From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  Each new Teamster National Master Freight Agreement covered fewer companies and permitted more regional and local concessions. The 1986 Agreement allowed individual concessions, as “loans” to employers. Even the labor aristocrats in the construction unions lost ground. More and more contractors operated as open shops, and more and more construction workers were not union members. The Carpenters lost nearly 70,000 members in just four years. In 1977, the National Contractors Association got the Laborers to pledge not to strike and to let management set crew size and dismiss employees at will. In 1978, the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department agreed to help the NCA control labor costs in heavy construction in exchange for union job guarantees.

  No union member liked concessions—both the G.M. reopener and the Master Steel Agreement were nearly rejected by the unions’memberships in 1982. A wave of takeovers, diversifications, and relocations had dispersed industry ownership and operations by the early 1970s. The meatpackers’ national union had become a division in a new diversified union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, product of a 1979 merger of the Retail Clerks International Union with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, which had absorbed the United Packinghouse Workers in 1969. UFCW granted a forty-four-month wage freeze to pork processors in 1981. Within a year, the average hourly wage in meatpacking fell from $9.11 to $7.93. During 1983, Swift Company imposed new wage cuts, while the LTV subsidiary Wilson Foods declared bankruptcy and cut hourly wages to $6.50—which qualified some meatpackers’ families for food stamps.

  In 1984, Hormel threatened to close its Ottumwa, Iowa, plant, got concessions from the union, then demanded other plants match them. Local P-9 at Hormel’s flagship plant in Austin, Minnesota, led other Hormel locals in rejecting the demand. UFCW called Hormel local officers to a meeting and got them to take the Ottumwa rates. P-9 prepared to strike. The local’s United Support Group mobilized families, retirees, and Austin youth, picketed the plant, set up defense and relief funds and a nationwide “Adopt-a-P9-Family” program. P-9 hired consultant Ray Rogers, whose New York–based Corporate Campaign publicized Hormel’s ties to banks and South African companies. In August 1985, the local voted better than ten to one to strike and called a boycott against Hormel. P-9 rallied support from unions, farmers, and organizations active around peace, social justice, and environmental issues. The National Guard came to protect strikebreakers. When 6,000 activists rallied in April 1986 to shut down the plant, authorities gassed them and arrested hundreds.

  UFCW president William Winn allowed the strike, but not the support activities. He got the Minnesota AFL-CIO to ban P-9 from its convention. He sequestered funds sent for P-9 support. In March 1986, he ordered the strikers back to work. They refused; three weeks later, when they defied an injunction with a mass rally at the plant gate, Winn trusteed the local. UFCW staff took over the union hall (and obliterated the famous P-9 strike mural themselves after local union painters refused the job). The new contract cut wages and benefits, and let the company fire anyone caught wearing a boycott button. Winn sent letters to every union local in the country urging trade unionists to buy Hormel products to support “union brothers and sisters.”

  A new round of restructuring swept the industry. Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) moved into pork, while the Cargill and Conagra feed and grain conglomerates added meatpacking to their vertically integrated food chains. When Armour meatpackers refused concessions, Armour’s owner Greyhound closed the plants and sold them to Conagra, which reopened them union-free. IBP began recruiting workers directly from Mexico in 1989. Vast hog and chicken factory farms sprang up in the right-to-work South.

  By 1986, average settlements in major union contracts gave a 1.2 percent raise; in major manufacturing contracts, the average was a 1.2 percent cut. Less than a third of major union contracts still had COLAs (compared to about 60 percent in 1979). Lump-sum payments replaced raises and new hires got lower pay. UFCW negotiated the most “two-tier” contracts (61 out of 261 recorded in 1983–85); Teamster two-tier contracts covered more workers.

