When a group of workers with an average income of a million and a half dollars a year are poised to go out on strike, you know that labor—management relations have hit the skids in America.
And it’s not just the baseball players who are walking out. Just released data from the Department of Labor indicate that 1994 is shaping up to be one of the biggest strike years since Jimmy Carter sat in the Oval Office. Through July of this year there have already been 24 “major work stoppages,” as the DOL euphemistically refers to them. The big ones include walkouts by workers at Caterpillar, General Motors, Pittsburgh Steel Corp., UPS, and, of course, the Teamsters. “Our members are increasingly nervous about growing union unrest,” analyst Peter Eidi of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce tells me.
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