Rush to compromise: labor hits the canvas for Clinton - Cover Story

Progressive, The, June, 1993 by Laura McClure

There's a rumor going around Washington, D.C., that Hillary Rodham Clinton has privately urged union leaders to exert a little more pressure for national health-care reform. After all, if organized labor is continually signaling its eagerness to compromise, who will provide a counter-weight to the power of the insurance companies and the American Medical Association?

But since Bill Clinton's election, many top union leaders haven't been exerting any pressure. Instead, they can't seem to find enough words to express their willingness to acquiesce in the desires of the new Administration.

"It has been a long, dry spell," explains AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland. "We have, I think, reached an oasis."

Gerald McEntee of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees is reported to be anxiously awaiting an invitation to the Rose Garden. "I've never been in the Rose Garden," he confesses.

An ecstatic Steelworkers president, Lynn Williams, says he feels "very good, very positive, very encouraged" about the Clinton Administration.

Although Bill Clinton was not the first choice of organized labor in 1992 - Tom Harkin of Iowa was preferred - labor provided plenty of cash and muscle for his campaign. (The $3.7 million in "soft money" contributed by labor was second only to the $13.7 million from big business.) Then, as now, the word "union" rarely crossed Clinton's lips.

Several months into the new Administration, the AFL-CIO seems to have few qualms about the new President's policies. It pledges it will "do its level best to be supportive" of Clinton's economic plan, expresses its intention to act as the Clintons' "troops" to get their health-care package passed, and signals its willingness to compromise on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to lift the taxes and tariffs companies now pay when selling goods among the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

The Federation is also favorably inclined toward the centerpiece of the Administration's labor policy: increased labor-management cooperation.

In the past few months, Labor Secretary Robert Reich has been laying out his ideas about this "new partnership" to everyone from the National Association of Manufacturers to the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO. The idea is that workers should join with management to help companies become more profitable, productive, and competitive. In exchange, bosses should agree to stop resisting union organizing drives, refusing to bargain, and crushing strikes. It's what popular psychologists would call a "win-win solution."

Unions appreciate Reich's call to restore a "level playing field for working men and women who have been penalized for even trying to form a union." And they are reassured by his promise that the Administration will back legislation to ban the hiring of permanent replacements in strikes.

But the campaign for "cooperation" is cast mostly as a business strategy, a way to enlist labor in the struggle for competitiveness. "Labor and management must become not only partners in the competitive struggle," says Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, "but advocates for an entirely new way for American firms to compete and win in the global marketplace."

Reich and Brown recently announced the creation of a new ten-member Commission on the Future of Worker/Management Relations to discuss how to "improve productivity through increased labor-management cooperation and employee participation in the workplace." The Commission, which includes only one representative from organized labor (longretired former United Auto Workers president Doug Fraser), is to hold open meetings and release its legislative recommendations in March 1994.

U.S. workers and unions already have plenty of experience with various attempts at "cooperation": It is estimated that there are 30,000 cooperative "quality-of-worklife" or "employee-involvement" programs in workplaces around the country. The reviews have been mixed. Many workers charge that management uses "cooperation" as an excuse to speed up the pace of work, lay off workers, and undermine the role of the union. The AFL-CIO and the majority of union leaders acknowledge some of these problems but still see cooperation as the way of the future. Labor's traditional adversarial stance is outmoded, they argue, and in this time of global competition, labor and management should become partners in productivity.

Larry Solomon, who heads a UAW local in Decatur, Illinois, would beg to disagree.

Solomon says the 2,000 or so members of his local, who make farm and construction equipment for the Caterpillar company, are "pretty happy so far with the new Administration." But ask about the Administration's push for labor-management cooperation and Solomon's voice goes up a dozen decibels.

"I know that Bill Clinton is a promoter of labor-management committees," he says. "But you mark this down: That is the cancer that is going to destroy the unions throughout all America."

In the 1980s, Solomon's local enlisted in the company's "employee-satisfaction process." which promised to give workers more control over their jobs. Every week, a group of ten to twenty volunteers from each department (assembly line, maintenance, and so on) met with a few managers to talk about problems and ideas.