But labor specialists said few had actually taken that step before 1981, when President Ronald Reagan moved to replace striking air traffic controllers.

But Stanley Aronowitz, a labor specialist at City University of New York, said there was a good chance there would be a strike.

Many pro-union labor specialists saw the dismissals as the death knell of the 71-year-old tabloid newspaper.

She and other labor specialists, as well as some labor leaders, said that changing public attitudes have played the largest part in why that is so.

Unions now account for less than 20 percent of the working population nationally, labor specialists say.

No matter how the strike is resolved, labor specialists say that it has built a new grass-roots movement by attracting the support of a thousand unions, religious organizations, clergy members and community groups.

Putting these concepts into practice will be difficult, labor specialists say.

Over the years, historians and labor specialists have searched for the records of the Chambers case; that they were missing increased curiosity about what they might contain.

"Giuliani, who talks the talk, doesn't walk the walk," said Stanley Aronowitz, a labor specialist at City University.

Many labor specialists were shocked when the Justice Department brought suit last June to oust the union's leadership for having made a "devil's pact" with organized crime.