill was killed by the Senate filibuster, and measures to ban permanent replacement of strikers are threatened with death by filibuster.

An articulate President must wage a more active effort with Congress to prevent that from happening. Then we can go on to other crucial matters facing the country.