LABOR : Caterpillar Strike Ends With a Whimper for Union Movement : The months on the picket line came to naught for thousands of members of the UAW. The surrender leaves workers in a vulnerable position.

PEORIA, Ill. —  For a generation now, humble pie has been a dietary staple of the American labor movement, but few servings have been harder to swallow than the failed strike of the United Auto Workers against Caterpillar Inc.

Seventeen months into the UAW’s latest walkout--its second long strike during a four-year dispute--the union finally surrendered Sunday, sending 9,000 workers back into factories that were doing just fine without them.

The walkout was rashly conceived and ineptly executed--and it now serves as a cautionary tale for a labor movement that is trying to rebuild itself through union mergers and a renewed emphasis on organizing.

Those new approaches may well help restore union membership, which has now dwindled to 11% of the private work force. But they will mean little unless they also contribute to the potency of the strike, once the big gun in labor’s arsenal, and one so prone to backfire these days.

“The Caterpillar strike is a big balloon that just went poof,” said Neil Bernstein, a labor law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “If I represent management, and the workers want to organize, I can tell them: ‘Look what happened at Caterpillar. What good does a union do for you?’ ”

If there is an enduring image to the Cat walkout, it is the proud but pigheaded strikers who stood at the burn barrels by the picket shacks, all the while refusing to believe that a patchwork of office workers, temporaries and union line-crossers were building tractors just as well as they had.

As the company kept proclaiming a long run of record profits, those strikers--and their leaders--kept reciting a self-deceiving litany about sluggish production lines and gargantuan scrap heaps.

It was not until Sunday here in Peoria, site of Cat’s headquarters and home to its biggest UAW local, that striking workers were given their first realistic assessment of the walkout’s effect. At a huge meeting, they listened to Richard Atwood, an official from the union international in Detroit.

“The only people being hurt by this strike are our good members,” he said. “It’s clear that Cat is getting enough quality and quantity, maybe not as much as if we were in there, but the company is saying: ‘So what?’ ”

With that, the strikers were told to return to their tool cribs even though they had no contract. And with that, the strikers were also being told a hard-to-swallow truth about experienced workers in a high-tech world.

Most can be replaced as easily as the tire on a car.

In union shops, contracts are negotiated through collective bargaining. If talks fail, there is always the prospect of a strike, one side withholding labor and the other pay. Both sides hurt each other until one gives in.

This balance of power served as a solid foundation for labor negotiations until the late 1970s, when employers increasingly began to permanently replace strikers. Before that, pro-union public attitudes made such action taboo.

Oddly enough, the firing of strikers is illegal in America, as it is in most democracies. But a 1938 U.S. Supreme Court opinion has left employers with a quirky opening: While strikers cannot be fired, a company does not have to make room for their return by letting go any replacement workers.

This makes the right to strike a risky one. In recent years, the foremost protection for striking workers has been a company’s difficulty in fielding a full force of replacements. The bigger the company, the harder that chore.

At Cat, the UAW was confident to the point of being foolhardy. How could the company build something as complicated as a 100-ton tractor without them?

Caterpillar has long been the world’s largest manufacturer of earthmoving equipment, but in the 1980s, hurt by Japanese competition and an unfavorable dollar-to-yen ratio, it experienced a near-fatal brush with red ink.

Since then, the company has remade itself. Some $1.8 billion was spent on computerized machine tools and robots. Ever more work was farmed out to low-cost suppliers. Plants were shut, workers let go by the thousands.

As the company grew stronger, its unions grew weaker--a pattern repeated again and again across America. In 1979, Cat employed 40,500 UAW members, 45% of all its workers. By 1991, the reduced numbers were 15,100 and 28%.

Power had dramatically shifted. In the event of a strike, outside suppliers and those costly new machines would be able to do a lot of the UAW’s work.

In 1991, Caterpillar’s new CEO, Donald V. Fites, was determined to break free of the UAW’s wage-and-benefit pattern for the heavy-equipment industry. The company’s contract offer shunned the standard package. It included smaller-than-standard wage hikes on Cat’s average $17-an-hour rate, a second tier of wages for some new hires and no promise not to eliminate jobs as workers retired or quit.

The UAW went on strike, only to cave in after five months under the threat of permanent replacements. Following that was an “in-plant campaign,” in which the UAW encouraged workers to goof off on the job. Then there was the second strike, a rebellion caused by the firing or suspension of the militants who did the goofing off.

This second strike had an important distinction to it. Because it was called over unfair labor practices instead of contract issues, by law the company could not hire permanent replacements. The union faithful thought it finally had the company outfoxed. Instead, Cat mobilized an army of managers and office workers and underemployed skilled temporaries.

They were aided in the factories by 4,000 disgruntled UAW line-crossers, among them Jim Mangan, who watched the new workers quickly take to their tasks.

“In many cases, a trained monkey can do these jobs, and I include myself in that. I am smart enough to realize just how valuable I am not,” he said.

In October, with the election of new leadership, the AFL-CIO took up a new battle cry: Organize, organize, organize. Some $20 million has been set aside to bring new members into union ranks and re-energize the labor movement.

However grand that sum, it is puny beside the $200 million to $300 million the UAW has spent on strike pay in the Cat struggle. “Look at that money--and all the UAW could think to do was tell their members to walk around in a circle with a picket sign on their shoulder,” said New York labor organizer Ray Rogers.

Many in labor--indeed, many within the UAW itself--criticize the union for its failure to pressure Caterpillar with other tactics, such as asking other unions to withdraw funds from banks that do business with the company.

“Back in the 1980s, the UAW had a vaunted research department, but the entire staff apparatus is ossified now, and it’s one of the least creative around,” said a Chicago labor consultant who has closely watched the strike.

The UAW international itself has new leadership. Elected in June, they have upcoming negotiations with the Big Three auto makers to worry about. The strike at Cat was an expensive nuisance. They were eager to settle.

In triumph, however, the company’s stance has only grown tougher. After a year with its managers and engineers in the plants, Cat claims to have learned so many ways to improve productivity that it needs 2,000 fewer workers.

Caterpillar will now set its own timetable for accepting the return of the strikers.

The full homecoming of the prodigals may take months as the company attempts to remix strikers and line-crossers without spontaneous combustion.

Unwelcome for now are 150 or so UAW members who were fired for alleged strike-related misconduct. The union had vowed never to go back without its wounded troops, but the handwriting on the wall is more pragmatic now.

It is a bad time to be an ex-striker, with the union so defeated and the company so hostile. Frank Dorsey, a toolmaker with 23 years at Cat, is returning to work, but he does not intend to stay too long.

“The further I get from Caterpillar, the better off I’ll be,” he said. “Even if it means a pay loss, I need to get away from this mess. You know, we employees have been like the children in a dysfunctional family.

“You know who the parents are? The company and the union, that’s who.”