GEORGE MEANY'S TROUBLED LEGACY

...But the general level of union — and class — consciousness continues to decline...

...a quarter of a century later, a richer and presumably more potent labor movement won only half the elections for which it petitioned, and today it wins fewer than half...

...Had the strikers shut it all down, or convinced transportation unions not to make deliveries, or prevailed on the UAW to refuse to mount "scab" tires on new cars, they might have won a quick and decisive victory...

...The movement needed more militancy of the kind that had guided it in the 1930s, but it had less...

...They did not respond as quickly to a call to join another union's picket lines...

...While many movements — civil rights, anti-war, feminist — have changed the character of our country in the last few decades, a powerful and progressive labor movement could still do far more than any other force to solve America's domestic and foreign policy problems...

...but if you measure the relative power of labor and capital, the gap has widened into a chasm...

...History has proven Quill was right...

...They paid an enormous price — scores were killed on the picket lines, thousands wounded, thousands more jailed...

...They can win if truckdrivers refuse to make deliveries, or if fellow workers in feeder industries refuse to process their employers' products, or if large numbers of unionists join the picket lines to keep scabs or customers from crossing...

...When they occupied General Motors, Chrysler, and hundreds of other plants during the sitdown strikes, they realized that their acts were illegal — but so long as government failed to force corporations to respect the right of workers to unionize, the interests of millions of laborers dictated that property rights had to be disregarded...

...A couple of years ago, during the long strike of rubber workers, the union was able to shut down only part of the industry...

...And it was the Trotskyist leadership of the 1934 Minneapolis truckers' strikes which made it possible for the teamsters' membership to grow from 95,000 to its present two million-plus...

...The union leaders had also changed: Young radicals had become middle-aged liberals, secure in building treasuries and long-term contracts...

...What these radicals had in common — even when they fought each other — was a basic distrust of business and government...

...They knew, from fundamental theory and sad experience, that business would try to smash their unions, that the Government would help business, and that both had to be resisted if labor were to achieve its goal of organizing the unorganized...

...The decline of the labor movement has grave consequences...

...But they accepted a lesson deeply rooted in American history — one that the Mollie Maguires and the Pullman strikers and the Wobblies had learned decades before, and that Mar'. . . unionism has slowly been drained of passion and zeal...

...It wasn't all Meany's fault, of course...

...He has never displayed any enthusiasm for strikes, the principal weapon in labor's arsenal...

...He furiously opposed the principles that gave labor its vital impetus two generations ago, and supported those that have benumbed it in our time...

...Meany had spent less than a year in office as president of the New York State Federation of Labor when the CIO was founded by John L. Lewis and Sidney Hillman in 1935, and only two years in office when the sitdown strikes exploded at General Motors...

...Under his guiding hand, the power of labor shrank and the power of big business grew...

...instead, CIO officials would become less so...

...Their chances of being unionized are small without labor idealism and solidarity — two qualities that George Meany did not encourage...

...In 1933, one worker out of every fourteen outside agriculture carried a union card, but under the impetus of CIO organizing drives union membership had grown to one out of four by the end of that decade and two out of five just after World War II...

...Perhaps the leaders of labor will begin to look at "new" ideas — the old ideas they have long neglected — such as creation of a labor party, or joining with William Winpisinger of the Machinists' Union in forging coalitions with other forces on the Left...

...Many were blacklisted so that they could not find work...

...One was that labor and management had common long-range interests, and should therefore be able to come to terms with a minimum of confrontation...

...The best one can say of Meany's tenure as president of the AFL-CIO is that under his guidance labor stood still...

...In fact, Meany says he has never participated in a strike or walked a picket line — a curious boast for a "labor" leader...

...Reuther realized in 1955 that it was necessary to "unionize" those already in unions — to educate them on basic labor issues and strengthen their allegiance to the cause...

...But that kind of solidarity sometimes requires flouting the law...

...In the years since the 1930s, American workers had improved their lot considerably...

...it was unable to repeal such anti-labor laws as the Taft-Hartley Act, or to win such longSidney Lens, a veteran labor organizer and peace activist, is a contributing editor of The Progressive...

...and the anti-war movement would learn decades later — that social progress is usually achieved by defying the system, not by working within it...

...In 1950, unions won 73 per cent of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections...

...In the late 1940s, succumbing to the Cold War virus, the CIO expelled eleven leftist-controlled unions, thereby cutting off a source of idealistic and energetic organizers...

...His departure should, at the very least, relax some of the rigidity that has been the rule in the higher levels of the AFL-CIO...

...Labor made greater progress and exerted far more influence when it was divided, its two branches competing, than when it united under Meany's business-union leadership...

...Livingston's functionaries were not as ready to resist the sheriffs, the national guard, and the courts...

...It was the communists who did the grass-roots organizing of the steelworkers and who built the unions of electrical workers, packinghouse workers, mine-mill workers, longshore workers, and many others...

...It is important to understand why, under Meany's stewardship, such a movement was not built...

...It was the communists, for example, who — along with Roy Reuther, who was then a socialist — led the sitdown strikes at General Motors which, more than any other event, established the strength of the CIO...

...The mass production workers in auto, steel, and other major industries who had "primary" economic power — they could shut down their plants without help from other unions — were safely in the fold...

