Coal Miners Get the Shaft From NLRB : The board’s new chairman, a liberal, takes a tough stance against workers.

Despite some encouraging words from President Clinton and his appointment of yet another committee to look into the problem, there is almost no chance Congress will make any major improvements during his Administration in America’s outdated labor laws that mostly help corporations and hurt unions.

While Clinton says he wants changes, he is in the middle of furious battles with Republicans and some Democrats over everything from health care and welfare reform to foreign policy, and he isn’t likely to fight hard for labor-law reform since that would provoke even more conflict with Congress and gridlock with the GOP.

So the best that unions can hope for as their ranks dwindle is an end to the decades of mostly pro-management decisions from the National Labor Relations Board. And that is a pretty slim hope.

Clinton was cheered last year by labor and liberals when he nominated Stanford law professor William Gould IV to be chairman of the powerful NLRB, which enforces the country’s labor laws and tries to encourage peace between unions and business. After nine months of opposition from conservatives, Gould was confirmed by the Senate in March.

In the battles between powerful corporations and badly weakened unions, Gould, a labor-relations expert, is an arbitrator who promises to remain neutral in those usually one-sided battles. That doesn’t offer much encouragement for the embattled labor movement, since Gould will have to rely heavily on the exact language of what is now bad law.

From my past contacts with Gould, I know that he is sympathetic to unions, labor-management cooperation and the concept of collective bargaining.

But with most corporations today striving for what they call a “union-free environment,” Gould has a seemingly impossible job in trying to bring real fairness to labor-management disputes by simply following our current unfair laws.

Yet if anyone can make a valiant effort toward that goal, it could be Gould. He is the most openly pro-union NLRB chairman since Frank W. McCulloch, who chaired the board more than 30 years ago.

Gould has held the job for little more than three months, so any judgment of his performance would be premature. But based on his record to date, he will have to try harder to overcome the NLRB’s pro-management stance of recent years.

One ominous sign was Gould’s deciding NLRB vote to seek as much as $1.3 million in contempt fines from the United Mine Workers for alleged picket-line misconduct during last year’s seven-month strike against 12 coal companies.

UMW President Richard Trumka furiously denounced Gould, saying his vote was reactionary and a bad omen for future decisions. Other union leaders agreed. All whom I contacted viewed Gould’s vote against the miners as a distressing start for him as NLRB chairman.

Maybe Gould was determined to prove he is not blindly pro-union, since management critics almost blocked his confirmation on grounds that he was too liberal.

But with his vote in the miners’ case, Gould went too far to make his point. The coal-strike settlement included an agreement between mine owners and the union to drop all picket-line misconduct charges against the union and charges of unfair labor practice against the companies. Even the government-appointed mediator, William J. Usery, urged Gould and other NLRB members to dismiss the charges against the miners.

On the plus side, Gould has moved to streamline the slow-moving NLRB. He is trying to expedite union representation elections and speed up adjudication of unfair-labor-practice charges against companies, since lengthy delays usually favor management.

So far, Gould has been tougher on workers and unions than need be. But in the long run, he is still likely to be far more evenhanded than any of his predecessors in the past few decades.

However, the only way to put some real justice in our labor law would be for Congress to enact major changes. A good first step would be passage of the workplace fairness bill, which would ban the permanent replacement of strikers--a tool that allows management to vitiate the unions’ most potent weapon.

The bill would finally remedy a foolish 1938 Supreme Court ruling holding that workers had the legal right to strike without being fired, but also finding that it would be legal to “permanently replace” them--as though there was a difference.