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As mines and factories shut down, job growth is becoming concentrated among service workers, from secretaries to financial planners to laboratory technicians. Labor leaders find these predominantly young white-collar workers hard to recruit and unreceptive to the gospel of union solidarity and militancy. Says John Edmonds, an official of Britain's General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trades Union: "We're dealing with better-educated people doing more diverse jobs, people who aren't impressed by battle metaphors and all that macho stuff."
The specter of unemployment has forced unions to rein in their wage demands. Between 1972 and 1982, workers in the European Community reaped average annual wage gains of 3.5% after inflation (vs. an average .5% drop in the U.S.). Last year the increase fell to 1.5%. Even in Scandinavia, where unusually strong unions still represent up to 90% of workers, pay hikes have been skimpy. In Denmark, for example, wages in 1984 actually declined 1.3% after inflation.
In the 1960s and '70s, European unions often enjoyed cozy partnerships with governments, but now relations have turned chilly. Conservative leaders have come to power in Britain and West Germany, and even Socialist regimes in Italy, France, Spain and Portugal have been forced by poor economic conditions to tighten their budgets and trim benefits.
Since her election as Britain's Prime Minister in 1979, Margaret Thatcher has stood firm in the face of union power, as she did against the miners. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl sided with industry last year against striking metal-workers and printers, who demanded a 35-hour workweek, but settled for 38 1/2 hours. Italy's Prime Minister Bettino Craxi last year pushed into law a change in the scala mobile, a complex wageindexation formula, to give workers slightly less protection from inflation. French President Francois Mitterrand has launched an industrial restructuring that calls for the elimination of 60,000 of 207,000 jobs in the state-supported mining, steel and shipbuilding companies.
European labor leaders hope that healthier economies will soon bring hard times to an end. Growth in the European Community was an encouraging 2.3% last year, up from 1.1% in 1983. One reason: the high value of the dollar has created a boom for many export industries.
Even so, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development predicts that West European unemployment will rise at least until 1986. Union bosses consider the joblessness a waste of human resources and blame governments for pursuing misguided conservative policies. Steinkuhler of the German metalworkers' union argues that the $15 billion to $18 billion that his government spends annually for unemployment relief could be better used to create jobs. Says he: "It is more reasonable to finance work than to finance idleness." Detlef Hensche, an official of the German printers union, blames the "capitalistic system" for not generating enough jobs for teachers, social workers and other public servants because that is not the most "profitable" way to invest capital.