Through the eighties and nineties, U.S. labor union officials longed for a Democrat in the White House.

In 1992, with the election of Bill Clinton, many of these union leaders thought their dreams had come true. But two years of the Clinton administration has provided labor with precious little more than the previous two Republican administrations.

The latest evidence of the administration's disdain for labor was the Congressional defeat of the striker replacement bill.

Securing a legislative ban on employers hiring permanent replacements for workers who go on strike has been the top priority of organized labor for years. While the National Labor Relations Act, the statute governing labor-management relations in the United States, prohibits companies from firing workers for exercising their legal right to strike, a twisted 1938 Supreme Court decision gives corporations the right to "permanently replace" those they are not allowed to fire. The permanent replacement option was used relatively infrequently until the Reagan years. Since then, corporate America has waged an aggressive anti-labor campaign, and the use or threat to use permanent replacements has been a major weapon in the corporate arsenal.

Republican maneuvering in the Senate ensured the striker replacement bill's defeat. Demonstrating a unity and savvy that Democrats were never able to muster when the Republican Party controlled the White House, Republican senators filibustered the bill. The Democrats were able secure no more than 53 votes compared to the required 60) to end the filibuster and bring the legislation to a vote.

With the Democratic majority in Congress likely to shrink significantly in the upcoming November elections, organized labor's Congressional influence will probably only diminish in the years to come - unless unions start to do things differently. To extract something positive from its terrible defeat on the striker replacement bill, labor should reassess its political outlook and strategic orientation - both in Washington and in organizing campaigns. There are a series of lessons to be drawn from the striker replacement debacle.

First, the Clinton administration is no friend of labor.

While the administration officially supported the bill, and Labor Secretary Robert Reich campaigned for it, the administration invested very little political capital in pushing for its passage In striking contrast to its efforts on the anti-labor North American, Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the administration didn't cut deals, threaten and cajole members of Congress, or actively take its case to the public. "There wasn't one tenth the effort on this [from the administration I that there was on NAFTA," said Senator Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.

Second, and relatedly, labor needs to re-learn how to play political hardball.

Despite local unions and rank-and-file union members' ardent opposition to NAFTA, and notwithstanding the significant work that national union leadership and the AFT.-CIO did on NAFTA, top labor leaders held back on the NAFTA fight. Fear of how a stirred-up membership might turn its attention to internal union matters, and an acclimation to, and chronic expectation of" losing were important contributing factors in top leaders' restraint. But equally important was a belief that holding back on NAFTA was an investment that would yield strong returns later in administration efforts on the striker replacement bill and health care reform.

The administration could probably have ensured the enactment of the striker replacement bill if it had so chosen. The problem was that the administration didn't feel enough pressure to do so.

Third, organized labor's extreme emphasis on legislative solutions to its troubles at the bargaining table is misplaced.

The use of permanent replacements is only one of many sources of labor's collective bargaining weakness, and eliminating the permanent replacement problem will only make a dent in the larger overall problem. Even without the option of hiring permanent replacements, employers can use temporary scabs during a strike, blunting the strike's effectiveness. Or they can play off against one another different plants of a downsizing company. Or they can indirectly threaten to close their factory and move to low-wage, non-union sites in Mexico or elsewhere. Or they can point to domestic or international competitors, and claim that they simply cannot accede to a union's demands and remain profitable.

Legislative responses will be an important part of a comprehensive approach to dealing with these problems, but not the primary element.

To truly confront the range of problems that the striker replacement bill came to symbolically encapsulate, organized labor will need to: utilize more creative workplace and negotiating strategies, including in-plant tactics such as, for example, work-to-rule campaigns; devote far more resources to organizing, in order to recreate a union culture in which scabbing again becomes repugnant, and to undercut management ability to divide workers; and develop national and global strategies to confront the problem of capital mobility.

Labor's defeat on the striker replacement bill, with a Democrat in the White House, marks a new low in its power in the post-World War II era. Whether it becomes just another point on the slope marking unions' steady decline, or the turning point at which labor's revitalization begins, is within the hands of labor union members themselves.