...We are going into the AFL...

...it has become a slot-machine phenomenon — you put your $8 or $10 a month into the slot, and out comes a 6 per cent or 10 per cent raise every year...

...It lacked the leadership and militancy that the leftists had imparted to organizing in the 1930s...

...Labor's political influence has suffered an even more severe decline...

...Though the national work force has grown by thirty million, fewer than 10 per cent have joined unions, and most of those are public employes in Federal, state, and local government...

...And in the absence of strong countervailing pressures by the most important potential dissident force, the drift to the Right — under liberals and conservative Presidents alike — gathered momentum...

...He would not tolerate leftists, and he would not conceive of working outside the system...

...Meany has always felt that radicals (not just Stalinists) represented a greater threat to labor than did bosses...

...To a small extent, this is being done in the UAW, the Machinists' Union, and a few others...

...The conglomerates and multinational corporations have come to dominate American life, while the labor movement has become a peripheral factor in the nation's affairs...

...In 1955, when the AFL and CIO reunited, Mike Quill of the Transport Workers Union warned that "this is not a merger with honor...

...There was no way to break into the Southern textile mills or the service industries without that kind of militancy...

...The millions who remained to be organized were mostly those with "secondary" economic power — unable to strike effectively without outside support...

...But Meany does symbolize the philosophical shortcomings of the movement, and he institutionalized them...

...But if it wasn't all Meany's fault, his dominance over the AFL-CIO made it difficult to reverse the slide into conformity and accommodation...

...Perhaps it was illegal to prevent a scab from crossing a picket line, but the greater crime was to let men, women, and children go hungry because workers could not earn a living wage...

...But his philosophical commitment then as now was anchored in two concepts that were anathema to the young radicals who built the movement...

...The AFL-CIO under Meany has won few legislative victories...

...Many things are possible, especially as the rank-and-file membership experiences the ravages of our irrational economy...

...Meany's retirement offers the movement an opportunity to reassess its role — to look in the mirror and see how badly its face has been battered by business unionism...

...The second cornerstone of Meany's philosophy was a passionate hatred of communism...

...Workers with "secondary" power can unionize and win strikes only when they have the help of others...

...Under Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin, for instance, it is illegal to engage in a "secondary boycott...

...Labor had carved a base in the mass production and other industries during the 1930s not by working exclusively within the system, as Meany demanded, but by being willing to work outside it...

...It is no longer a cause but an arrangement, like an insurance policy...

...The united labor federation over which he has presided since 1955 is in stagnation, whereas the divided labor movement of the 1930s made sensational progress...

...During Meany's reign, however, the number has dropped back to one out of four — among the lowest percentages of unionized workers in any major industrial nation...

...AFL officials, he warned, would not become more militant...

...Just before the 1955 merger of the AFL and CIO, Meany wrote an article for The New York Times in which he suggested a "non-aggression pact" between unions and corporations — and this has been his orientation throughout his long career...

...But the drive quickly aborted...

...It is time for labor to revive the spirit of the stalwarts who led it, almost half a century ago, to its greatest growth and strength...

...delayed major reforms as national health insurance...

...The trouble with this sort of business unionism was that it did nothing either to "organize the unorganized" or, in Walter Reuther's famous phrase, to "unionize the organized...

...Meany, the "honest plumber," certainly did not deliberately betray labor, nor does he bear sole responsibility for its setbacks...

...Perhaps they will even reappraise their allegiance to the arms race and nuclear power...

...During World War II, even while the United States and the Soviet Union were allies, Meany joined with David Dubinsky and Matthew Woll to form the Free Trade Union Committee as a vehicle to fight communism in Europe, and after hostilities ended he and his associates joined with the CIA in dozens of illegal and unsavory activities — including strike-breaking — to fight "communism" and "neutralism" abroad...

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...When workers at a single store in such a chain as Sears or Montgomery Ward or Woolworth's hit the bricks, they affect the company's total profits so little that they are hardly missed...

...In the strikes they led, therefore, they put human rights before property rights...

...For the twenty million or so who do carry union cards, unionism has slowly been drained of passion and zeal...

...In choosing between the niceties of the law and the realities of life, the radicals of the 1930s came down on the side of the realities...

...But because today's unions fear costly law suits, the rubber workers were denied that kind of clout — and tens of millions of unorganized men and women have even less...

...It was a hatred born in his Irish Catholic upbringing, but intensified by the hostility that conservative craft union officials harbored toward the New York leftists who preached industrial unionism and labor militancy...

...When twenty maids in a motel or forty waiters in a restaurant go out on a strike, they can swiftly be replaced...

...When Meany assumed the leadership of the AFL-CIO in December 1955, the united federation chose a UAW vice president, John Livingston, to head a major organizing drive, and Reuther pledged $4 million to the campaign from the unions that had formerly constituted the CIO...

...The men and women who built the United Auto Workers' membership from 30,000 to 400,000 in a single year, and the CIO from a million to four million in a couple of years, were communists, socialists, Trotskyists — radicals of various persuasions...

...He believed that the CIO was being liqui-dated organizationally and ideologically, submerging into an older federation that tolerated racketeering, racial discrimination, and backdoor contracts...