There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Although the UAW workers returned to their jobs at Caterpillar in spring 1992 in response to the company’s ultimatum, many took up a kind of disruptive guerrilla warfare within the plant walls, carrying on what labor tacticians call “inside games”—worker slowdowns, holding union meetings in company lunchrooms, demonstrating outside Caterpillar’s offices, and wearing anticorporate buttons and T-shirts that read YOU ARE ENTERING A WAR ZONE: CATERPILLAR V. ITS UAW EMPLOYEES. The company fought back with tightened discipline and selected firings.93

  A three-day walkout was staged in November 1993, but the major renewed strike showdown came in June 1994. The UAW had amassed an impressive strike fund and appeared set to go the distance. “The Cat” was ready, too, however; when the workers went out the firm arranged to stay fully operational using temporary employees, white-collar personnel, and new hires, thoroughly frustrating the union’s aim of crippling production. By now, the UAW was in an even weaker position in terms of public opinion regarding replacement workers, as replacements had been used that summer in a Major League Baseball strike. The use of replacements had become so common, the New York Times noted, a union’s only chance of combating the tactic was to time strikes to coincide with periods of peak employer need, when the hiring of scabs would be too inconvenient. The paper also observed that the professional baseball players’ union was unique in its ability to defy management’s use of scabs, since the star athletes’ celebrated talents and popularity with fans gave them “immunity to being replaced.”94

  The baseball strike again served as an analogy when, on March 8, 1995, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order denying federal contracts to firms that used replacement workers during strikes. “We don’t want the industrial equivalent of minor leaguers and rookies making the tires for the next Desert Storm,” said White House spokesman Mike McCurry, referring to the U.S. military engagement in Iraq and a current strike at Bridgestone-Firestone in which twenty-three hundred scabs had taken the jobs of striking rubber workers.95 Conservative business groups vied to fight the executive order’s application in court, while the order itself, offered chiefly as an olive branch to labor by Clinton to cool unions’ irritation over the administration’s approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), was expected to affect only a modest number of employers.

  The Caterpillar workers, however, were not athletes; their work did not require them to hit, catch, or pitch into the late innings; they possessed no virtue or talent more exceptional than simply having been loyal employees attempting to exercise the fundamental rights of collective bargaining. The strike at Caterpillar lingered halfheartedly for eighteen months, as UAW members crossed picket lines and returned to work or quit the union entirely; by December 1995 the UAW had no option but to admit defeat.

  THREE YEARS LATER the labor movement regained some ground, and got a much-needed morale boost, as the result of a 1997 Teamsters strike at United Parcel Service (UPS). The victory was cherished not because it triumphed over a badly behaving corporation—UPS had a fairly decent reputation for management-employee relations—but rather because the union challenged and won out against the insidious problem of “contingent” or “two-tier” employment, in which an employer cuts costs by relying on temporary and part-time workers. UPS was also attempting to change the structure of the workers’ pension program, removing it from a multiemployer plan so as to place more control in the company’s hands. The Teamsters resisted the idea because UPS was the richest member of the multiemployer group, and if it withdrew, fellow Teamsters at other, less endowed transportation firms might lose out. But staging a strike for any reason had become a risky undertaking, and also rare. Work stoppages in America declined from 3,111 in 1977 to only 385 by 1995, even as real wages lost 15 percent of their value—data that, as if on a diagnostic chart, revealed an ailing U.S. labor movement.96

  Based in Atlanta, UPS was the nation’s largest shipping company, with 302,000 American employees at twenty-four hundred sites and annual earnings of $1.1 billion. As many as 80 percent of the company’s new hires were part-time, which allowed UPS to deny them full benefits and pay them $9 an hour in contrast to the $20 it paid full-timers. UPS defended the practice for two reasons—to stay competitive (its chief rival, Federal Express, had a lower-paid workforce, union-free except for its pilots), but also because the workday schedule at UPS was sporadic, with intense periods of loading and sorting followed by lulls in which few if any workers were needed. “We go in and out of business several times a day,” one executive characterized it, explaining the preference for part-time employees.97

