BIG LABOR'S FUTURE
Gibbons, Russell W.
BIG LABOR'S FUTURE RUSSELL W. GIBBONS What happens after George Meany? Social historians, like all of us, have their favorite fantasies. Had Roosevelt lived a year longer, the Soviets might...
...Steel vice president R. Heath Larry as its catalyst...
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...And on and on...
...Consider this: ''No group—not in the labor movement, not in the civil rights and women's organizations, not in the churches—can by themselves match the raw political and financial might of big business...
...Had Roosevelt lived a year longer, the Soviets might have become part of a postwar power consortium with the U.S., at least delaying the cold war while it rebuilt with Western help...
...Steel imports steal jobs" declares a simplistic but effective button worn by an unemployed steelworker in Campbell, Ohio...
...OR BANK DRAFT TO: Rev...
...On the Mesabi iron range of Minnesota, in hundreds of coal-producing communities throughout the coal belt and at huge Lockheed aircraft plants within an hour's drive of the Bonaventure, thousands of steelworkers, miners and aerospace workers were sustaining long and bitter strikes, with little interest in traditional collective bargaining resolution by employer groups...
...The stability factor has been welcomed in both the councils of government and industry, and it has given rise to a mythology about self-satisfied union leaders and membership...
...The old saying that labor conclaves are for ratification of decisions already made may have some truth, but the greater events facing the nation in the first year of congressional testing of the Carter administration may make that practice moot...
...Nowgong, Assam, India...
...Or this: "Labor cannot go it alone...
...Governor Jerry Brown...
...It does not take a Meany to rouse an audience of steelworkers in Ohio or western Pennsylvania or garment workers in New York and New England...
...Even George Meany's unwavering voice may not be enough to drown them out...
...The classic confrontation now going on between the textile workers and the massive J. P. Stevens Company is dramatic evidence that reform of the Act is more than an administrative manuever—Stevens has thwarted unionization among its Southern workers for three decades because it is cheaper to avoid compliance and take fines than to accept union wages and conditions...
...Already passed in the House last October, if the Senate passes a Carter-endorsed measure to upgrade the National Labor Relations Act, this could precede one of the greatest surges of organization since the original Act was passed over 40 years ago...
...The seemingly eternal gap between rhetoric and real political performance could be tested, and in surprising ways...
...Such declarations could conjure up the revival of the grand old coalition of civil rights days, but those involved in the interplay of organizations and the remnants of "the movement" still consign such thoughts to the what-might-have-been fantasies of the historians, who like to envision a labor movement sans Meany and with the late Walter Reuther in his stead...
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...He couldn't care less about George Meany...
...The AFL-CIO political action chief has announced that "summer soldier" congressmen who have deserted labor on some key issues in the past session may now find themselves without labor muscle and dollars during this year's campaign...
...Labor law reform in 1978 could be the key...
...If the job-producing actions of the Carter administration do not translate into a lowering of the unemployment rate, if the economy continues in a slump and if the President deserts his number one campaign issue—jobs—and adopts that of the revived conservative opposition—a "balanced budget" and more of the same—then anger below could overcome leadership restraint at top...
...Historical reality has been George Meany for the past quarter century...
...As with many dogmas which have bit the dust in the RUSSELL w. gibbons, a frequent contributor, is a labor editor in Pittsburgh...
...The reforms hold obvious benefits for the big city minorities and poor, locked into "working poor" jobs in the service industries, but the prospects for finally organizing the Sunbelt states will take a large upturn...
...The two decades that he has been head of the combined labor federation there has not been even semi-serious talk of a challenge to his leadership, and the votes for his re-election at the biennial ingatherings of the delegates from the five-score affiliated unions which constitute its strength have always been an affair by acclamation...
...This may be the last wagon circle for organizing the unorganized," said a speaker at the AFL-CIO convention, citing the fact that business and industry have now organized in a concerted anti-labor reform coalition with some of the biggest names in employer ranks...
...He has outlived four of the seven Presidents he has dealt with as head of the AFL and later the AFL-CIO, seemingly being the only rival to the late J. Edgar Hoover as an eternal presence on the American political landscape...
...Says Clark University sociologist Robert Ross: "the Sunbelt labor organizer may be the best ally of the Snowbelt community organizer," suggesting that the reform will have a ripple effect of retaining jobs in the urban environment when labor costs and protections are de-regionalized...
...And George Meany, at 83, has become an institution if not the anachronism that many of his annoyed critics believe him to be...
...The Meany survival syndrome may be unique in the aftermath of the Sixties, where few institutions, from industry to church, academia to government, were able to retain old structures without responding to the rising expectations of younger and more informed constituents...
