PEORIA, Ill. — For a generation now, humble pie has been a dietary staple of the American labor movement, but few servings have been harder to swallow than the failed strike of the United Auto Workers against Caterpillar Inc.
Seventeen months into the UAW's latest walkout--its second long strike during a four-year dispute--the union finally surrendered Sunday, sending 9,000 workers back into factories that were doing just fine without them.
The walkout was rashly conceived and ineptly executed--and it now serves as a cautionary tale for a labor movement that is trying to rebuild itself through union mergers and a renewed emphasis on organizing.
Those new approaches may well help restore union membership, which has now dwindled to 11% of the private work force. But they will mean little unless they also contribute to the potency of the strike, once the big gun in labor's arsenal, and one so prone to backfire these days.
"The Caterpillar strike is a big balloon that just went poof," said Neil Bernstein, a labor law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. "If I represent management, and the workers want to organize, I can tell them: 'Look what happened at Caterpillar. What good does a union do for you?' "
If there is an enduring image to the Cat walkout, it is the proud but pigheaded strikers who stood at the burn barrels by the picket shacks, all the while refusing to believe that a patchwork of office workers, temporaries and union line-crossers were building tractors just as well as they had.
As the company kept proclaiming a long run of record profits, those strikers--and their leaders--kept reciting a self-deceiving litany about sluggish production lines and gargantuan scrap heaps.
It was not until Sunday here in Peoria, site of Cat's headquarters and home to its biggest UAW local, that striking workers were given their first realistic assessment of the walkout's effect. At a huge meeting, they listened to Richard Atwood, an official from the union international in Detroit.
"The only people being hurt by this strike are our good members," he said. "It's clear that Cat is getting enough quality and quantity, maybe not as much as if we were in there, but the company is saying: 'So what?' "
With that, the strikers were told to return to their tool cribs even though they had no contract. And with that, the strikers were also being told a hard-to-swallow truth about experienced workers in a high-tech world.
Most can be replaced as easily as the tire on a car.
In union shops, contracts are negotiated through collective bargaining. If talks fail, there is always the prospect of a strike, one side withholding labor and the other pay. Both sides hurt each other until one gives in.
This balance of power served as a solid foundation for labor negotiations until the late 1970s, when employers increasingly began to permanently replace strikers. Before that, pro-union public attitudes made such action taboo.
Oddly enough, the firing of strikers is illegal in America, as it is in most democracies. But a 1938 U.S. Supreme Court opinion has left employers with a quirky opening: While strikers cannot be fired, a company does not have to make room for their return by letting go any replacement workers.
This makes the right to strike a risky one. In recent years, the foremost protection for striking workers has been a company's difficulty in fielding a full force of replacements. The bigger the company, the harder that chore.
At Cat, the UAW was confident to the point of being foolhardy. How could the company build something as complicated as a 100-ton tractor without them?
Caterpillar has long been the world's largest manufacturer of earthmoving equipment, but in the 1980s, hurt by Japanese competition and an unfavorable dollar-to-yen ratio, it experienced a near-fatal brush with red ink.
Since then, the company has remade itself. Some $1.8 billion was spent on computerized machine tools and robots. Ever more work was farmed out to low-cost suppliers. Plants were shut, workers let go by the thousands.
As the company grew stronger, its unions grew weaker--a pattern repeated again and again across America. In 1979, Cat employed 40,500 UAW members, 45% of all its workers. By 1991, the reduced numbers were 15,100 and 28%.
Power had dramatically shifted. In the event of a strike, outside suppliers and those costly new machines would be able to do a lot of the UAW's work.
In 1991, Caterpillar's new CEO, Donald V. Fites, was determined to break free of the UAW's wage-and-benefit pattern for the heavy-equipment industry. The company's contract offer shunned the standard package. It included smaller-than-standard wage hikes on Cat's average $17-an-hour rate, a second tier of wages for some new hires and no promise not to eliminate jobs as workers retired or quit.