  But the Teamsters complained that workers were kept at part-time status for years without promotion, and that as many as ten thousand part-timers actually worked full-time hours, although they received the lower, part-time rate. “In the corporate suite, that is called smart management,” noted New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. “In other places, it is called ripping people off.”98

  UPS opened contract negotiations by offering to move eight hundred part-time workers to full time over the coming four years, while the union demanded that ten thousand make that leap in the same period. When no deal could be obtained, the union struck on August 4. The two thousand pilots who flew UPS planes agreed to honor the strike as 185,000 Teamsters walked off the job. The company made sure the media knew about a scandal involving Teamsters president Ron Carey, who faced charges that he’d illegally used union funds as “campaign contributions” in his recent narrow election over James Hoffa Jr. UPS alleged that Carey had forced the strike when he did to distract attention from his legal troubles. But by and large the union had the public on its side, and the press was also sympathetic. Polls showed the public supported the UPS strikers by a margin of 55 percent to 27 percent, and that people saw the issues of downsizing and contingent employees as a nationwide problem. The Teamsters’ assertion that the two-tier method denied workers a middle-class existence rang true with many Americans, no doubt because by 1997 contingent work had become so ubiquitous virtually everyone knew a friend or family member trapped in the two-tier system as temps or part-timers, working at reduced pay, with marginal perks and nonexistent health coverage. In place of “the old ideal of job security,” wrote Herbert, had come “permanent employment anxiety.”99

  While it was of limited solace, the fact that by 1997 most Americans took offense at the idea of a job without reliable benefits was in itself a tribute to the historic attainments of organized labor. Indeed the level of public empathy for the UPS walkout became news; in the 1981 PATCO strike 51 percent of Americans had backed President Reagan and only 40 percent the air traffic controllers; in the 1982 football players strike and the 1994 baseball players strike, respondents had sided with management by a margin of 43 percent to 22 percent. But the UPS workers, who enjoyed a 55 percent approval rate, were by far more familiar figures to most Americans than air traffic controllers or professional athletes, and there was a common perception that the men and women in brown uniforms seen toting packages in and out of the nation’s businesses all day worked hard for their pay. As one pollster noted, there was also by 1997 a “very strong perception that management is less fair and less loyal to workers than it used to be.”100

  More crucially the UPS workers, unlike the PATCO controllers, benefited from the solidarity shown by the company’s pilots; and unlike the Hormel strike, the Teamsters enjoyed the support of the rest of the labor movement, which perceived the strike as an important test of whether two-tier downsizing could be curbed. UPS was, after all, “a textbook example of the new economy, a service sector industry that’s highly computerized, that’s based on information, organization and smarts,” said an economist. “If this kind of company cannot offer workers middle-class wages, if it pays $8.50 an hour instead of $20, that’s a bad omen for the future.”101

  The AFL-CIO had even stepped forward to offer financial resources for the Teamsters strike fund. “Because their fight is our fight,” fe
deration president John Sweeney explained, “we are making this strike our strike.”102 Such cooperation was a reflection of the shake-up at the AFL-CIO in 1995, the first major reorientation of the 14-million-member organization since its inception forty years earlier. Disappointed over the passage of NAFTA in 1993 and angry that, following the 1994 midterm elections, President Clinton and the Democrats had shifted to the right and trimmed the country’s welfare entitlement, the federation leadership had passed to Sweeney, the head of the Service Employees (SEIU). Sweeney brought a “rank and file” spirit to the job, a stark change from the executive-style leadership of Lane Kirkland. “I decided to run for president of the AFL-CIO because organized labor is the only voice of American workers and their families, and because the silence was deafening,” Sweeney said.103

  One innovative bit of activism the Teamsters pursued against UPS was to call on their friends around the world. While UPS was dominant in the shipping industry in America, it was still in an expansion mode in Europe. The Teamsters had links with transport unions in Europe, and so as union and UPS representatives sat across the bargaining table from one another in America, the European unions, as part of what was called UPS World Action Day, staged brief demonstrations or work stoppages. The message to UPS was clear: a failure to resolve the Teamsters strike on terms acceptable to workers might bring global consequences.