...No, the president of the largest state federation of the AFL-CIO, John F. Henning...
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...Thus protectionism finds favor in a group which once articulated the mainline of bipartisan foreign policy under half a dozen Presidents...
...Management is able to operate more effectively without unions, Mr...
...The stability of incumbency is faced with new and pressing issues...
...George Meany to the opening session of the AFL-CIO last month...
...Yet in labor, a general holding operation continued, and the Meany mystique continued through the White House gate from Harry Truman to Jimmy Carter...
...Now retaliation instead of free trade is the code word in labor speeches...
...Ralph Nader...
...They know that tens of thousands of jobs have been lost in steel, electronics, textiles and other sectors because of undercutting imports from Japan and the Common Market countries...
...covered assertiveness—the post-65 "grey power" bloc...
...The National Association of Manufacturers, on the eve of the convention, announced the formation of the Council on Union-Free Environment, with onetime U.S...
...This may be the real anachronism of George Meany at 83—not his age, or political instincts or aplomb as spokesperson of a considerable bloc of vested economic interest—but that there is evidence of rising discontent in both union and non-union work sectors, and a real opportunity to revive the broken-down liberal-labor coalition which flourished in the heady days of the Johnson administration...
...The "undowntrodden" are not aware that they have achieved a most favored status position within the American economic and social structure—in fact many of them are convinced that there is a new movement to cut them out completely...
...The Auto Workers' Reuther was a gifted image-conscious progressive who ran his union as tightly as did any AFL bureaucrat, but craft unionists who always held him in disdain would likely have broken the union merger ("A rope of sand," scorned the Miners' John L. Lewis) rather than accept him as their leader...
...post-Vietnam trauma of American liberalism, the facts do not suggest that anyone but a Meany could have held an unlikely alliance of trade and industrial unions together...
...We have to move in concert on a broad liberal front...
...Had Kennedy avoided the assassin's fire in Dallas, Vietnam might not have become an American swamp but the civil rights showdown might have been delayed by a decade...
...It must be in coalition with liberal groups of like mind and purpose, the black community, the Chicano community, youth groups, women's organizations...
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...But that is historical fantasy...
...Yet throughout the country, at the time when the AFL-CIO was in convention, there may have been upwards of 200,000 of these "middle class" working people out on strike, seeking little more than the essentials of lower middle class existence—purchasing power at the food store, health care security and a work environment which will not produce more statistics for death and disability on the job...
...The Reverend Jessie Jackson...
...Palatty M. Catholic Mission, P.O...
...The federation's political action arm has been the prototype for others, and its expertise in the legislative corridors of Washington and the major state capitols has been the training ground for much of the civil rights, consumer and women's movements...
...First task of the Council: defeat labor reform legislation...
...Only last December, in the cavernous Bonaventure ballroom, was there a surfacing of discontent, with small pockets of dissenters remaining seated as the vast majority of the 900-plus delegates rose on the motion for acclamation...
...Presiding over the 12th annual convention of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations in the gaudy Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles last month, Meany seemed to be the symbol of the nation's newest minority which had disSt...
...He uses a cane, but walks straight and booms out at the lectern with the same assurance that brought him to unquestioned leadership of Local 463 of the United Association of Plumbers and Steam Fitters in New York City half a century ago...
...And what if George Meany had presided over the American labor movement for only a decade, instead of the 22 years that he has been its undisputed leader...
...But together, these groups represent millions of people, and people, not money, are what this nation is all about...
...Jobs translate into members, and this is what the federation is losing (down 500,000 from the previous convention...
...i Jalana, D.T...
...This year could be a watershed one for labor...
...He is interested in getting his job back...
...And if there is a predictable nerve ending within the complex nervous system of the AFL-CIO, it is jobs...
...The downtrodden aren't downtrodden anymore," says New York labor lawyer and collective bargaining advocate Ted Kheel, "they are middle class and very much a part of the heartland of America...
...Bad form, perhaps, to speculate on what might have happened had an incumbent figure of some consequence not been around, but within the same fantasy school of history...
...Upwards of a million manufacturing jobs—many of them once union —have been lost, stolen or strayed into the southeastern and southwestern states in the past two decades, most of them from the northeast (or Snowbelt) states...
...The change may have been in form more than in substance, but essentially there was an acknowledgement that a new ball game was being played...
...Bella Abzug...
...And aside from a preoccupation with reviving the cold war, Meany has had a solid enough performance record as an extension of AFL-CIO resolution rhetoric...
...Larry said in announcing the Council, "although I wish that were not so...
Vol. 105 • January 1978 • No. 2
