[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 171 (Wednesday, November 1, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S16510]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       STRIKER REPLACEMENT ISSUE

 Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, I ask that the March 13, 1995, 
editorial from the Washington Post regarding President Clinton's 
Executive order prohibiting the use of permanent replacement workers 
during an economic strike if you do any business with the Federal 
Government be printed in the Record.
  The editorial follows:

               [From the Washington Post, Mar. 13, 1995]

                     The Striker Replacement Issue

       President Clinton and the filibustering Senate Democrats 
     are wrong on the striker replacement issue. The Senate 
     Republicans are right, and we hope a couple of Democrats can 
     sooner or later be persuaded to switch sides. Then the 
     filibuster can be broken.
       The president has no particular history of commitment on 
     this issue. The executive order he signed, disturbing and 
     tilting settled labor law in labor's favor, was plainly an 
     effort to propitiate a constituency that couldn't get its way 
     through normal procedures. The resisting Senate Republicans 
     think that in issuing the order, the president was trying to 
     snatch what ought to be regarded as a legislative 
     prerogative, and they are determined to take it back. If not 
     on the current appropriations bill, you can expect them to do 
     it on some other. In the long run the law seems unlikely to 
     be changed; this is more a fight over symbols, the president 
     who frustrated organized labor on other issues over the last 
     two years trying now to look on the cheap like its friend.
       The executive order would bar large federal contractors 
     from hiring permanent replacements when workers strike over 
     economic issues. That's the rule that labor had tried and 
     failed to get Congress to apply to all employers. The unions 
     argue that the ban has become necessary to protect what they 
     depict as a threatened right to strike. But it isn't because 
     of labor law that unions have lost membership and clout in 
     recent years. Rather, it's because, in part by virtue of 
     their own past actions, they find themselves in an 
     increasingly weak competitive position in a world economy. 
     The insulating change they seek in labor law would be much 
     more likely over time to make that problem worse than to make 
     it better.
       The law is contradictory. The National labor Relations Act 
     says strikers can't be fired; the Supreme Court has 
     nonetheless ruled that they can be permanently replaced. The 
     contradiction may be healthy. By leaving labor and management 
     both at risk, the law gives each an incentive to agree. For 
     most of modern labor history, management in fact has made 
     little use of the replacement power, and labor hasn't much 
     protested it.
       The unions say that now that's changed. The replacement 
     power has been used in a number of celebrated cases in recent 
     years, and labor is doubtless right that in some of these 
     cases it wasn't used as a last resort, but as a union-
     breaking device from the beginning. The problem is that 
     situations also arise when strikers by their behavior forfeit 
     the right of return and ought to be permanently replaced. 
     This newspaper faced such a situation in dealing with one of 
     its own unions in the 1970s. A ban on the hiring of permanent 
     replacements goes too far. Rather than restore some lost 
     balance in labor law, as its supporters suggest, it would 
     throw the law out of balance and in the long run likely do 
     great economic harm. Maybe there are some modest changes that 
     can usefully be made in current law. But the president's 
     order ought to be reversed. He should find some other way to 
     pose as labor's champion.

                          ____________________