Labor trouble on the left.

• Position: Center for Constitutional Rights labor dispute

A labor struggle pitting wellknown activists at the helm of the Center for Constitutional Rights against the Center's workers threatens to tear apart a major progressive institution. Workers at the public-interest legal organization went on strike in October.

In addition to lay-offs and a differential pay cut--amounting to 36 percent for staff, but only 10 percent for management--staff have been protesting a shift in decision-making power from a worker collective to management and the board of directors.

"For twenty-nine years CCR has been a worker collective, with the full staff ... involved in deciding agendas, program, what cases to take, how to hire, and so on," the strikers declared in a press release. "Overnight, with no notice to the staff, the Board terminated this carefully constructed structure, scrapped the personnel manual, and imposed a top-down management structure."

The staff filed an unfair-labor-practice complaint against CCR, after management declared its intention to fire the shop steward, attorney Matthew Chachere.

"We said, why do this?" Chachere says. "Why alienate the whole staff? Three years ago, when we were in a similar fiscal crisis, eveybody took the same cuts. We weren't happy, but we lived with it because we were part of it. But what makes them think that people are going to want to work here anymore if they're not involved in decision-making and have to accept this kind of top-down management?"

Management and striking workers agree that the days of the CCR collective are over. The staff association is now negotiating for a union contract.

Each side has compiled letters of support from attorneys and activists involved with the Center.

At least one member of the CCR board--Patricia Williams--resigned because of the strike. Williams criticized the board for not keeping her informed of its decisions and for cutting the staff out of the process. She also criticized the staff for escalating the crisis with its...