CORPORATE POLICIES TARGETED : DEBATE PITS PROFITS VS. RESPONSIBILITY.

Byline: Richard W. Stevenson The New York Times

When President Clinton convenes a White House conference planned for next week on the nebulous but politically charged issue of corporate responsibility, the list of those reaping his praise will not include Caterpillar Inc. or its chief executive, Donald Fites.

Fites, after all, is accused by many of his own employees of busting unions, closing plants and grabbing for huge paychecks - the kind of managerial behavior that politicians are condemning in an election year punctuated by themes of economic insecurity.

By contrast, Sidney Harman, the chief executive of Harman International Industries in Northridge, will be one of the corporate managers Clinton holds up as a model of how treating workers well is not only the right thing to do, but good for business, too.

To keep workers at his speaker-manufacturing company employed during business downturns, Harman pays them to make parts he would otherwise buy from suppliers, or build clocks out of scrap material.

He also offers extensive training programs. And Harman, whose wife, Jane, is a Democratic congresswoman from California, has tried experiments such as allowing workers to share in the proceeds of cost savings they propose.

The reputations of Fites and Harman may be at opposite ends of the spectrum in the debate over corporate responsibility, the concept that managers must have a commitment to the welfare of their employees and communities - the company's other stake holders, apart from investors - as well as to their bottom lines.

But, economists and business executives argue, the widely varying approaches can obscure the fact that managers are often attempting to do much the same thing: taking action, based on their companies' circumstances, to protect jobs in an environment of ever-intensifying competition.

Fites might have caused considerable pain by beating back a strike and holding down wage increases. But viewed as part of an effort to turn around a company that a decade ago was in real danger of collapse, his strategy could be seen as helping preserve tens of thousands of high-paying American jobs when many manufacturers were shifting employment to low-wage sites abroad.

``The first and most important responsibility of any corporation is to be economically viable, because if it's not it will eventually die,'' said Peter Feuille, the director of the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Illinois.

``That's the issue Cat sees itself as addressing - to press for the protection of its economic interests so it can remain viable over the long haul,'' Feuille said.