Labor's Search for Job Security

When the United Mine Workers (UMW) recently began contract negotiations with the major Eastern coal companies, their contract demands could be summed up in two words: job security.

UMW President Richard Trumka promised to "use every tool necessary" to protect the jobs of union coal miners.

If the past, however, is any guide to the future, protecting its members' jobs will be difficult for the union. Since 1980, the number of active mines in the United States has fallen from about 5,000 to little more than 3,000. Meanwhile, the number of unionized coal miners has declined by a third to only 85,000 - scarcely 20 percent of the UMW membership that the legendary UMW organizer John L. Lewis led during the 1930s and '40s.

Trumka's UMW typifies the challenges facing American unionism in the'80s and beyond. At 38, Trumka is the youngest president of any national union. A former coal miner and an attorney with a keen grasp of economic issues, as comfortable with the new world of personal computers as the old world of picket lines, Trumka is an appropriate heir to the union built by the innovative Lewis. But, more importantly, just as Lewis' UMW met the challenge of that era by organizing unorganized workers, Trumka's UMW faces the major challenge of protecting the unionized jobs that provide a decent standard of living for millions of U.S. workers.

America's industrial unions are up against the erosion of our nation's industries. Since 1979, at a time when the work force has grown by more than 10 million, the number of jobs in basic manufacturing has dropped from 21 million to less than 19 million. During this period, a staggering 75 percent of unionized steelworkers' jobs have been wiped out, as have one-third of unionized coal miners' jobs, one-sixth of auto workers' jobs, and the jobs of hundreds of thousands of garment workers, electrical workers, rubber workers and workers in other industries.

Even these statistics do not tell the story of the rusting of America's industrial plants and the declining capacity ' of the U.S. to produce steel, automobiles, farm equipment, electrical appliances, radios, television, sophisticated machinery, clothing, shoes and computers. Nor do statistics convey the human consequences of the decline in basic industry: workers laid off from unionized industrial jobs, with good pay and comprehensive benefits and forced to accept non-union jobs in'the service industries with low pay and few, if any, benefits such as health insurance.

"Hollow Corporations"

While the news media and corporate managers have taught Americans to blame the Japanese for our job jitters, the best analysis of our plight came from the founder of a leading Japanese company, Sony Corporation Chairman Akio Morita. Morita says, "American companies have either shifted output to low-wage countries or come to buy parts and assembled products from countries like Japan that can make quality products at low prices. The result is a hollowing of U.S. industry. The U.S. is abandoning its status as an industrial power."

Morita spoke a simple truth which has been publicly acknowledged by only one presidential candidate, Jesse Jackson. American workers' jobs have been wiped out not so much by foreign companies but by U.S - based multinationals which stamp theirown trademarks on products made overseas or import foreign-made parts for final assembly here. As Business Week magazine reported in a recent issue, more and more U.S. companies are becoming "hollow corporations," little more than "marketing organizations for other producers, mostly foreign."

As U.S. industry "hollows out," scores of U.S. jobs are wiped out: not only assembly-line workers but engineers and machinists, steel workers and coal miners and everyone else involved in producing raw materials, designs, parts, finished products, plant equipment and other essentials of an industrial economy.

Meanwhile, a union movement now faces the dilemma of how to protect its very existence. Over the past half century, collective bargaining has produced better pay, benefits, better working conditions, supplemental unemployment benefits for the victims of layoffs, and has protected job security against such age-old threats as unfair firings.

Voice in Corporate Decision-making

But today, winning job security means winning something more: a voice in corporate decision-making. To protect workers' jobs at a time of convulsive change, unions need to win commitments from corporations to invest in America: to modernize their plants and retrain their workers to compete effectively in the world economy of the future. Instead of job security, unions increasingly are seeking "career security" for their members: not a guarantee that they will hold onto exactly the same job for the rest of their lives but rather the opportunity to continue to work in fast-changing industries.

When the issue is forcing companies to invest in their own workers and their own country, unions are bargaining for something new: a stronger voice in corporate decision-making. From bitter experience, unionists have learned it is not enough to get paper promises that jobs will be preserved. What's needed arefirm guaranteesthat corporations will invest in existing plants, build new ones, retrain workers for new skills and give current employees first consideration for new and often very different jobs.

The changing meaning of job security is illustrated by the recent history of the steel, auto and telecommunications industries.

Steel Industry Dismantles Itself

The experience of the United Steelworkers reveals the difficulty of protecting industrial workers' job security at a time when so many of America's basic industries are systematically dismantling themselves.

With great fanfare little more than a decade and a half ago, the United Steelworkers signed an "experimental national agreement" with the major steel companies that was supposed to herald a new era of industrial peaceand guarantee lifetime employment for the workers.

Today only 140,000 workers remain on the job in basic steel-compared to more than 700,000 as recently as 1978. In the ensuing years, tens of thousands of steelworkers accepted contracts trading concessions on wages and work rules in a futile effort to save their jobs. Unemployed after decades of difficult and dangerous work, many now face cuts in their pension benefits and the looming bankruptcy of entire retirement systems. (See Multinational Monitor, "Rusted Dreams in Southeast Chicago," June, 1987, and 'Pensions: The Broken Promise," August, 1987.)

Hindsight is easy, but the leaders of the Steelworkers union during the early ;'Os were veteran unionists who faced a changing world and national economy that was to bewilder the leaders or business, government and finance, as well as labor. 13-on Fisher, who was a key staffer for the union during the late '60s and early'70s and now directs the Center ior Labor Studies at Carnegie-Mellon University, explained recently, "Weknewthe work force would shrink over time, but it happened much more quickly than we assumed."