  Unions suffered big defeats. In 1983, Continental Airlines replaced strikers with new hires, and 12,000 members of the Amalgamated Transit Union at Greyhound took a pay cut after a seven-week strike failed to keep buses off the road. The same year, when the Glaziers and Glassworkers Union started a drive at Atari’s video games plant, the company shut down its U.S. assembly operation. In 1985, the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees and other railroad unions lost 2,000 jobs during a strike over combining jobs on the Maine Central Railroad and at the Portland Terminal. 1986 was a very bad year. The Communications Workers at AT&T gave up their COLA in return for early notice of layoffs, after a twenty-six-day strike. TWA flight attendants went on strike over unequal pay—5,000 lost their jobs, and the Supreme Court threw out a settlement of their discrimination lawsuit. Aluminum, Brick and Glass workers struck Alcoa for five weeks before accepting the cuts in pay and benefits already accepted by Alcoa Steel Workers after a shorter strike. Greyhound workers struck again at the end of the year against more pay cuts, settled in February with a new owner, and lost deferred pay during bankruptcy proceedings. The United Paperworkers had already lost over 300 jobs during a 1986 strike at Boise Cascade in Maine; in 1988, they lost 1,200 more jobs when the union shut down a sixteen-month strike at International Paper. In 1989, Eastern Airlines pilots and flight attendants announced the “complete and unconditional termination” of their eight-month strike with Eastern’s Machinists. The company announced it would not rehire strikers and filed for bankruptcy.

  As Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers observed, “Workers can see you don’t need a union card to hold up a white flag.” Union membership dropped 2.7 million between 1980 and 1984. By 1985, fifty AFL-CIO affiliates had fewer than 50,000 members and uncertain futures. One solution was merger: as AFL-CIO Regional Director Kevin Kistler observed, “It’s a hell of a lot quicker and cheaper to add members through a merger than it is to organize new members.” Many unions recruited well outside their original jurisdictions. The most aggressive organizing came from the Teamsters, Service Employees, Communications Workers, UFCW, and UAW. The International Jewelry Workers went into the Service Employees in 1980. The Barbers and Beauticians Union and the Insurance Workers International Union joined the Food and Commercial Workers in 1982 and 1983. Only 40 percent of the National Maritime Union’s 25,000 members in 1987 were deep-water sailors. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers organized gravediggers working for the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles in 1989.

  Unions also competed over independent employee associations. For two years beginning in 1985, AFSCME, National 1199, the Communications Workers of America, and the Teamsters fought over various groups of Ohio state employees. AFSCME won many of them, but also lost locals to CWA in New Jersey and to SEIU in Massachusetts; and SEIU picked up state employee associations in Oregon (1980) and California (1982). Unions competed even in new drives. USWA, IUE, UFCW, CWA, and AFSCME all worked to organize 28,000 Blue Cross clerical workers in twenty cities, though the UAW already had a 3,000-member Blue Cross local in Michigan.

  Unions made no better progress in politics. The AFL-CIO strongly backed Carter’s former vice president Walter Mondale in the 1984 elections, in fact, the Federation endorsed him before the primaries. Unions activated canvassers and telephone banks, and contributed a record $35 million to candidates, but fared worse than before. Reagan beat Mondale by nearly 17 million votes overall and actually increased his support among voters from union households to 46 percent. The Teamsters reaffiliated in 1987, but the added numbers did not enhance AFL-CIO political influence—the Teamsters endorsed Republican George Bush in 1988, as they had endorsed Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984.

  The key to working-class Republican support was racism. For AFL-CIO leaders, the racial problem was the demand for affirmative action. Unions had been the first organizations cited for contempt in cases based on Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—P
lumbers Local 189 in Columbus, Ohio, and Metal Lathers Union Local 46 in New York City. Most union leaders supported affirmative action in hiring and training (sometimes under court order). USWA defended plantwide seniority and affirmative action goals for training, and went all the way to the Supreme Court to defend itself and Kaiser Corporation against a reverse discrimination lawsuit brought by white union member Brian Weber.

