By all appearances, the union movement’s clout keeps waning. Last month Caterpillar Inc. broke a strike by the powerful United Auto Workers; just last week the AFL-CIO’s endorsement of Bill Clinton’s presidential aspirations drew yawns. But even as unions struggle to maintain their presence in the workplace, they have managed to broaden their influence elsewhere through a network of alliances and institutions that rarely display the union label.

Given the union movement’s low public standing, downplaying the label may help labor’s causes. When it comes to trade, for example, unions like the Steelworkers and the UAW have lost so many members that they don’t swing much weight anymore; their opposition to the 1988 U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement was unavailing. So when the Bush administration asked Congress last year to endorse free-trade talks with Mexico, labor encouraged environmental and religious activists to lead the resistance. International Ladies Garment Workers Union lobbyist Evelyn Dubrow was a key figure in assembling them into the Citizens Trade Watch Campaign, which has mustered enough opposition in Congress to endanger both the likely Mexico pact and the 105-nation Uruguay Round trade talks. With groups concerned about food safety, dolphins and rain forests in the fore, the Garment Workers have unobtrusively advanced their own goal of scaling back clothing imports. “Practically all the unions are in support,” Dubrow says.

Unions have brought more intellectual firepower to bear on Washington’s policy debates by moving into the think-tank business. Leading the effort is the Economic Policy Institute, which gets 40 percent of its $1.7 million annual budget from unions and has six union presidents on its board. EPI has produced a stream of well-documented studies on issues like privatization and education. That’s just what the leaders of politically liberal unions-among them the UAW, the Service Employees and AFSCME, the big public-employee union-were looking for when they decided to back an independent research organization six years ago. “There’s been an inability of the labor movement to produce what it needs inside because it’s very hidebound,” explains one union economist. “The research department at the AFL does not get the best people; it’s not out there in front and doesn’t have any PR sense.”

PR sense is something EPI has in spades. Its reports detailing how the earnings of blue-collar workers weren’t keeping up with inflation created enormous controversy-and proved to be true. EPI papers alleging that U.S. economic competitiveness is waning have kept the debate over industrial policy bubbling. Coming soon: a study showing that real incomes of male college graduates are declining, too. “That’s going to be a shocker,” promises president Jeff Faux. By think-tank standards, EPI operates on a shoestring. Its typical research grant is less than $5,000. “We get people who sympathize with our goals and our aims and often don’t have other avenues to publish,” Faux explains. Among them is Harvard economist Juliet Schor, who got EPI support for a recent book, “The Overworked American,” asserting that Americans are having to work longer hours than they used to. Her book made the front page of The New York Times Book Review. Fortunately for Schor, the reviewer was journalist Robert Kuttner, an EPI founder and board member and, along with Schor, a member of the institute’s research council. His rave helped “The Overworked American” climb onto the best-seller list.

EPI’s work on the widening income gap meshes with that of labor’s tax-research group, Citizens for Tax Justice. CTJ director Robert McIntyre broke into prominence in 1984, when he reported that hundreds of major corporations paid little or no federal income tax; his data fueled the successful drive to undo the 1981 Reagan tax law. Lately the organization has turned its attention to state-level tax matters, although it found time last month to help shoot holes in Jerry Brown’s presidential campaign with a well-timed attack on his proposal to cut the federal income-tax rate to a flat 13 percent and raise revenue by taxing purchases instead. “The only way we can solve the problems here in Washington is to make the tax system more progressive,” McIntyre insists. The politicians still don’t dare to say it quite like that. But when a new Congress arrives next year, a higher tax rate for higher-income people will have a prominent place on its agenda. So don’t write off organized labor just yet. While it’s still losing on the picket lines, its surrogates aren’t doing badly in the battle for public opinion.