Americans place a high value on fairness. We want to make sure that people who are competing in any area have what we call a "level playing field," so no one has an unfair advantage over anyone else. It's not too hard to do this in sports because players are generally pretty evenly matched to begin with. But there are other areas where ensuring fairness is a tricky and difficult business. Education is one of them and labor-management relations is another. That's why the pending legislation that would make it illegal for employers to hire permanent replacements for striking workers is so important.
Not so long ago, companies held all the cards: An employee could be fired for any reason and at anytime -- like after the person had worked for the company for 30 years and was about to retire. Companies had no obligation to pay a decent wage or provide decent working conditions. All this is still true in some Third World countries, but the labor movement in industrialized nations has been working over the past 100 years to make sure that the advantages in labor-management relations are not all on the side of management. It's had some big successes.
Before there were unions, no individual worker would stand a chance in a dispute with a company -- it's easy to fire a worker and hire a new one. But when workers get together in a union, things are more nearly equal because it's a lot more costly for a company to tell its entire workforce to get lost.
U.S. laws protect this right to organize by saying that companies can't fire employees for joining a union. The laws also say that management must meet with union representatives -- must bargain collectively -- to iron out disagreements about wages and working conditions. Our laws further try to make both sides equal in disputes that resist settlement by giving companies the right to lock out workers and workers the right to withhold their labor-to strike.
The success of all this depends on maintaining the balance between two inherently unequal opponents, but this balance is being destroyed. That's what the new legislation is about.
Although it's against the law to fire workers who are on strike, employers may hire workers as permanent replacements for strikers. Their freedom to do this is nothing new, but for many years, though companies sometimes hired temporary replacements, few hired permanent replacements for strikers. Now, the practice is becoming more common-we saw it in the strikes at Continental and Eastern Airlines, at Greyhound Bus Lines and at the New York Daily News -- and it threatens the right to strike and even the existence of labor unions.
What's the difference between firing workers who are on strike and replacing striking workers with new employees? What indeed! There may be a fine legal distinction, but workers who don't have a job to go back to after the strike is over will not appreciate it. Whatever terminology is used, they know they are simply out of a job-perhaps after they have been out on strike for weeks or months and have spent their savings. That's happened to 300,000 workers since 1981.
The practice of hiring permanent replacements destroys the balance between labor and management by depriving labor of its biggest card. What does the freedom to strike mean if you know you might lose your job when you go out? What incentive will companies have to bargain in good faith if they know the threat of replacements can keep their workers in line? And if workers do strike, and permanent replacements are brought in, why should management care if the dispute with their original workers is ever resolved? The replacements are almost always paid less, and they are unlikely to be union members. In fact, hiring permanent replacements is a good way of getting rid of the employees' voice altogether by getting rid of the union.
The legislation that is now in committee would permit temporary replacements -- employers have a right to continue to operate their businesses just as workers have a right to strike. But it would remove one of the unfair advantages that management has over labor by making the hiring of permanent replacements illegal.
People who oppose the legislation say it would lead to a rash of strikes and would harm our competitiveness in world markets. Looking at other industrialized countries suggests that there's not much to the competitiveness argument. Employers in Japan and Germany -- our chief competitors -- are forbidden by law to replace striking workers, and the same is true in many other European countries: France, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Greece.
The notion that banning permanent replacements would lead to many more strikes than we now have is based on the naive idea that workers like going out on strike and, with some encouragement, would do it a lot more often. Strikes are a powerful weapon, but they are not without severe financial and emotional cost to strikers -- as any one who has ever been out on strike knows. And that makes them a weapon of last resort.
The proposed legislation is not about taking advantage of business; it's about preserving the voice that workers have struggled to get over the years-and that's good for business, too.