But just as unions have begun a period of transformation, becoming more committed to organizing and better at it, unionbusting has expanded. The state of the art now includes sophisticated efforts to forestall organizing drives by creating company-dominated organizations in the workplace and by

Two years ago, the highest profile union organizing group in the country, Justice for Janitors, met some of this new corporate thinking head-on. Having previously organized most janitors in California's Silicon Valley and neighboring Alameda County, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1877, one of the

After winning workers' support, Local 1877 asked Somers to recognize the union based on a check of authorization cards. The company refused. Within weeks, an ex-supervisor and the wife of another supervisor began going through Hewlett-Packard buildings at night,collecting signatures for the Couriers and

Eventually, the NLRB issued a complaint, calling Local 1 a company union. Somers settled the charge and kicked the organization out.

Somers' company union marked a new and sophisticated

Somers and Littler tried to find a weak point in Justice for Janitors' campaign strategy, which rallies

But at Somers, while SEIU Local 1877 mounted pressure from outside the workplace, the company used Local 1 to create a climate of fear among the workers themselves. Those who supported the company union were given better treatment,and some were even chosen as stewards.

Somers found another ally in Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), who held hearings of the House government oversight committee to push a longer-term Republican agenda entirely barring corporate campaign tactics such as those used by Justice for Janitors. Marlene Somsak, a public relations spokesperson for Hewlett-Packard, referred to the campaign as "the use of neutral parties as battlegrounds."

Joe Uehlein, past secretary of the AFL-CIO's Industrial Union Department and now director of its Department of Strategic

And win they do. Unions lose about half the NLRB elections, and more in larger companies than smaller ones. Even worse, they win contracts with only half of the companies where workers vote for union representation.

"In the meantime, the union is excluded from the workplace entirely and has no way of stopping illegal activity before the voting takes place," Bensinger says. "The fact is, workers don't really have the right to organize unions."

Unionbusting consultants have thrived as the legal process has grown more and more skewed. When Local 2850

At the Lafayette Park Hotel, the firings were combined with raises and increases in benefits. Unions suspect that ACG consultants trained supervisors to identify and isolate pro-union workers, pressured the undecided, and helped form anti-union employee committees standard unionbuster tactics during NLRB election campaigns. "After all that, there was no way we could have a fair election there," Dupont says.

The Lafayette Park Hotel campaign is still going on. Unions adopting this approach have to have a long-term

BLOOD & GUTS STRIKEBREAKERS
The classic strategy for breaking already-organized unions hiring scabs received its blessing from the Reagan administration in its handling of the PATCO strike in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan ordered the firing of 7,000 air traffic controllers. It was

Since Phelps Dodge, the list of companies hiring scabs to break strikes is a roll call of the major class battles of the 1980s and 1990s: Continental Airlines, Eastern Airlines, International Paper, Greyhound, Caterpillar, Hormel, Watsonville Canning and Frozen Foods, Diamond Walnut,

The newspapers also lined up hired guns to handle scabs, legal affairs, PR, and security. A good-sized industry of such support institutions exists. One of the largest companies specializing in providing replacement workers, BE&K, maintains a data bank with the names of hundreds

To guard the scabs, the newspapers

Nor is the menacing image purely for show. In Detroit, 20 Vance guards beat striker Vito Sciuto with a stick, breaking his skull. In comments to a reporter afterwards, a Vance employee said the guards wanted "to hurt people."

The tapes are also useful after a strike is over to

BE&K's data bank has thenames of hundreds of potential scabs who travel the country from strike to strike.

that "troublemakers" are dealt with. While there is

THE MODERNCOMPANY UNION
Companies use different tactics in dealing with workers trying to organize than they use to break existing unions like those conducting the newspaper strikes. Not far from the Lafayette Park, another, larger, hotel chain is implementing a sophisticated strategy

After General Electric defeated a union drive at its Mattoon,

Peer review committees are only a small part of a much larger picture. Modern personnel practices in large corporations try to inoculate workers against the idea of

Much of this strategy was developed in Silicon Valley during the Cold War. From the beginning, high-tech workers have faced an industry-wide, anti-union policy. Robert Noyce, who helped invent the transistor and later became a co-founder of Intel Corp., declared that "remaining non-union is an essential for survival for most of our companies. ... This is a very high priority for management here."

