For nearly 50 years, labor and management in America agreed to disagree.
Despite hundreds of strikes, management never resorted to hiring others to do the strikers’ jobs, even though it was legal under the federal Taft-Hartley Act.
“There was a kind of mutual pact that replacements would not be bought in,” said Douglas McCabe, a professor and expert on labor-management relations at Georgetown University in Washington.
That all changed in 1981.
“President (Ronald) Reagan ended that with the firing of the striking air traffic controllers,” he said.
Organized labor failed to force Reagan to back down and suddenly management had a new negotiating tool at its disposal.
Striking workers had reason to fear they might lose their jobs.
In short order, copper producer Phelps Dodge Corp., Greyhound Bus Lines, Eastern Air Lines and Continental Airlines successfully kept operating with permanent replacements.
Many management experts credit the decision in 1992 by Caterpillar Corp., based in Peoria, to begin hiring replacement workers with helping drive striking workers back to their jobs.
Even though only a few hundred were hired, the specter of permanent replacements being hired frightened workers to return to work.
“Use of replacements has become not an infrequent event,” said Myron Roomkin, a professor and expert in collective bargaining at the Northwestern University Kellogg Graduate School of Business.
“If organized labor is capable of keeping strong long enough, the use of replacements hardens their position,” he said.
Ray Hilgert, a professor of management at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis, cited a recent strike by machinists at McDonnell Douglas Corp. in St. Louis as an example where a united group successfully bucked a company’s decision to bring in replacements.
Still, replacements are a regular consideration within a corporation’s arsenal of weapons they can use to settle a strike.
On Saturday, United Parcel Service, whose workers have been on strike for a week, said it would do “whatever it takes” to protect the company.
“Starting to hire replacements may be part of strategy to get more striking UPS workers to cross the picket lines,” said Hilgert.
