Labor ‘Reform’ Will Eviscerate Worker Rights : Rhetoric is eerily similar at an Illinois firm that locked out and replaced union workers.

Even if Congress had made a dent a couple of weeks ago in the proposition that it’s illegal to win a strike in this country, the prospect for workers would not have markedly improved.

The measure that Senate Republicans filibustered to death in mid-July would have barred employers from permanently replacing workers on strike.

To be sure, the AFL-CIO would have fairly claimed a great victory if Congress had barred permanent replacements. It was Item No. 1 on labor’s agenda this year and would have somewhat compensated for the 1993 defeat on NAFTA.

But the win would have been more a symbolic than a practical weapon in the hands of workers. Temporary replacements would still have been permitted, along with the rest of the formidable arsenal available to employers. It remains almost impossible in this country to exercise the democratic right to withhold your labor without losing your job.

In the present era of ferocious encroachment by employers on workers’ rights, the strike is no longer a focus. The ability of an employer to relocate, the quiescence of most labor chieftains, are features not lost on workers whose battles often have little to do with simple efforts to win higher pay.

Take the current struggle at A.E. Staley Co. in Decatur, Ill., which has been going on for more than two years, with 760 workers locked out a year ago.

Staley is a corn-processing factory owned by the international giant Tate & Lyle. The dispute isn’t over wages, but control. The management, whose company was posting decent profits at the time, decided to rewrite long-standing portions of the contract, junking rights won over years of negotiation by Local 837 of the Amalgamated Industrial Workers.

At the time of the June, 1993, lockout, the workers had been without a contract for a year, negotiations having broken down over the company’s determination to destroy union protections on seniority, job classifications and grievance procedures.

The company also had imposed 12-hour shifts without overtime, three days on and three days off, with 30-day rotations between night and day shifts. This ended the eight-hour day and also caused domestic and social problems for workers.

It looks as though Staley wanted to force a show-down. The union mounted an in-plant resistance campaign in the form of a work-to-rule, sticking rigidly to specific job descriptions, and Staley responded with the lockout. Management also claimed equipment sabotage, but no convincing evidence has ever been produced.

So now the workers are locked outside the factory gates, watching scabs drive in to do their jobs. The law killed by Republicans and southern Democrats two weeks ago wouldn’t have helped them.

Staley began its onslaught by proclaiming in the late 1980s that it was embarking on a “cooperative effort” to result in the “elimination of we-they perceptions” and to “improve the competitive position of the Decatur plant.”

By no accident, this is precisely the lingo of the Clinton Administration as it moves toward its so-called New Deal for labor. The “reforms” now being pondered by the Labor and Commerce departments will similarly spout the lingo of worker-management cooperation while eviscerating what legal guarantees--going all the way back to the 1936 Wagner Act--organized workers have.

The spirit of cooperation sung by the Clintonites took the practical form, on June 25, of a Decatur SWAT team summoned by Staley management spraying the locked-out workers with pepper gas. Some witnesses said the burning gas was pointed specifically at union activists, many of whom were already on the ground, and that three children got sprayed.

Politicians aren’t going to help. At the time of the June 25 attack, such supposed friends of labor as Democratic Sens. Paul Simon and Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois and Paul Wellstone of Minnesota all kept their mouths shut.

The Staley workers, meanwhile, have been traveling around the country, explaining their struggle to other workers--trying to ignite the popular, grass-roots protest that in truth is the only weapon American workers have at their disposal at this stage of the game.