  With the forces of big labor, public opinion, and coordinated sympathy strikes breaking out as far away as Orly Airport in Paris, UPS had its back to the wall. In this instance its own size and dominance of America’s shipping business began to work against it. Because even the efforts of all its competitors, including FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service, could not pick up the slack created by the sudden disappearance of the familiar brown UPS trucks from the nation’s streets, the firm came under immediate pressure from its customers, particularly retailers and catalog companies, to settle.104 UPS also had exceptional vulnerability to a protracted strike, in that as a shipping business it made its money by providing a daily service and, unlike a manufacturer like Caterpillar, was not protected by its back inventory. President Clinton and his labor secretary, Alexis Herman, also pitched in, keeping the two parties at the bargaining table despite the sluggish pace of the talks, and at one point rejecting out of hand UPS’s request for a court injunction against the Teamsters.

  Fifteen days after the walkout began UPS capitulated, agreeing to shift ten thousand part-time workers to full time within five years and raise part-time salaries 37 percent during that period, full-timers by 15 percent. The company also agreed to maintain the present pension arrangement. Teamsters president Carey was exultant. “I remember in the 1980s when the air traffic controllers’ union was wiped out,” he said. “For 15 years after that, employers all across the country cut jobs, cut pensions, cut health coverage, and stepped on workers’ rights. Working people were on the run, but not anymore. This strike marks a new era.”105 Labor scholar Nelson Lichtenstein concurred, noting that the Teamsters’ win over UPS ended “the PATCO syndrome.”106 If anything, what the victory showed was that to succeed, a strike in the era of globalization must be vigorously supported by allies near and far and exceptionally well managed. The union had run such a strike, and it had won.

  Economists, naturally, warned against jubilation. The overall trend of globalization and the pressures of intensified competition on employers, they explained, as well as the ever-broadening pool of cheaper workers, still augured poorly for labor. More factories would vanish in Ohio and Pennsylvania and reappear in Mexico, China, or Indonesia; at home the difficult problem of replacement workers and contingent workers would in all likelihood remain.

  But no professional doubters were to deny organized labor its moment. The Teamsters, so recently the bad boy of American unionism, had shown it was still possible to rally against capital and win, and it had done so with the venerable AFL-CIO looking on with pride and approval. “What we have is a more aggressive labor movement,” even the dour National Association of Manufacturers was forced to concede. “Whether we have a more effective one remains to be seen.”107

  IN NOVEMBER 2009 the U.S. sportswear company Russell Athletic made a startling announcement: it would reopen one of its Honduran clothing factories that it had closed ten months earlier in reaction to the unionization of the plant’s twelve hundred workers. It took this unusual step, which included rehiring the workers, as the direct result of a national campaign by the United Students Against Sweatshops, youthful American activists who had pressured Boston College, Columbia, Harvard, New York University, and ninety-two other colleges to suspend the lucrative sportswear licensing agreements that allowed Russell to imprint sweatshirts and other clothing with the schools’ names and logos. The students targeted not only college retailers and administrators but also picketed major college sporting events. As part of Russell’s settlement, the company agreed to cease its antiunion activities at other plants in the Central American nation, leading a Honduran labor official to comment, “We are impressed by the social conscience of the students in the United States.”108

  What was particularly encouraging about the anti-sweatshop group’s effort was that it had overcome perhaps the main obstacle that thwarts U.S. labor organizing today, the power of American corporations to disperse their operations to developing countries where there are cheaper workers and few if any labor regulations. Since the early 1990s U.S. firms have been all too glad to exchange a labor base that costs, for example, $5 million a year to maintain for one that will cost a fifth as much, and is less organized, more desperate, and hence more docile. The result of course is a significant loss of leverage on the part of unions and American workers.

