New Weapon for Bashing Bosses

Labor's pension fund muscle

He wears jeans to the office, lifts weights to stay in shape for his long working days and has little of the charisma of legendary labor leaders. Yet Ray Rogers, 35, former VISTA volunteer, is shaking up union-management relations witha devastating new tactic that could well become as much a part of labor's arsenal as the strike or the picket line. An organizer for the Manhattan-based Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers, Rogers is the chief of its "corporate campaign," which uses the union's raw financial and political power. His campaign has already brought some of the most powerful corporations to their knees, and his ideas are spreading to other unions.

Rogers' prime target has been J.P. Stevens & Co., the second largest U.S. textile maker, which for more than 16 years has fought off unionization despite repeated warnings by the National Labor Relations Board and three contempt citations by federal courts. Labor regards cracking Stevens as the key to organizing the largely nonunion South. The ACTWU aims at isolating Stevens by making it a pariah to other business and financial institutions. Says Rogers: "The ultimate goal of the corporate campaign is, if necessary, to totally alienate and polarize the corporate and Wall Street communities away from J.P. Stevens."

Last winter the ACTWU organized a campaign that led labor unions to threaten to withdraw more than $1 billion in pension and other funds from New York's Manufacturers Hanover bank unless it dumped two of its directors, who also held seats on the Stevens board. The bank quickly caved in and failed to renominate Stevens Chairman James D. Finley and David W. Mitchell, chairman of Avon Products. Two weeks later Mitchell, deluged with letters from union sympathizers threatening a boycott of Avon goods, also quit as a Stevens director.

Next the ACTWU turned its ire on the New York Life Insurance Co. by announcing that it would run its own candidates for the board against Finley and New York Life's chairman R. Manning Brown Jr. A contested election would have cost the insurance firm as much as $6 million to mail ballots to its policyholders, and New York Life decided that it was not worth the fight. Stevens' Finley was again knocked off a board--this time New York Life's--and he was furious. Meanwhile, Brown, who had earlier vowed not to give in, resigned from the Stevens board. Said he: "I must consider the interests of New York Life."

But that was only the beginning. Now the union is going after E. Virgil Conway, chairman of the Seamen's Bank for Savings in New York City, who refuses to quit as a director of Stevens. The union is stirring up activist groups against Sea men's by pointing out that the bank makes most of its mortgage loans to borrowers outside metropolitan New York. The ACTWU has also enlisted political, labor and religious groups to help block the bank from opening a branch on Long Is land.

Next on the hit list is Sidney Weinberg Jr., a partner of Goldman, Sachs, the investment banker. Rogers plans a nationwide campaign to force him out as a Stevens director. After that the union will probably try to push Finley off the boards of Sperry Rand and Borden.

Rogers has been advising other unions on ways to apply pressure, notably the United Food and Commercial Workers.

For two years the UFCW has been battling the Seattle-First National Bank, the largest in the Northwest, to recognize the union as the bargaining agent for the bank's employees. The union has persuaded labor organizations and civic groups to withdraw deposits of more than $125 million from Seafirst. It has also begun to ask other unions to take their pension funds from Seafirst's correspondent banks in an effort to get them to break their ties. Last week the AFL-CIO called for a national boycott of Seafirst by union pension-fund managers.

Many business people regard the tac tic as a form of secondary boycott and possibly illegal. Nonsense, says Rogers:

"Unions must confront giant corporate capital with workers' capital. They must confront interlocking corporate power with interlocking workers' power." In the meantime, labor and business leaders are waiting to see what the new tactic pro duces. If either Stevens or Seafirst is eventually compelled to accept unionization, labor's use of the "corporate campaign" squeeze is certain to increase.

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