LABOR'S LONELIEST BATTLES

The best unions fight their toughest battles alone, behind closed doors.

Waged one-on-one, member-to-member, they are confrontations aimed at
bringing their brothers and sisters back from the edge, helping them
conquer alcohol and drug addiction. Such struggles are not usually
associated with traditional bread-and-butter labor issues. But they're just
as much a part of unionism's original core mission of mutual support, and
combatants say there's as much at stake as on any picket line.

In a quiet and mostly unheralded success story, union-sponsored member
assistance programs have become one of the country's most successful
bulwarks against alcoholism and drug abuse. New surveys show that programs
in which unionists who are recovering alcoholics or drug addicts help
fellow members achieve an average success rate far above that of most
professionally run employee assistance programs.

Some of the oldest and most successful programs are in New York, where the
transport workers, steamfitters, sandhogs, ironworkers, and other unions
have made helping members conquer their own demons a key part of their mission.

"It saves lives; it puts families back together," explained Don Perks, who
runs a member assistance program for the steamfitters union. It was his
union, Perks said, that rescued him. "I called my program leader and the
son of a gun had me in detox the next day. He's telling me I got to go in
for 30 days. I said, 'I can't afford the time off.' He said, 'You can't
afford not to. You're gonna die otherwise.' Then he visited me in detox and
stayed on me for months afterwards."

"We live in a society where people don't know how to ask for help. They may
be screaming for it, but they don't know how to ask," said Mickey Diamond,
who launched a member assistance program for sanitation workers in 1969.

"You're always better off talking to a guy who knows your job and
situation," said Tom Burns of the ironworkers. "Someone who can say, 'Come
on, don't bullshit me. You think I never wet my pants from drinking? You
think I never forgot where I put the car? That don't make you a bad
person.' That's how union programs get the success rate they have--that's
what makes them work."

Last week, Perks, Burns, Diamond, and other leaders of union assistance
programs gathered in a conference room at the posh Cornell Club off Fifth
Avenue to swap stories and celebrate the success of their movement. They
were also there to mark a unique partnership they've struck with the Ivy
League college and a family of wealthy philanthropists committed to
defeating alcoholism among workers.

Since 1991, the R. Brinkley Smithers Institute for Alcohol-Related
Workplace Studies at Cornell University has been pioneering research on
substance abuse in the workplace. The program was founded by Smithers, a
multimillionaire banker who was himself a recovered alcoholic and a strong
supporter of trade unions. By the time of his death in 1994, Smithers had
provided more than $40 million to programs to fight alcoholism, including
the Cornell institute. His work has been carried on by his widow, Adelle
Smithers Fornaci, who, on Thursday night, sat across the table from a dozen
blue-collar union members and leaders grateful for her support.

"'Brink' knew that unions had to be involved if workers were to really get
help," she said. "He told the big corporations--General Motors, the steel
companies--this can't work without labor."

The meeting was initiated after the latest Smithers study, authored by
Cornell professors Samuel Bacharach, Peter Bamberger, and William
Sonnenstuhl. The academics spent eight years descending airshafts to visit
sandhogs digging the city's water tunnels, climbing high-rise construction
projects to talk to ironworkers, and walking through train yards with
railworkers.

"Unions have become the most responsive institutions to alcoholism in the
country," said Bacharach, who directs the program. "They've done it by
going back to their fundamental ideals, by taking care of their members.
They know it's better to do it themselves than have management do it. And
they're doing more about it than most employers. The root of their success
is caring."

Over the past 25 years, some 5000 programs have sprouted at locals
throughout the country. Management has also focused increased attention on
drinking and drugs--not all of it helpful to workers, said Sonnenstuhl.
"Both managed care and drug testing have become dominant aspects, and as a
result, companies have looked for shortcuts. One of them is to fire people
rather than rehab them," he said.

Jack Hennessey, a founder of the assistance program for the International
Longshoremen's Association, said managed care has been a dangerous trend
for unions. "The managed care comes in, they just don't know the workplace,
they don't know what your job's like, they do the diagnosis on the phone;
that doesn't work for most of us," he said.

Alcoholics and addicts entering treatment programs with the backing of
union volunteers had a recovery rate of 70 to 80 percent, as opposed to
management-sponsored recovery programs, which have only a 10 percent
recovery rate, the Cornell researchers found.

"When you have the workplace involved--when people are looking out for
you--you've got a better chance to recover; it's that simple," said
Sonnenstuhl.

After a 10-year break due to a change in its medical benefits plan, the
city's 36,000-member Transport Workers Union reopened its assistance
program in the late 1980s. "Members were lined up down the halls," said Ted
Mapes, program director. "People are referred by shop stewards or
supervisors. And we have teams out in the field, checking on how people are
doing."

Ed Watt, newly elected secretary-treasurer of the TWU, said the program
serves as an antidote to what he called "the mean-spiritedness that
pervades our society these days. It calls for kicking the weakest link.
Many times, the members in our programs are the weakest links, and we're
the only ones going to help them."

In their new book, Mutual Aid and Union Renewal, the Cornell researchers
chronicle a railworkers program adopted in the 1980s. Workers dubbed it
"Operation: Redblock" after the red signals that alert engineers to danger.
There is a long history of heavy drinking in the ranks of railworkers, who
do tough physical labor and often spend long periods away from home. But
despite a management-sponsored assistance program and draconian rules about
drinking on the job, studies found that almost 23 percent of operating
personnel were problem drinkers and at least 5 percent reported to work
drunk at least once a year.

"Operation: Redblock" was conceived by a Union Pacific brakeman who
reasoned that the stiff punishment of those caught drinking made other
workers complicit in alcoholism, since they often covered up for violators.
The program allowed the union to steer members into treatment programs
rather than have them face immediate discharge. A railworker under the
influence is allowed an excused absence from work, providing he or she
submits to review by a panel of other workers who may determine treatment
is required.

A member of the Redblock committee told the Cornell team, "You don't see
the drinking anymore. You don't see it period....I knew an old switchman
one time that laid in the shanty for three months drunk. They put his name
on the ticket and he got paid every day....They just left him back there.
That can't happen today."