  The question is how readily organized labor can, like the United Students Against Sweatshops, pivot to confront similar challenges. Some labor historians make the point that it has managed equally dramatic shifts before. “Just like capitalism,” Ronaldo Munck insists, “trade unions as a social movement are capable of mutation, transformation, and re-generation.”109 When the apprentice-journeyman-master tradition was threatened by the manufacturing system, labor formed workingmen’s associations; when industry became national in scope it evolved into sprawling trade union federations and later industrial unions; when management was at its most rapacious and brutal during the Gilded Age, elements of labor sought alternative means of economic organization, or staged massive strikes; when labor policy began to emanate from Washington, unions developed advocacy skills and the ability to affect elections.

  Those who see reason for hope are encouraged by the possibility that organized labor can reinvent itself simply because it has done it before. “The reports on the death of the labor movement are not just premature but wrong,” contends scholar Stanley Aronowitz. “As long as people procure their livelihood by working for wages and salaries, they will recognize, sooner or later, the futility of appealing to their employers as individuals. For most workers,” suggests Aronowitz, “there is no alternative to collective action.”110 In 1986, only five years after PATCO’s demise, he observes that the nonunion replacement air traffic controllers had themselves organized as the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, and had begun to echo many of the same grievances voiced by their predecessors.111

  But does the American labor movement remain relevant enough to transition as it must? Today, in the new labor-management dynamic impacted by globalization—and the related loss of manufacturing, long-term full-time jobs, pension, and health benefits—overall union membership has shrunk to about a fifth of the percentage of U.S. workers it had in the mid-1950s, with only 12.3 percent belonging to a labor union. There are today 7.9 million unionized public sector workers (37.4 percent of the total number of government employees) and 7.4 million union members in the private sphere (7.2 percent of all such workers). Meanwhile, there are tens of thousands of transnational corporations, controlling 75 percent of world trade and upward of 150 million jobs worldwide.112 And muc
h as large-scale industrial capital got the jump on organized labor in the early nineteenth century, so again during recent years has it leaped forward into global markets, rewriting or abandoning what was once viewed as a covenant with American workers, well ahead of labor’s mostly gradual efforts to keep up. Is the cause of workers’ rights somehow so timeless and universal that it can be expected, against such odds, to sustain or re-create itself through some inherent force of necessity?

  WHILE GLOBALIZATION’S IMPACT on U.S. workers has been both substantial and insidious, wreaking havoc in ways large and small, not every setback can be laid at its door. Among other factors that have influenced the downward trend in unionism since the late 1970s must be included a popular disenchantment with workaday life itself. The general rise in education levels and the diverse cultural influences of recent decades combined to elevate individual expectations regarding the way one earned a living. Along with an increased desire for work that holds intrinsic interest and offers variety and challenge had come a disdain for the traditional “good job” in an office or factory. Indeed, many large firms themselves no longer encourage or make it possible for employees to stay put in one job over long periods of time, and workers enjoy such innovations as the four-day workweek, telecommuting, and the semi-independence of serving as a consultant or surviving as an artisan or entrepreneur.

  Those escaping the nine-to-five grind, sometimes described as the “creative classes,” are generally college-educated individuals who support themselves as graphic artists, freelance writers, Web designers, Internet publishers, interior decorators, photographers, food specialists, or public relations consultants. Some make ends meet with temporary jobs. Ironically, while such status confers tremendous freedom and mobility, it has largely removed its practitioners from the sphere of potential labor organization, and most, despite their credentials and qualifications, are in fact locked in a struggle to make a living different only in style from the plight of nonunionized workers a century ago. With no employer health coverage, no workplace safety protections, no employer-managed benefits, pension, or 401(k), no sick pay or vacation pay, not even the opportunity of collective bargaining, many are for all their worldliness a voiceless “Precariate,” as scholar Andrew Ross has dubbed them, cut off from society’s traditional sources of livelihood security.