The dominant view of labor relations these days is that workers should ask not what their employers can do for them, but what they can give back to their employers. As the pundits see it, organized labor–if it must be organized at all–should cooperate with management to promote our “competitiveness” in the “global economy.”
For many years only a few rogue employers, most of them in the south, took advantage of that Supreme Court opinion. It only became a serious practical threat to labor unions after Ronald Reagan fired striking air-traffic controllers in 1981. Reagan broke no new legal ground with that action–as federal employees the controllers did not have any legal right to strike–but he did set a new tone for labor relations, and private employers took his cue: Phelps Dodge, Brown & Sharpe, the Tribune Company, Hormel, International Paper, Eastern Airlines, and many other companies broke strikes or unions by bringing in permanent replacements over the next decade. And many other companies, taking advantage of high unemployment and a generally weakened labor movement, threatened to do so.
As he progressed in his trade, he reluctantly continued as steward, then ran for successively more powerful positions, spending two terms as bargaining chairman during the past decade. But that was a “horrible job,” Brown said, fighting the company day after day over thousands of grievances and contending with a membership going through painful convulsions. He suffered a heart attack in 1988. Then his caucus drafted him to run for president of the local, a job that doesn’t involve the same unending, day-to-day conflict. Even in the turmoil of the recent strike, Brown was calm, confident, and friendly, qualities he needed to reassure his anguished members. Physically he’s no fire-breathing John L. Lewis: he looks like a scoutmaster or well-muscled accountant, clean-cut, open-faced, soft-spoken, without guile.
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In two subsequent contract negotiations during the 80s, both resolved without strikes, the UAW gave up many rights in order to let management have a freer hand organizing production, shuffling jobs, and subcontracting work. The union reduced the number of job classifications in most plants from several hundred to less than one hundred, knowing full well that such changes would cost jobs. It also gave up some of the rights that senior workers had to “bump” junior workers out of their jobs if there were employment cutbacks. In order to reinforce the Cat Logistics Division’s promise on delivery of spare parts, the union surrendered the right to strike in that division–over the loud protests of many members. Employment at the East Peoria local plummeted from 24,000 in 1979 to about 9,000 today with roughly similar production.
Brown said he first got inklings of problems to come after the 1988 contract was signed, when Caterpillar’s new director of labor relations began reneging on what the union thought were understandings about the meaning of the contract. These problems eroded the trust the company was supposedly still trying to build. Caterpillar so dominates the Peoria area that many blue-collar workers have known management people for years. Brown knew managers who had been high school chums. The wife of one top union official works in an upper-management post; indeed, so the story goes, one foreman ordered her husband, a production worker, to cross the picket line or she’d divorce him.
Last year Caterpillar ran its factories full blast, using extensive overtime, to build up as much inventory as it could before the strike. Although Brown urged workers to minimize overtime voluntarily, the union had given up the right to restrict it many years earlier. Since the economy was still mired in recession and sales were weak, Cat was well situated to withstand a strike, especially since the union could not strike the one operation that continues fairly strong even during downturns: the Logistics Division, or parts department.
