Of Labor and Its Friends
Geltman, Emanuel
THE STATE OF THE UNIONS, by Paul Jacobs. New York: Athe neum, 1963. xiii-1-303 pp. $5. LABOR TODAY: the Triumphs and Failures of Unionism in the United States, by B. J. Widick. Boston:...
...But taken in sum, America Comes of Middle Age is a collection I'll be glad to keep...
...But it is a human document of the first order...
...The picture of the horror of these camps, and especially the sketches of the life histories of more than a hundred women with whom the author shared her fate, are unforgettable...
...And this much can be said: Paul Jacobs may have accomplished just that...
...No question about that...
...His stature does decline aganst the measure of what he might have been...
...Peck's book may more properly be said to exist...
...What they fail to take into adequate account are the pressures that cannot be contained by unimaginative porkchoppers squatting on their life-time sinecures...
...Dix-Sept Ans les Camps Sovietiques, by Andree Sentaurens...
...6.50...
...In context, the sense is conveyed that none of this can be resisted or changed—and this, I think, has not been demonstrated...
...Labor Today is a useful work if, I think, ultimately a wrongheaded one...
...It is rather a question of advancing the Negro's cause by advancing the union's as well...
...Admitted, Meany has never been on a picket line, never led a strike, and boasts of both "achievements," but he does head the most powerful labor federation in the world, and knows the business of running a union—which is not quite the same thing as, if in practice it is close to, business unionism...
...He makes excellent use of his own experience as assembly line worker (and not on summer holiday either), union activist in auto (and before that in rubber), labor journalist, and professional in labor studies at Wayne State and Columbia University...
...Boston: Houghton Mifffin, 1964...
...If here and there the prose is gluey and overexposed, it is more frequently incisive, compassionate, caustic...
...The patient reader will be rewarded with interesting, if hardly novel, facts about stresses and strains imposed on the shop steward as rank-and-file leader, as buffer between union officialdom and management...
...Kemptori s columns, however, are remarkably readable...
...That is to say, three of them are animated...
...He would have done well to let his assessment of Reuther rest with the conclusions and criticism contained in that book which are not at all in conflict with updating the information on Reuther's progress or his decline...
...It is hard to accept as reasoned judgment, for example, his repeated assertion that George Meany is not a labor leader...
...Similarly, both Jacobs and Widick are the vctims of their own good intentions...
...And Herbert Hill and Paul Jacobs are as likely to have the last word as Gus Tyler...
...Dubinsky is not really the essence of the matter...
...As a man who has devoted his life to a dedicated vision of the union's responsibilities and opportunities, B. J. Widick unfortunately loses his sense of balance in confronting its disappointments and realities...
...which is what Widick does...
...Now and then Kempton strains for effect in a column, and quite often a sentence creaks under the effort to sparkle with paradox and punch...
...Whether Meany is a good or bad labor leader is one discussion...
...The Hoffa articles, which open the book, are dated by the latest developments...
...The essence of this report, "Old Before Its Time," is given as follows in an introductory statement: . . . collective bargaining cannot operate successfully in coping with the growing problems created by automation and unemployment...
...As statements of fact, all of these points seem to be established by the evidence...
...Nashville, Tennessee...
...of citations...
...etc., is alone worth the price of the work...
...but that lie is not a labor leader at all...
...There is more involved here than whether Reuther is or is not a hasbeen...
...Peck's credit: he did not rely on written sources...
...My mother used to say that the trouble with the bride is she's too pretty...
...xi+238 pp...
...summers he worked in different factories...
...Peck is abso lutely goggle-eyed about his "techniques" (the jacket blurb tells you right off they are "revolutionary...
...Not that it is lacking in information, or sympathy for its subject: the union shop steward...
...It is not merely a question of compelling the sheetmetal workers to admit Negroes...
...887 pp...
...But who is to say he might not still "be...
...New Haven: College and University Press, 1963...
...Traditional methods are inadequate in meeting new problems (but what about the traditional problems which continue to exist in abundance...
...398 pp...
...F. 16...
...But as the civil rights movement develops, and faces its own dilemmas, won't it exercise compulsions on the union movement, and not only for jobs...
...THE RANK-AND-FILE LEADER, by Sidney M. Peck...
...Nor is it at all certain that the Reuthers, or even the Meanys, will utterly fail in respect to all of these problems...
...Praiseworthy as his summer employment was, I have an idea that if he had talked to shop stewards in all kinds of shops and situations his contribution might have been easier to assess...
...It remains to be seen if the civil rights department of the AFLCIO will make significant progress in eradicating entrenched discriminatory union policies...
...However, anxiety need not encourage despair...
...Kempton cannot resist the temptation to finish off his characters...
...What may really count for more in the end are the signs that important elements of the civil rights movement, and not only Randolph, are mounting pressures on the unions for involvement...
...Paris: Gallimard, 1963...
...The columns here collected were written by a working newspaperman, and they are best when Kempton is reporting a story...
...The four books here discussed share the quality of being animated by a genuine concern for the factory hand, the victim of corporate, union, or political bureaucracy...