  Promotions and layoffs were another matter, since they affected current union members. When the NAACP Legal Defense Fund campaigned to make layoffs preserve minority employment goals, the unions supported strict seniority. (“Superseniority” had been limited to union officials.) By 1984, firefighter and police unions were in court arguing against reverse discrimination in promotions as well as layoffs. Most unions stood by when the Supreme Court gutted federal antidiscrimination laws in its 1989 Ward’s Cove decision. Filipino and native Alaskan cannery workers proved that Ward’s Cove Packing Company segregated its living and eating facilities, failed to post qualifications for hiring or transfer to higher-paid jobs, and paid white employees more on the average. The Court held that this did not prove company intent to discriminate and the workers had no legal remedy.

  Unions were still dealing with racial discrimination when women took their turn. After women’s organizations sued the Labor Department, President Carter set hiring goals and timetables for women on federally-funded construction projects in April 1978, and women began entering the buildings trades. They were not welcomed. In New York City a hundred members of United Tradeswomen staged a midday rally to make Jacob Javits Convention Center contractors meet federal guidelines. Once on the job, women found themselves in “trench warfare,” a phrase used by an apprentice carpenter as she described the day a journeyman dropped a sledgehammer on her head and then sent her up onto a scaffold that he forgot to nail down. By 1989, women were a little more than 6 percent in only one construction trade—painters—and still less than 1 percent of plumbers and pipefitters. The AFL-CIO had its own affirmative action problem. By 1992, only three affiliates—the Retail, Warehouse, and Department Store Workers, the Association of Flight Attendants, and the American Guild of Musical Artists—had women presidents. In the eight largest AFL-CIO unions where more than half the members were women, women held between 8 percent (UFCW) and 32 percent (American Federation of Teachers) of the leadership positions.

  AFL-CIO leaders supported one government initiative with enthusiasm—the renewed crusade against communism. The American Institute for Free Labor Development promoted land reform in El Salvador to defuse peasant support for leftist insurgents and paid union leaders to join the pro-government labor federation. The Institute trained union leaders in Grenada following the October 1983 U.S. invasion, set up a labor federation for Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1984, and helped run conferences condemning the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The African American Labor Institute supported Angolan anticommunist guerilla Jonas Savimbi and the Workers Union of South Africa, which competed with the antiapartheid Congress of South African Trade Unions. The Asian American Free Labor Institute backed the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines against the Kilusang Mayo Uno federation and its campaigns against dictator Ferdinand Marcos and U.S. military bases, and funded the Fiji Trade Unions Congress campaign against the island nation’s ban on nuclear weapons. In 1983, the Free Trade Union Institute began administering U.S. grants to unions worldwide. By the end of the decade FTUI funded anticommunist labor groups in eastern Europe and sponsored opposition to the independent General Confederation of Trade Unions, which had replaced the defunct Soviet federation in 1990 as the U.S. S.R. began to disintegrate.

  The AFL-CIO rejoined the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in 1984, mainly to combat communist influence, and helped affiliates participate in the international trade secretariats, networks of unions in allied industries loosely connected with the Geneva-based International Labor Organization. The secretariats proved to be more concerned with industry-wide problems and transnational employers than ideological purity. In 1990, the International Union of Food and Allied Workers’ Associations admitted the left-wing Salvadoran Sindicato Industrial de Café over AFLCIO objections.

  Expanding international operations and absorbing independent associations did not build the American labor movement. Lane Kirkland recognized the need to organize new sectors of the workforce and allowed SEIU’s John Sweeney and USWA’s Lynn Williams to start an AFL-CIO Organizing Institute. But Kirkland’s focus was fixed on the better-paid, better-educated white-collar worker, which reflected his understanding of the typical trade unionist. In his 1986 article “It Has All Been Said Before,” Kirkland wrote, “As the composition of our membership shows, trade unionists are nothing more—and nothing less—than the American middle class and those who aspire to it.”