UAW Bargaining

No union has been more innovative in its bargaining tactics-or less bashful about challenging corporate prerogatives-than the United Auto Workers (UAW). Four decades ago, when he was little older than Richard Trumka is todav, the UAW leader Walter Reuther demanded that General Motors take the unprecedented action of "opening the books" to the UAW to prove that it could not afford a substantial pay increase without raising prices. About the same time, Reuther urged the big three auto companies to do something that would have prevented foreign companies from making inroads into the U.S. market: start building small cars, as well as the larger-and costlier-models. The auto companies laughed at Reuther's idea, just as GM balked at opening its books, but, ironically, if the industry had allowed the UAW a voice in setting policies, it would be much stronger and more profitable today.

Reuther was not successful in his effort to win a voice in corporate decisionmaking, but, during the 1950s and '60s, the UAW did succeed at negotiating a trailblazing program of Supplemental Unemployment Benefits (SUB) under which the big three auto companies agreed to provide laid-off workers with 90 percent of their pay for up to two years. The supplemental payments were intended not only to help jobless workers make ends meet but also to discourage the companies from laying off workers in the first place-because it would be so expensive to keep paying them benefits for two years.

Auto workers have always been vulnerable to seasonal layoffs and recessions, yet their jobs were relatively secure until the energy crisis of the '70s and the growing popularity of foreign cars wiped out more than 200,000 jobs. During the 1980s, auto workers' jobs have been threatened by a new enemy: the "hollowing out" of U.S. corporations. Increasingly, the big three auto-makers assemble their cars from foreign-made parts-or simply buy foreign cars, put U.S. nameplates on them, and sell them here.

While much attention hasbeen paid to joint projects between U.S. auto makers and foreign companies, few Americans are aware that U.S. companies are also becoming part-owners of their foreign suppliers.

Today, Ford receives about half of its components from outside sources while GM gets 30 percent of its parts from outside sources. Meanwhile, Ford owns 70 percent of the Taiwanese auto company Lio Hu, 42 percent of South Africa's Samcor Motors and 25 percent of Japan's Mazda. GM owns 38.1 percent of Japan's Isuzu, 50 percent of the auto division of Korea's Daewoo and 60 percent of the British sports car producer Lotus. And Chrysler owns 15 percent of the giant Japanese auto maker Mitsubishi and 25 percent of Taiwan's Yu Loong Motors.

The UAW has had a hard time negotiating job security because the companies across the bargaining table are busy getting out of the business of making cars. In the recently completed contract talks with Ford and GM, as in the 1984 negotiations, the UAW has resumed the effort Reuther began four decades ago: trying to win a voice in corporate decision-making.

In its 1984 contract negotiations, the UAW won agreements with Ford and General Motors to create "job banks," which paid workers who were laid off because of "outsourcing" or new technology to learn new skills and guaranteed them first consideration for new jobs. The UAW also got the auto companies to commit to new investments to build small cars in the United States (Alpha and Saturn) and to set aside $130 million incorporate funds for new ventures to replace closed plants.

This year, in an effort to win additional job security protections, the UAW targeted Ford, the most prosperous of the big three auto companies, and then won a similar agreement at GM. Under the new contracts, Ford and GM agreed to maintain the existing number of jobs at each of their plants, promising not to lay off workers for any reason except declining car sales. This means Ford and GM cannot lay off workers to shift production overseas or to increase automation here at home. While Ford and GM can reduce their labor force by attrition as a result of retirement and illness and voluntary resignations, they have agreed to rehire one new worker for every two who leave for such reasons. These contracts, however, are not ironclad guarantees against layoffs or even plant closings. In fact, shortly after the contract was signed, GM announced it is closing its Framingham, Massachusetts, plant, idling at least 3,000 workers. However, these new agreements d o give the UAW new leverage to make Ford and GM re-invest in the American auto industry. (Chrysler's contract comes up next year.)

Ma Bell's Orphans

In a third major industry--telecommunicationsworkers face the challenges not only of new technologies and foreign competition but also the break-up of their leading employer, AT&T. Before the break-up of the Bell system, a job with the telephone company amounted to lifetime job security. But, following the court-ordered dismantling of Ma Bell-with chunks of the old Bell system forced to compete in a changing marketplace-more than 80,000 jobs were lost in 1985 alone.

The telecommunications industry's major union, the Communications Workers of America (CWA), understands that, in this fast-changing environment, there is little hope for any worker to expect to hold onto the same job with the same employer for the rest of his or hercareer. Instead, as CWA President Morton Bahr explains, "Our major objective is for a worker to have guaranteed lifetime employment within that company-not within that workplace or that particular job-but within that company, recognizing that jobs are changing rapidly."

Consequently, in negotiations with AT&T, CWA has bargained a company-financed program providing technical training to prepare laid-off workers for new jobs within the industry. Meanwhile, at the regional phone companies, which continue to enjoy virtual local monopolies, CWA has won stronger job protections. Pacific Bell and Nevada Bell, for instance, agreed not to lay off workers during recently negotiated three-year agreements.

At a time when management, labor and government are all concerned about our nation's economic competitiveness, stronger guarantees of workers' job security should be good business for America. After all, workers who know that they have a future with their company are more likely to be concerned about the company's future. That is the argument unionists are making at bargaining tables across the country, and, before closing their minds to that message, management negotiators should remember what has happened to so many American industries that treated their workers like disposable parts.

David Kusnet directed publicity in organizing campaigns for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). He was a speechwriter for the late AFSCME President Jerry Wurf and for Walter Mondale during the 1984 campaign.