Labor more militant as economy teeters

"The last week was one of the worst ever in the airline industry," says Joseph Tiberi, spokesman for the machinists' union.

Meanwhile, some 10,500 union longshoremen on the West Coast are trying to hammer out a new contract to replace the one that expired at the end of June. Should talks fail, it is considered likely that President Bush would step in rather allow a strike to disrupt US shipping.

The double whammy of recession and Sept. 11 has also hit Chicago-based Boeing. The aircraft manufacturer has moved to round-the-clock negotiations with the machinists to wrap up a three-year contract to replace the one that expires Sept. 1. With demand for aircraft slumping, the company has taken the unusual step of saying it would not try to keep production going in the event of a strike.

Another union hard hit by the double whammy: the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. Last week, the union's Chicago local, representing nearly 7,000 employees, authorized a strike Aug. 31 if it doesn't agree on a new contract with Chicago hotels.

"There's a lot of hidden unemployment going on," Professor Kochan says. A slump in hotel and restaurant traffic is forcing managers to cut hours of their already part-time employees.

Even less visible, but equally important, are the cuts that state and local governments are beginning to make. Public-sector unions have been one of the few bright spots for the labor movement since the 1980s recession shrunk union representation in the private sector. Today, for example, unions represent 1 in 10 workers in the private sector, down from 1 in 6 in 1983. Union representation of government employees, meanwhile, has stayed steady – nearly in 4 in 10 workers – during that period.

That may fall a bit now, thanks to dramatic declines in tax revenues. "We've been hit fairly hard in a number of locations already and next year could be even tougher," says Steven Kreisberg, associate director for research and collective bargaining for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The union represents state and local government employees. States including Ohio, Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska, are laying off workers in a bid to bridge their budget deficits.

Here in Illinois, two departments – corrections and human services – are taking almost all the cuts, which will mean fewer front-line supervisors in state prisons and the closure of several mental-health hospitals.

Here in Alton, Ill., more than 100 union staffers stand to lose their jobs at the civil wing of the local mental health center. The AFSCME local union has gone to court to try to delay the Sept. 15 closure.

One of the few encouraging signs for the union movement comes from a survey of unionized employers. As of last year, nearly 6 in 10 expected to negotiate at least a 3 percent first-year pay increase in new labor contracts for 2002. That was about the same as the previous year, according to the Bureau of National Affairs, the publisher that does the study.

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