COLUMN LEFT / HARRY BERNSTEIN : It’s a Fine Line Between Profit and Greed : Anti-labor laws, hard-nosed employers and a President lukewarm to labor conspires against workers.

It’s hard to know where and how corporate executives draw the line between their legitimate quest for profits and ugly greed when they are fighting unions or slashing the size of their work force.

But either way, workers almost always get trashed.

Sometimes, organized workers can win if they fight long and hard enough, as members of the United Mine Workers of America showed recently when they were victorious after a grueling seven-month strike during which not one of the 17,000 miners crossed the picket lines.

That kind of seldom-seen labor unity and militancy can pay off, although it costs workers their paychecks while their bosses’ regular incomes continue.

Such strikes are hard to win because of our anti-labor laws, hard-nosed employers and a President who isn’t against unions, as former Presidents Reagan and Bush were--but Clinton is no close friend of labor, either.

So, wins like that of the miners are all the sweeter, especially when they win a decent contract agreement as the miners did, giving them, among other things, a guarantee of 60% of the jobs created when a coal operator opens a new mine. Usually such mines are run non-union.

Even such agreements don’t automatically mean the end of the workers’ troubles. The miners’ union still faces devastating, hard-to-justify civil contempt fines of more than $60 million--among the highest ever--in a case stemming from a 1989 strike against the Pittston Coal Co.

With the help of the Clinton Administration, a Virginia court is pressing hard to collect the fines even though the UMW and the company had agreed to a new contract and to drop all charges and countercharges.

The lower court, though, refused to accept the settlement. Some Clinton officials wanted the Administration to at least stay out of that case, as it should have.

But when it went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it is pending, Clinton’s appointee, Solicitor General Drew Days III, joined the fight against the union anyway. It was Days’ call, legally, but Clinton made no public objection.

Militant labor unity has paid off without subsequent legal fights in other cases, though, such as the strikes of flight attendants against American Airlines, the machinists against Boeing and telephone workers against NYNEX.

Disputes like those might well have been avoided entirely or been shorter if our labor laws were more even-handed and the President more concerned about the plight of workers.

Unions showed great political strength when they almost won the fight against the North American Free Trade Agreement, battling against great odds, including the President. And while they still support Clinton as a sharp contrast to Reagan and Bush, they cannot expect much help from him in many of their other battles.

Most workers are non-union, and they are usually doing even worse than those who belong to unions. In just the past three months, major American corporations announced plans to lay off more than 90,000 workers, even though productivity is still rising. That means the firms can produce more with fewer workers and executives don’t seem to give a second thought to the plight of those they drop from the payrolls.

The latest large layoff announcement came, surprisingly, from Xerox Corp. that has--or maybe had--an excellent relationship with its major union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Xerox says that it will dump 10,000 workers even though the company is highly profitable. Among those who will be laid off are people who helped the company earn more than $600 million last year. By slashing its work force by 10%, the company executives and stockholders expect to make even more profits.

Many of the thousands of dismissed workers will ultimately find new jobs elsewhere, but often lower-wage ones or in part-time or temporary positions.

The non-union workers, though, have no protection against corporate decisions that can wreck their lives. Xerox will at least discuss the layoffs with Amalgamated to try to ease the impact, although the company apparently hasn’t convinced the union that the layoffs were caused only by a “normal” hunger for profits at the expense of workers.

We won’t start creating a just society until we require employers to give at least the same consideration to the needs of workers that they do to profits. Corporate executives must pay as much attention to the length of unemployment lines as they do to the bottom lines.