Nominally, federal law bars companies from firing workers who are striking in a contract dispute. But while firing is illegal, Alaska Airlines’ threat to hire “permanent replacements” for strikers has become a standard management strategy. The fine distinction-permanent replacement obligates the employer to hire former strikers for future openings should they occur may not be apparent to the layman. But to the labor movement it’s all too clear: since 1981, when President Ronald Reagan broke a taboo by firing air-traffic controllers who were striking illegally, companies like Greyhound and International Paper have ended labor disputes by permanently replacing strikers. In 1989, the House labor committee calculates, about 21,000 strikers lost their jobs. Last year, after Caterpillar forced the United Auto Workers to end a five-month walkout by threatening to replace 12,600 workers, organized labor made a ban on striker replacement its top political priority. But in the latest sign of labor’s waning clout, the bill may not even make it to the Senate floor-and labor’s friend in the White House isn’t pushing it.
In happier days, the unions wouldn’t have had much of a struggle. Although the Supreme Court gave companies the right to hire permanent replacements in 1938, they rarely did so. But after a decade in which unions have lost much of their power, corporate America is loath to allow them any sort of victory. The threat of a Senate filibuster twice blocked action on a striker replacement ban last year. A similar bill passed the House again in June, but sources tell NEWSWEEK that Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell may bottle it up unless he sees the 60 votes needed to stop a filibuster. President Clinton has endorsed the measure, but all signs are that the White House would be happy to see the issue fade away. “Clinton says, ‘Get it to me and I’ll sign it, ‘but you don’t see him up on the Hill pushing it,” says Brad Cameron of the Labor Policy Association, an employer group.
The bill would do little to reverse labor’s declining influence. Automation, deregulation and international competition have reduced unions’ membership and curbed their ability to extract high wages. With just one in nine private-sector workers now covered by a union contract, the possibility that business will go to nonunion competitors is already a strong deterrent to strikes. But at the local level, where members fear for their jobs when the time comes to cast a strike vote, striker replacement has sparked a fervor the movement hasn’t seen in years. “It’s something people feel passionately about in our rank and file,” says one union lobbyist. “I get calls about this from small locals I’ve never heard of. It would be difficult to back away.”
So, despite fears among some union leaders that another Senate defeat could be devastating, the AFL-CIO is pushing for a quick vote. “I think that’s part of the problem with the country: if you think something’s not going to pass, you don’t fight for it,” says United Mine Workers president Richard Trumka. One possibility: a compromise that would let employers permanently replace strikers only after 90 or 180 days, giving a striking union time to admit defeat and take its members back to work. “There comes a time when, if a strike isn’t accomplishing anything, you’ve got to declare an end to it,” says Harvard labor-law expert Paul Weiler, who backs the idea. Union leaders strongly oppose compromise. But just as in those dark Reagan years, they may not have much choice.