...However, they remain illuminating, continuingly useful in any final appraisal of Hoffa...
...The point is better made in consideration of Paul Jacobs' book which, for very good reason, has been debated as one of the most important labor books in years...
...He uses sources wisely, and displays good judgment in the use (excessive use...
...The unions have "failed to understand the nature of the Negro demand for job equality...
...it can stimulate investigation...
...others will read it at their own peril, but with some profit...
...I thought they were great when I first read them...
...Boston: Little, Brown, 1963...
...It is a reminder that New York City has lost a top-notch newspaperman...
...Which does, however, say that things can be done—given, let us say, a better purpose and, obviously, a better way...
...Their zeal is betrayed by the realities of business unionism, jurisdictional quarrels, bureaucratism, traditionalism, segregation...
...Jimmy Hoffa and Richard Nixon are always being counted out, and bouncing back...
...They are beginning to envision a future in the unions as an integral part of their future...
...There is enough cause to critically scrutinize Meany's role, and enough reason to take him apart for his record on civil rights among other issues, without clouding the total picture...
...Pollyanish...
...Years ago, Widick collaborated with Irving Howe in writing The UAW and Walter Reuther...
...Little Rock, Arkansas...
...Murray Kempton is just that, and the columns collected in his new volume were culled from what was the best newspaper column in New York City while it lasted...
...That neither begins nor ends the matter...
...The heart of the book is in its last chapter which is part of a report he made as director of a trade union study sponsored by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions...
...I suspect that interviewing Jack Widick and other shop stewards, present and ex-, might have produced a more illuminating study...
...This is not a political book, the author knows little and cares less about politics...
...Since I know both of them, I think I can testify to what is not altogether plain in their books: they would like to see a vigorous labor movement, democratic, viably confronting new problems, extending the hand of fraternity to the Negro worker...
...Whether conservative Mortimer Snerds glug at mere mention of his name had as little moment when Reuther was their bete noir as today when he has been swallowed by a society able to absorb everything...
...and that unions are faced with a major internal crisis growing from their failure to understand the nature of the Negro demand for job equality...
...Granted Reuther has not measured up to all we, and the auto workers perhaps, expected of him...
...Could be...
...3.75...
...The ILGWU pieces do not come off so well, understandable in view of the difficulties he reports in trying to discuss the situation with union officials...
...It may be commendable as a dissertation, but a dissertation is not yet a book...
...And there's nothing I suppose that will really prevent political or labor columnists from making like they're working the press box at a ball game...
...that government intervention into collective bargaining will increase more and more...
...But suppose we do write ourselves off, and, far more important in terms of power and position, Reuther, Mazey, Hoffa, and all the present crop of union leaders, good and bad...
...But how far can the reader's patience be taxed...
...LABOR TODAY: the Triumphs and Failures of Unionism in the United States, by B. J. Widick...
...More distressing is Widick's treatment of Reuther...
...The government gives every sign of intervening more and more (witness the President's recent statements), and the unions are in truth not facing up to the Negro challenge...
...Peck to a journalist at the top of his craft...
...The section called "Among School Children," including stories datelined Sumner, Mississippi...
...I still think so...
...It is unfair to turn from Mr...
...At any rate: Recommended for doctoral candidates in industrial sociology, labor studies, and associated disciplines (at the very least it is handy footnote material...
...The Jack (or B. J.) Widick I referred to above has written a swiftstepping, overview of the labor unions today...
...And the participant observer technique is not that unusual, even among sociologists...
...he gets things done, if in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons...
...xiv+885 pp...
...That impresses me as silly...
...In the end, there is more attention to the "failures" of unionism, than its "triumphs...
...This detailed account, by a French woman who spent seventeen years in Russian concentration camps and was finally released in 1956, ought soon to be translated...
...It is a collection, with all the frailties of assembling reportorial pieces written over a period of years, but with the virtue of having been done well...
...This much is to Mr...
...It is not a collection, but incorporates pieces Widick had previously written...
...Interesting that Kempton and Jacobs, sharp as they are about Hoffa, display a reluctant admiration for Hoffa...
...Parts of it are first-rate, as "Detroit— the Day the Job Stopped," which originally appeared in The Nation...
...AMERICA COMES OF MIDDLE AGE, by Murray Kempton...
...Collections are frequently painful things...
...there is some small evidence of improvement...
...So much space is devoted to tedious elaborations of methodology—the group interview technique, the selection of shops to study, the soundrecorded group interview—that it becomes very difficult to see the information for the methods used to acquire it...
...That, however, is not the same thing as counting Reuther out...
...foreword by Eugene V. Schneider...
...He nevertheless remains a highly complex individual, with extraordinary ability and sensi tivity (call it ambition, if you will...
...maybe, but that would simply prove that some revolutions do not cut much ice...
...In any case, we are not beyond being able to influence the situation— I speak of myself, Paul, Jack...
...Where it comes unstuck is in the very passion of its concern over the vanishing vitality of the union movement...
...they tend to lack an inner unity of theme, spirit, and skill...
Vol. 11 • April 1964 • No. 2
