Editorials

...Aware of its own preeminent role as an institutionalized force for social change, it has too often preferred to go it alone, and the contempt for unions (or just plain ignorance of them) that has pockmarked many middle-class reform efforts has been returned in full measure by labor...

...Plenty of that too...

...Here, it seems, the labor movement is engaged in a dramatically unsuccessful holding action against a government that is consciously embarked on a plan to redistribute wealth and decision-making power away from wage-earners and into the hands of the wealthier classes...

...In not merely resisting Patco's demands but in sacking . all the striking workers and decertifying the union, with no hint of compromise in the offing, Mr...

...The No and the Yes...

...Interestingly enough, of course, the monks interviewed offered no profound rationale for their sexual continence...

...Catholicism wouldn't be spinning its wheels as much as it so visibly is...

...However much the point was lost in the script - and it was - the great ritual symbols and action say what, to the contempla-tive's penetrating eye, is actually going on in the most common, physical doings of ordinary life...

...Congratulations, though, are in order to ABC for being generous with prime time for producer Helen Whitney's fine effort to eff the ineffable...

...For entirely too long, oriental gurus, cults, and the spirituality of hot tubs have monopolized the networks' "religious" programing...

...Many of the unions, and the AFL-CIQ as a whole, have recognized the need to refurbish their political efforts-to get involved in Democratic (and sometimes Republican) party politics at earlier stages, to make the most of the new mailing and polling political technology...

...or more softly, from John Cheever's ironic pen...

...Plenty of that about...

...To be sure, the government believes that the growing economic "pie" it anticipates as a consequence of this redistribution will improve the lot of the worker as well...

...Writ small and manageable for concentration, then, the monk's world is nothing more or less than our very own secular world - seen in another, splendid light...

...The next decade may make the "THE MONASTERY" "Those who believe that they believe in God," observed Unamuno, "but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself...

...The choice was apt...

...A year later, federal labor law reform, a measure crucial to the unions' ability to accompany the labor force in its shift toward the Sunbelt, was successfully blocked by a conservative filibuster...

...The question of who's more insulated from reality, them or us, is really an open one...

...Simultaneously, though, Ms...

...its"let-them-eat-cake" attitude toward the cities, mass transit, hard-pressed educational systems, and the poor...

...And finally it is more than a little sticky asking hard-pressed American workers to rally to the cause of strikers who have been averaging $33,000 in yearly wages and want more for less time on the job...

...By the beginning of the next century, labor could be further reduced to a kind of vestigial, consultative organ in the social body...

...But this representation, in the end, demands not just muscle but articulation-articulation of a vision that links self-interest to the common good...

...Organized labor in the United States is on the defensive - a few observers might even say "on the ropes.'' The latter would be a misleading exaggeration, but the contrast with the elan of Poland's Solidarity is striking...

...The celebration of this anniversary is undeniably muted, however...

...In the literary world, similar no's issue from Walker Percy's parody and satire of modern life...

...Reagan has given the White House stamp of approval to an already existing trend toward union-busting...

...Were more of their art of inner cultivation available at the ordinary parish level, one may guess, U.S...

...The decline in organized labor's political power was apparent as far back as 1977 when the bill to legalize common-site picketing, a labor goal for twenty-five years, was defeated by a coalition that included post-Watergate Democrats as well as Republican and Southern conservatives...

...In fact, given the standstill solitude they expose themselves to, we would contend they're likely to suffer more acutely than we worldings the psychic dislocations of the culture and the times...

...Thirdly, the union was not exactly in good repute with other labor bodies, having endorsed Reagan last fall in return for the candidate's assurance that "if I am elected president, I will take whatever steps are necessary to provide our air traffic controllers with the most modern equipment available and to adjust staff levels and work days so that they are commensurate with achieving a maximum degree of public safety...

...So monks are made of the same haunted stuff as we are...

...The contemporary religious search is obviously not for dogma...

...this well-known crack in modern Catholic apologetics showed up plainly...

...Beyond that, the coalition-building marking Solidarity Day should become a permanent part of labor's strategy...

...Its defense of the New-Deal and GreatSociety "safety net" should be seen not as a knee-jerk attach ment to federal bureaucracies nor as mere do-goodism but for what it is: a realistic recognition that most Americans are always economically vulnerable even when they are momen tarily well off...

...An astonishingarray of organizations - liberal and radical groups, consumer lobbies, environmental watchdogs, peace groups, women's organizations, minority representatives, and many more - are backing Solidarity Day, a sign that long-standing suspicions between labor and middle-class activists may be disappearing under the pressure of the Reagan program...

...its bias toward the rich in tax cuts...

...The show was too talky, too focused on "interesting" personalities, and the puzzlement over celibacy took up a disproportionate amount of space...

...Nor, arguably, is it simply for superior theologies...

...Likewise, labor's interest in greater income equality, in steady and secure employment, in consultation and cooperation rather than cutthroat competition can all be related not only to a more productive America but to one where "productivity" would actually be reflected in better living and not merely in better statistics...

...its removal of restraints on industry...

...Labor has rightly prided itself on representing those many Americans who, at least in the terms of the national media, are relatively inarticulate...

...which makes it against the law for controllers to close down an airport but not for pilots or mechanics to do so...

...The Economist's report on the air traffic controllers' strike was tellingly printed under the headline: "Solidarity is not a word America's unions know...