Silicon Valley hearings of the Commission on the Future of Labor Management Relations, the Dunlop Commission,held in January of 1994, gave the public a first-hand look at high-tech labor/management cooperation. According to Pat Hill-Hubbard, senior vice

In the high-performance workplace, asserted Phuli Siddiqi, an Intel worker who gave part of her company's presentation, work teams give employees a voice. She described "worker ownership of projects and products,"

In the early years of the electronics industry, companies paid relatively low wages, but they attempted to equal, and sometimes surpass, union benefits, providing medical and dental plans and even sick leave. Hewlett-Packard even promised never to lay off workers.

Today, however, permanent jobs are being abolished. Half the work force in many large electronics plants works for temporary agencies, without any benefits, and at much lower salaries.

"The company always told us

"Increasing the company's profitability, they said, would increase our job security. That was the purpose of our workteams. Then the company took the ideas contributed by the experienced work force in Santa Clara, which they got through the team meetings, and used them to organize new labs with inexperienced workers in Arlington, Texas, where wages are much lower. The experienced workers lost their jobs. The team meetings stole our experience and ideas, and didn't give

Manan lost his own job, as did more than 30,000 semiconductor workers on production lines in Silicon Valley in the last 10 years.

Through its 50-year existence, the semiconductor industry has successfully prevented workers from organizing unions by combining the lure of labor- management cooperation with the threat of job loss. This model of unionbusting does not depend on outside consultants, but on the expertise of companies' own human relations departments. The strategy is less

The ideologues of this approach consider union organizing drives a punishment for companies which have failed. Kirby Dyess, Intel's vice president of human relations, says that when workers organize unions, "it is a failure of management."

Although many of the new structures for labor/management cooperation are currently illegal, corporations are lobbying hard to change that. After the Republican sweep of the 1994 elections,

A "UNION PROOF" WORK FORCE
Modern unionbusting combines the paternalism of the company union with another sophisticated strategy designing a "union-proof" work force.

In Los Angeles, cleaning contractors in office buildings in the mid-1980s dumped their largely African American union work force, shed their union contracts, and hired immigrants.

While profitable in the short run, however, using

Immigrant construction workers in southern California were also brought in to replace a higher-wage work force

Many immigrants bring militant traditions with them from their home countries, and have high expectations of social and economic justice. The Los Angeles Manufacturing Action

With the new welfare reform bill and preexisting programs to force welfare recipients into the job market, employers have seen another source of a potentially "union-proof" work force. Cities have already begun looking at workfare recipients as a pool of low-cost labor that can replace unionized employees.

Last August, negotiating with a gun to its head, New

New York City uses a growing number of workfare

Public employee unions have historically supported jobs for welfare recipients and unemployed people. But

What unions want is a basic bill of rights for workfare recipients, including the right to the same wage and treatment given other employees, the right to organize unions, and protection from unfair and arbitrary

Private employers are also eyeing the possibilities. Marriott Corp., which made one of the first efforts to bring workfare into its work force, emphasizes that it supports and counsels recipients about problems such as tardiness, rather than simply disciplining or firing them as it does with other workers.

But for workfare recipients, the weekly benefit check is all that stands between them and the streets. That's an advantage to a company like Marriott, which has mounted

In September, President Clinton urged expansion of workfare in the private sector. "We cannot create enough public-service jobs to hire these folks," he said, adding that "this has basically got to be a private-sector show."

But with no guarantee about

CAN THE BUSTERS BE BEATEN?
"For over 10 years, employers have been ruthless and sophisticated," Bensinger says, "and there have been a lot of seminars given by unionbusters cashing in on their interest."

Direct activity by anti-union consultants and law firms,

Fighting against unionbusting, therefore, is not simply

Organizing the unemployed may prove to be as important as organizing in the workplace.
Just preserving the overall percentage of organized workers takes more than 400,000 new union members a year, a rate the AFL-CIO has yet to achieve. While trained,full-time organizers are

In US labor history, large-scale union organizing has always been part of a broader social movement fighting for the interests of all

They projected a vision of social and economic change that went far beyond, and directly in contradiction to, the prevailing wisdom of the time.
company unions, the violence

The upsurge among millions of American workers,

The current changes in labor may be the beginning of something as large and profound. If they are, then the obstacles erected by present-day unionbusters can become a historical relic as quickly as did those of an earlier era.