In My Opinion: "The More Things Change..."

What are the issues and challenges that confront organized labor as we look toward the dawn of the 21st century? The answer, in many cases, is - the same ones that workers and union leaders faced when the calendar turned from the 1800s to the 1900s.

Rapid technological change. Then it was the telephone, the birth of aviation, the automobile and the technique of mass production. Today it's the computer and the age of high-tech information and mass communications.

Concentration of power. John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt were either great industrialists or "robber barons" depending on your point of view. Today's versions are named Bill Gates, Bernie Ebbers, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner.

Sweatshops. Only the locations have changed.

At the turn of the last century, a big threat to secure jobs was piece work in the needle trades and manufacturing, daily job shapeups on the waterfronts and at construction sites. Today it's "permatemps," a growing system of permanent contingent jobs to avoid paying benefits and discourage unionization.

The need for union solidarity hasn't changed. A century ago, divisions between craft unions often presented problems such as when, say, railroad shopworkers would strike but engineers and brakemen kept driving the trains. To build the unity and power to take on giants like Ford, U.S. Steel, and AT&T, labor's major push during the first half of the 20th century was for the new concept of industrial unionism.

Today, we're going to have to consider "multi-industrial unionism" to deal with incredibly diverse empires like the Walt Disney Co. For example, we discovered in bargaining at ABC, now owned by Disney, that the process regarding key, critical issues like health care, was being controlled by the parent company, by decision-makers who weren't present at the negotiating table, and whose bottom-line concerns were far removed from the daily workings of the ABC network.

I've discussed with AFL-CIO President John Sweeney the need to call a meeting among the unions representing workers at the far-flung Disney enterprises. Clearly, it's going to take a joint strategy and united, multi-union effort to bargain effectively with a global media/entertainment colossus with a powerful presence in film, television, publishing, Internet services, music, sports, cruise lines and retail sales, along with its famous theme parks.

At another information age giant, Microsoft, we see an uncanny coupling of modern union tactics and age-old labor issues. CWA's Newspaper Guild affiliate has an innovative approach to helping organize thousands of permatemps in Seattle who work for Microsoft and Boeing through some 20 temp agencies.

A Guild-CWA alliance called WashTech is challenging the bogus status of these permanent temp workers, who make up 35 percent of Microsoft's workforce. In so doing, WashTech has a legal challenge against what can only be called "yellow dog contracts," a 19th century device - now outlawed - whereby employers coerce workers into signing agreements not to unionize. In this case, Microsoft is forcing permatemps to sign a waiver that would exclude them from any rights and benefits gained for them by the union.

Ultimately, the methods employers use to resist unions in organizing and collective bargaining haven't changed much in the last century. With the threat of permanent replacement, revived by President Reagan when he fired the PATCO strikers, the strike threat once again has become as much an employers' weapon as it is a workers' tactic.

In recent years, CWA and other unions have honed new methods - concerted workplace mobilization activities - for pressuring employers without subjecting workers to the hardship or risk of striking. CWA's program of advertising, public protest and inside mobilization at Bell Atlantic in 1995, for instance, was considered by many to be a model for a new concept, "the virtual strike."

But here again, these tactics are a variation on old themes. Decades ago, when there were no labor laws but always plenty of potential scabs around to break a strike, a union organizer wrote:

"The best way to strike is the 'strike on the job,'" and he noted that, "striking on the job is a science and should be taught as such.... First present your demands to the boss. If he should refuse to grant them, don't walk out and give the scabs a chance to take your places. No, just go back to work as though nothing had happened and try a new method of warfare."

He went on to describe workplace actions that would cause the boss to "soon find that the cheapest way out of it is to grant your demands." The organizer wrote down those thoughts from a prison cell in Salt Lake City in 1914. The next year he was shot by a firing squad, having been framed - so they say - on a murder charge by the copper bosses.

His name, Joe Hill. His farewell message, "Don't mourn - organize." That's still our top challenge on the eve of the new century.