...One effort at redressment will be made on September 19, two weeks after the opening of Solidarity's congress in Poland and under the same banners...

...At the end of the last century, organizations of working people were forced, by law and by private economic power, to the margins of American life...

...The Wall Street Journal is known for its excellent reporting as well as its editorial viewpoint-and the former, not the latter, has made it the largest circulation paper in America...

...Has the labor movement ever considered publishing a daily or weekly in which independent, competent coverage of the economy was matched with its...

...Obviously, a revitalized labor movement will have to demonstrate that solidarity is not a sometime thing...

...It was past time that pne of them chose to explore an esoteric form of life closer to home, one that in this case elicits increasing interest from mainline Protestants and Jews traditionally hostile to it, and one that has remained a secret for all too many Catholics...

...It is a hundred years now since the AFL was founded, a century of struggle, of ups and downs, false starts and reversals, bitter defeats and yet the overall accomplishment of seeing American working people rescued from a regime of arbitrariness and possessed of a degree of job protection, collective benefits, the dignity of self-organization and negotiated rather than imposed contracts, and, of course, a fairer share in the material prosperity based so largely on their own toil...

...Secondly, the strike was ill-prepared, called without carefully plotting the consequences and consulting potential allies...

...It was a hard struggle, first to win legitimacy, then to achieve something approaching equal bargaining status with government and business...

...Helen Whitney's camera eye caught some of the paradox in this deliberately estranged form of life: the stifling taste of the secular world's ashes that had moved many of the monks, the perceived curse upon our houses - and yet, equally fierce in some, that cheerfulness and love of the earth...

...So much for the surprise, perhaps morose delectation for some, in seeing Trappist Brother Albert confess, on ABC-TV's August 20 showing of "The Monastery," that he sometimes wondered if God exists...

...Those votes were relatively close but, coming under a Democratic administration, a portent nonetheless...

...But so far the labor movement remains thoroughly unpersuaded - and just as thoroughly unable to do anything about it...

...For we have speed and sensory overload blocking us from the worst of it - and from ourselves...

...From London, the Economist, which approves of the president's toughness, has seen the larger meaning of this episode: "The long-term implication is that the controllers' defeat could hasten America's drift towards an almost union-free society...

...But it will take more than one march on Washington, no matter how successful, to restore labor even to the role it had a few years ago in representing the needs of masses of ordinary people, let alone render it a creative force in the reshaping of America that, like it or not, is now underway...

...Still, labor has simply not been able to mold these positions into some general alternative vision of America, able to compete with the rugged individualism cum nostalgia and nationalism that is now serving both cultural and economic conservatives so well...

...Some united response to the government's policy of no-compromise/everyone-fired must be forthcoming from the AFL-CIO...

...Recently, that status has been reduced to,the role of a junior partner...

...The quest is for authentic, earth-moving experience, some reason to have a theology at all...

...may be permanently mired in poverty, over every eight-year period one of every three families will sink for at least a year below the poverty line-often with lasting, disastrous consequences...

...IT WAS A very fitting gesture for Poland's independent trade union to invite Lane Kirkland, president of the AFL-CIO, to attend the opening of Solidarity's first national congress the weekend before America's Labor Day...

...its lop-sided emphasis on military spending...

...Some of us did not doubt that...

...All the elements are available for labor to articulate that alternative vision...

...A Flannery O'Connor, for instance, after gearing up for a morning's writing by praying much the same Divine Office chanted by these Cistercians, could catch God's glory in even the most grotesque circumstance...

...There, it seems, the independent, democratic organization of working people is the creative force in shaping a new society, and doing so under the most hazardous of economic and political conditions...

...The problems that Patco's action presented to the rest of the union movement are obvious.,The strike was clearly illegal, however arbitrary the situation (unlike that of government workers in Western Europe, and now Poland...

...Or it could take the lead in creating a society of expanded democracy and responsible citizenship...

...point of view...

...Whitney caught in the monks' laughter at each other, in their common toil with plow, sheep, and pigs, weaving and assembly line jam jars, what one also finds breaking out in Percy and Cheever - a lyricism about earthy life that with monks con-gruently bursts forth in psalmody and eucharistic liturgy...

...Furthermore, the positions that labor leaders have staked out on a host of national issues are distinctive-far from the "me-tooism" of which they are occasionally accused...

...So also, while we're at it, is the question of who's doing the more ' 'useful" work...

...William James was the prototype American in putting monks and nuns on the pragmatic spot, as if the question did not run the other way as well...

...Business has learned this lesson: it is setting up think tanks, enlisting scholars (and giving them the leeway to make them feel comfortable), sponsoring debates on public policy, inundating the media with material that carries a strong pro-business bias and yet is more than simple propaganda...

...its relaxation of federal concern about minority rights and equal treatment for women...

...The most careful study of the matter shows that although only a tenth of American families (only...

...The point of this mobilization by labor and its allies is to demonstrate the depth of active American support for social and economic justice - to protest the administration's slashes intiuman services...

...For all of that, the challenge that the president's policy presents to the labor movement is enormous...

...For the first time in history, the AFL-CIO has called for a march on Washington, a mass mobilization in the nation's capital under the name Solidarity -Day...

...In politics the appearance of weakness is weakness, and nothing has turned the spotlight on organized labor's weakness like the strike of the air traffic controllers...

...And within Catholicism at least, monks and contemplative nuns are, as it were, delegated authorities in first-hand religious experience...