  This outlook did not fit the new workforce. U.S. employment patterns had been shifting rapidly, especially to the service industries. As the capitalist economy continued to mature, more and more activities became marketable commodities, urban and suburban populations needed more services, mass consumption required more elaborate distribution, and businesses required more services. As employment grew in services, it stagnated or declined in agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. These job losses came from automation and other labor-saving technological innovations and from expanding imports as well as from restructured production chains and runaway shops. Between 1979 and 1993, the number of U.S. jobs in services increased by 38 percent, while jobs producing goods, from food to fuel to manufactures, declined 12 percent.

  Many of the jobs lost were union jobs; most of the jobs gained were low paid and nonunion. Between 1979 and 1987, more than 10 million new jobs were created paying $13,000 a year or less, while only 1.6 million new jobs paid more than $26,800. Union job losses helped dismantle economic arrangements that had bolstered the postwar middle class. Between 1980 and 1993, the proportion of full-time employees at large and mid-sized companies with medical insurance fully funded by the employer fell from 71 percent to 37 percent. The expectation of continuous, steadily better-paying work over a lifetime diminished. Workers abandoned by downsizings and closures rarely found jobs that paid as well. Home mortgage foreclosures measured economic distress; they tripled to over 450,000 a year between 1980 and 1995. More jobs became part-time or temporary, or both. From 1970 to 1990, as total employment increased by 54 percent, involuntary part-time employment increased 121 percent and temporary employment 21 percent. By 1993, Manpower Incorporated passed General Motors as the country’s largest private employer.

  Many workers in these new jobs were new to the labor force or new to the country. More and more women worked outside the home—by 1979, half of all women over sixteen; by 1990, almost 60 percent. The fastest-growing group of women workers were mothers with children under six—by 1983, half worked outside the home part- or full-time; by 1991, 60 percent. The racial and ethnic composition of the labor force changed too. After 1970, while European and Canadian immigration remained about the same, immigration from Asia and Latin America nearly doubled, and African immigration more than tripled. Immigrants were more diverse, and many were refugees from the consequences of U.S. foreign policy. By 1990, more than a quarter of U.S. Latinos were neither Mexican nor Puerto Rican in descent—5 percent were Cuban and 23 percent Central or South American. Asian immigrants included significant numbers of Vietnamese (9 percent) and South Asians (11 percent). These two trends overlapped in the electronics assembly plants of California’s Silicon Valley, the Route 128 corridor in Massachusetts, and in North Carolina, where by the early 1980s about 40 percent of the workers were immigrant women, with low wages, high rates of illness, and next to no job security.

  As Kirkland looked for people aspiring to the “middle class,” for many people life got worse. Government policies deepened and extended the consequences of the recession. As taxes were cut, military spending expanded—some wasted in corrupt procurement (the Air Force
paid $9,600 apiece for ordinary Allen wrenches), even more wasted on missile-defense schemes that never worked. The federal deficit ballooned;federal debt exploded. By 1985, more than 12 percent of annual federal spending went to interest alone.

  Social spending was cut. The number of families living on $17,000 a year or less increased by a third from 1978 to 1981 to include 92 million people, more than 34 million of them below the federal poverty line. As poor families became more common, Aid to Families with Dependent Children fell, from an average $477 a month in 1980 to $374 in 1992, and more people were denied disability pensions and food stamps. Poverty spread unevenly by race and sex. When 18 percent of the total auto workforce was on layoff in 1980, almost 32 percent of black autoworkers were out of work. In majority-black “Motor City” Detroit, unemployment was 23 percent in 1982, black youth unemployment 70 percent, and the infant mortality rate about the same as for Honduras. In early 1981, while Reagan argued that high unemployment was caused by too many women looking for jobs outside the home and that government aid kept “welfare queens in designer jeans,” a New York Times reporter interviewed Rosa, an undocumented Ecuadoran woman who lived in a Union City, New Jersey, basement with two children (one brain damaged), and worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, sewing shirts for 20 cents apiece.