Ban on Firing Strikers Blocked : Labor: Senate Republicans succeed in a filibuster on the measure. Unions had sought to keep firms from permanently replacing their members during walkouts.

WASHINGTON —  President Clinton and organized labor suffered a stinging defeat Tuesday when the Senate effectively rejected legislation that would have prevented American corporations from firing striking union members and permanently replacing them with non-union workers.

In one of the fiercest political battles between management and labor in a generation, union supporters in the Senate mustered a 53-47 majority but fell seven votes short of the 60 needed to break a Republican filibuster of the striker replacement measure.

The Senate’s Democratic leadership scheduled another vote for today to stop the filibuster, but both sides said they expect the result to be the same.

Although union officials were reluctant to comment extensively until after today’s expected final vote, they did express disappointment and frustration. “We really feel it’s a travesty,” AFL-CIO spokeswoman Sharolyn Rosier said.

Business lobbyists who worked fiercely to kill the bill were ecstatic. “This is a major blow to organized labor,” said a triumphant Richard L. Lesher, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Passage of the legislation “would have destroyed the balance of power that has existed for more than 50 years between labor and management,” Lesher said.

“We hope that this is the death knell for organized labor’s confrontational approach on labor-management issues,” said Dan Yager, a lobbyist with the Labor Policy Assn., a business trade group.

For the labor movement, the defeat was especially bitter because it comes at a time when corporate America is showing an increased willingness to fire striking workers rather than bargain with them to hammer out new contracts.

Labor unions and their allies in Congress said the use of permanent replacements for striking workers sharply increased in the 1980s, after President Ronald Reagan fired union air traffic controllers in 1981, thus signaling to the business community that the federal government approved of the practice.

Federal law never prohibited the use of replacement workers but, union leaders said, until Reagan’s action there was a strong cultural stigma that made business executives reluctant to fire striking employees. As a result, they had insisted that the federal ban was needed so labor could use the threat of a strike as an effective lever at the bargaining table.

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While the Senate was voting Tuesday, Caterpillar Tractor was hiring workers to keep its assembly lines rolling in the face of its second bitter strike in two years. During Caterpillar’s last strike in the midst of the 1992 presidential campaign, candidate Bill Clinton made a high-profile visit to striking workers in Illinois and vowed to push for the striker replacement ban if elected.

That 1992 strike eventually ended in a union defeat when workers agreed to return to their jobs after the company threatened to find permanent replacements.

Clinton’s campaign promise to sign a striker replacement ban helped energize union support for his candidacy, especially in the general election campaign against President George Bush, who had vowed to veto the ban if it reached his desk. The last congressional battle over the issue also died in the Senate while Bush was in the White House in 1992.

Yet despite his campaign pledge, President Clinton did not mount an aggressive, public campaign in support of the legislation, as he has done on other high-profile initiatives like last year’s North American Free Trade Agreement, prompting quiet frustration among some union officials.

For years the striker replacement legislation has been the No. 1 legislative priority of organized labor, which has suffered a long string of political setbacks during the last decade as it has seen its economic power and membership erode.

Union leaders said Tuesday that they were satisfied with the Administration’s effort in support of the striker replacement ban and acknowledged that the ideological battle between business and labor over the issue was so heated that a White House lobbying campaign would have done little to budge swing votes.

“We felt the White House was trying,” said Rex Hardesty, chief spokesman for the AFL-CIO. “We are satisfied that the White House did what we could reasonably expect. We also know that they were not successful.”

Clinton did, however, make last-minute appeals to key Democratic senators by telephone from Europe this week, and he assigned senior adviser George Stephanopoulos to head the White House lobbying campaign on the legislation. Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich also played a leading role in pushing for the bill and made repeated calls on critical lawmakers in the closing days.

But Tuesday’s defeat still damaged Clinton’s attempts to improve his ties to organized labor, which were badly frayed by the battle over the North American Free Trade Agreement last fall. That trade fight pitted unions against the White House, which was then allied with the same business interest groups that opposed the Administration on the striker replacement bill.

Ultimately, the White House was unable to win over key Southern Democrats to the striker replacement bill, most notably the two from Clinton’s home state of Arkansas, Sens. David Pryor and Dale Bumpers, who were under heavy pressure from business lobby groups. Labor lobbyists, who focused their efforts on Republicans while the White House handled Democrats, also failed to lure many moderate Northern Republicans into breaking ranks with their party leadership.

By Tuesday morning, supporters of the striker replacement ban--which already had passed the House--knew that they would fall short, but the margin of defeat was larger than the three to five votes they were predicting.

Both of California’s Democratic senators--Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer--voted to end the filibuster.

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Republicans Alfonse M. D’Amato of New York, Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania joined 50 Democrats in supporting cloture. Democrats David L. Boren of Oklahoma, Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, Harlan Mathews of Tennessee and Sam Nunn of Georgia joined Pryor and Bumpers in voting with the Republicans against cloture.

“This issue has become such a lightning rod for both sides that it was a very tough, uphill battle all the way,” an Administration lobbyist said.

Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), who sponsored the legislation, argued that the current law “sends the unmistakable message that workers are disposable, reducing employee morale and lowering productivity.”

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said that “any right to strike today is . . . a hollow right.”

Business leaders and their supporters, by contrast, insisted that the use of permanent replacements is still quite rare but warned that a federal ban on the practice would give unions a new weapon and make labor leaders much more willing to strike to win contract demands.

“The bottom line is that our system of collective bargaining has worked well for over half a century and continues to work well today,” said Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), a leader of the bill’s opposition. “But by eliminating the risk factor from strikes, this bill presents employers with an untenable Hobson’s choice: Shut down the business--close down the factory--or accede to the union’s demands, whether those demands are reasonable or not.”