The Labor Revival : ‘Attention Must Be Paid.’ After 25 years of political irrelevance, the American worker is gaining a voice on the national stage. : BLUE- AND WHITE-COLLAR LABOR : Fighting Big Interests

This may be the September when the diminished importance of Labor Day--more diminished would be hard to imagine--ends its sad 25-year run as a leading indicator of the economic and political plight of working-class America. The biggest imbalance since the 1920s seems to be shifting.

This reversal could influence circumstances ranging from the 1996 presidential race to the election-year economy, perhaps even the stock market. If Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “forgotten American” is remembered again, if the U.S. labor movement sits up in its deathbed and takes beef broth, President Bill Clinton, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), the Business Roundtable and the Dow Jones Industrial Average could all be surprised. We could even have the makings of a new reform era in American politics.

Not that big changes can come quickly. In the last 10 to 15 years, the average American employee has been neglected and infuriated by politicians; abused by deficit charlatans and competitiveness gurus, and periodically run over by investment bankers in yellow BMWs. The overpaid steelworkers of the 1960s are a vanishing breed. The union goons of the 1940s and 1950s are now arthritic retirees in the Sun Belt. Meanwhile, inflation-adjusted non-supervisory wages have been falling for two decades.

Labor is no longer a threat. Its old terminology and imagery--picket lines, scabs, Taft-Hartley and smokestacks--live on mostly in old Robert Mitchum movies on the late show. Management no longer trucks in strikebreakers from the other side of the county; now they move plants to take advantage of $1.25-an-hour workers on the other side of the world.

If the decline of labor and the American Dream is one side of the political and economic see-saw, the rise of capital is the other. The wealth and future of the United States is being relentlessly transferred from employee cafeterias and ordinary neighborhoods to the Dow, the S&P; 500 and the Wilshire Index--to the financial portfolios of the few.

The potential politics of this is that speculation, great wealth and the widening gap between the middle class and the rich is at levels unseen since the Robber Baron days of the late 19th Century and the Roaring ‘20s.

The obviousness of this great reversal--finance and capital up, labor and ordinary people down--is again working its way to the fore, just as it did in the Populist-Progressive and New Deal eras. Clinton, who partly campaigned in 1992 on how he would stop this turnabout and rescue the middle class, came to Washington and threw in with many of the financial forces he had attacked.

This, in turn, is the basis for what appears to be a new institutional and political mobilization around four major perceptions: that working-class forces such as the labor movement and even large chunks of the middle class need to be more aggressive; that the Republican and Democratic parties are too linked to the policies and lobbies of the last few decades, which requires new parties or independent politics; that reforms to reduce the role of money in political campaigns and lobbyists in national policy-making are imperative, and that current economic issues such as competitiveness and free trade usually wind up involving sacrifices by ordinary people to create an even more favorable climate for business interests. The evidence, so far, is growing but not definitive; if it jells this autumn, however, this could be powerful.

Organized labor, which had diminished into a kind of old-age home for leaders in their 70s with bigger memories than muscles, may now be on the verge of a generational change with this year’s transfer of power to a new president in the AFL-CIO. Labor cannot prosper in the 1990s by trying to return to the illusions of the 1950s and ‘60s. But today’s imbalance in favor of business and finance gives blue-collar America a chance to pitch a new social contract, conjoining frayed white-collar America in a new shake for the ordinary employee.

Independent politicians and presidential wannabees already represent elements of this potential new social contract in their concern about the role of money in the existing two-party system. Ross Perot talks about overturning a Washington run by lobbies and multinational corporations that don’t care about American workers. Jesse Jackson says the problem isn’t gridlock, but hiplock--the way both parties are joined at the hip in working for their contributors. Lowell P. Weicker Jr., the former Independent governor of Connecticut now contemplating a presidential run, calls the GOP and Democrats a duopoly united in ignoring the grass roots.

There’s also a growing commitment to attacking the inadequacy of the lobbying laws and the Swiss-cheese election laws that have put money on the political throne. Republican Patrick J. Buchanan--being talked of as an independent contender if populists cannot regain influence in the GOP--criticizes his party’s fealty to Wall Street and K Street (the lobbyist equivalent in the nation’s capital). He blames their influence for a bipartisan deficit-reduction approach that wants to take hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare away from grandma and grandpa over the next decade but doesn’t hesitate to commit $50 billion to a bail-out of the Mexican peso to rescue financial speculators.

Finally, there’s the extent to which the current Washington policy debate in areas such as trade, competitiveness, tax policy and deficit-reduction is far more representative of the interests of finance than blue- and white-collar Americans. Perot, Jackson and Buchanan have almost made a cliche out of demanding that federal policy put workers ahead of multinational corporations, but it is fair to say that talk about U.S. competitiveness often seems to emphasize ordinary Americans giving up wage increases or jobs so that corporate profits and investment-banker fees can rise.

The predominant tax reform and deficit-reduction movements are also thinly disguised advocates of the corporate worldview. The so-called tax reformers--advocates of a flat income tax or national sales tax in lieu of the current multibracket, progressive income tax--come out of this orbit, as do the major deficit-reduction organizations, so willing to cut Medicare, erode Social Security and scythe farm programs. Meanwhile, they refuse to talk about cutting the lobbyist-built special tax credits and deductions of their corporate and financial shepherds.

It’s worth noting that Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), who admits he, too, may try for President in 1996 as an independent, earlier this year supported a Senate Democratic budget alternative that would limit the slashing of Medicare in favor of capping the amount of money devoted to tax breaks for corporations--”tax entitlements,” in the mocking words of the amendment’s sponsors. This would probably pass in a national referendum; but in the real world of contemporary Washington, it doesn’t have a chance.

Yet, with the possible change in national politics, this agenda might just have a chance. For the American labor movement, it could be a ladder back to influence--and to a relevance and usefulness it hasn’t had in years.*