Labor Loses Another Battle

Angry members of the United Auto Workers thought their walkout would cripple Caterpillar Inc.

Instead, the company had record profits, while bitter and broke strikers have no new contract and now are waiting to return to jobs occupied by replacement hires and union members who left the picket lines.

UAW leaders told workers Sunday that they should return to work even though they rejected the company’s latest contract offer. In effect, the union surrendered to Caterpillar.

The company has said it may take days or weeks to decide who goes where and what will happen to replacement workers.

The 17-month strike was the latest in a succession of labor skirmishes in which corporate America has shown clearly it has the upper hand.

“Skilled workers are not as irreplaceable as they were 20 years ago or even 10 years ago. This was just a great case study,” Kenneth Kovach, a labor-relations professor at George Mason University, said Monday.

Analysts say that, despite the new spirit of militancy at the AFL-CIO, unions may be forced to learn more about the art of cooperation if they are to be effective in the 1990s.

Nowadays, companies can hire new workers from the big pool of under-employed Americans. They can shift production overseas or farm it out to contractors. They can even lure union members across picket lines.

The UAW wasn’t the first union to learn that lesson the hard way.

The United Rubber Workers ended a strike earlier this year against tire maker Bridgestone-Firestone Inc. only to be told that many of the 2,300 strikers had lost their jobs to replacements.

The Air Line Pilots Association is feuding with Federal Express, which is responding by leasing planes from other carriers and possibly shipping more packages by truck and train.

“I think the message is loud and clear: Who’s afraid of the big, bad wolf? What can the unions do to hurt you?” said Neil Bernstein, a labor law professor at Washington University.

Unions can still wield power, especially when they make up a company’s entire work force. But the UAW had almost no advantages against Peoria-based Caterpillar, the nation’s leading manufacturer of earth-moving and heavy equipment.

Workers at some critical facilities could not walk out because of no-strike clauses in their contracts. Only one-fifth of Caterpillar workers were UAW members. And union solidarity had been frayed by an unsuccessful strike against Caterpillar just two years earlier.

When the UAW walked out, Caterpillar hired new workers and welcomed back 4,100 disgruntled union members.

Experts say Caterpillar’s victory may simply reinforce a lesson that most companies and unions learned a long time ago: Both sides have more to gain by cooperating than by forcing a confrontation.

“This shouldn’t turn on the light in anybody’s mind,” Kovach said. “If the light wasn’t on by now, they’re about 10 years too late.”

Even Caterpillar, although it weathered the strike, will have 8,700 bitter employees back in its plants, working side-by-side with people they consider scabs. And without a contract, it faces the prospect of further turmoil.