An Afl Fairy Tail

...Actually, hardly a newspaper reader paid any more attention to the recent similar unsavory events in the AFL-CIO than to a Monday morning police court trial of a sexually complicated row in a highway motel along U.S...

...In the burgeoning non-profit enterprise system, trade union officials get as much deference as the executive officers of all except the largest foundations...

...What is going on in the AFL-CIO camp at the moment, performed unconsciously as if Art Buchwald had written the scenario in the manner of his now famous column on what would have happened had Goldwater been elected president, proves that the trade-union movement in the United States is indestructible, at least for the time being...

...If you present this thin irony to a union member, however, the chances are he will shrug and say, "well, in the union like anywhere else, you can't have everything...

...Apart from the direct confrontations, unions and companies coordinate, if they do not cooperate, almost as intimately as is the case in Social Democratic Sweden...

...No matter where you look in the economic or political life of the country at the present time, the union is an important part of the dynamics of events...

...and in Brazil, where the Free Labor Institute, so one of its officials said over the radio, took part in the preliminary plotting that led to the Army coup...

...Outside of a very few corridors in Washington, New York, and perhaps a few capitals, especially Brussels, no one knew that George Meany, the President of the AFL-CIO, and a VicePresident of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, had said that the world center of free unionism had become infected with homosexuality ("fairies" was the word he used) or after he offered a tongue in cheek apology by explaining he understood fairy to mean a gossip, that he added another prick to the ICFTU sensibilities by charging ICTFU staff with expense account skulduggery...

...Similarly, the satisfactions enjoyed by the professional trade unionists who engineered the displacement of James Carey as president of the International Union of Electrical Workers and David McDonald as president of the United Steelworkers from the inside, the only approach to power in a union is largely private...

...There is, of course, a tedious explanation for all this which involves a narration of the ICFTU uneasiness about the role of the AFLCIO and Jay Lovestone in Africa...

...If the business community has not embraced industrial democracy, at least where unions have won recognition they get attentions that would have seemed impossible even a decade ago...

...Even set beside the GM profits, or a government appropriation, this joint enterprise has the measurements of a social Aswan dam...

...but the unions, right or center (there is no left), are making advances socially that are not unbearably behind the technological advances that characterize the large society...

...Similarly, the automobile settlement last year, which is being replicated throughout the industrial community, was a remarkable economic enactment by what is nothing less than an emerging new form of industrial government...

...Yet the unions, like the American nation under President Eisenhower, a decent superannuated nonentity, like the greater number of presidents of the AFL-CIO's 140 or so affiliated organizations, were never richer, more powerful, and impersonally, without respect to their leadership, more effective...

...But the explanation is essentially unimportant, because these activities are closed clandestinities which have little bearing on what unions really do in the U.S...

...The eleven and a half cents per hour per worker are not being distributed as the largesse of the employer, which in the past has often been the case, but instead are being put in escrow until the union decides, when negotiations resume, what the $50 to $60 million down payment that will be accumulated should purchase...

...In most ways, though not in all, it is still enormously more advantageous to be the president of a corporation, however small, or a professional person, or a business man, or a member of the middle classes than to be a punch press operator...

...One south of the Potomac...

...and less on the events overseas that the James Bonds of the AFL-CIO seek to influence...

...As the result of an unprecedented and unremarked revolution in American life, Big Steel is underwriting a social benefit shopping expedition for the steel union, of major proportions...

...In mid 1965, one of the three or four most important institutional aggregations in the country is presided over by a group of men, who are hardly known to most Americans, and who are held in an unemotional and detached disdain by those who are aware of their existence...

...Certainly labor's spokesmen were better when the opposition was tougher, but then conditions for the rank and file were not so good...

...in British Guiana, where the Free Labor Institute, according to The New York Times, distributed CIA funds to the terrorist squads that campaigned against Jagan...

...and even on the highest levels, unions exercise a near veto on most elections or appointments...

...Thus the test of democracy in the unions does not depend on the honesty of elections, nor is the proof of integrity the technical honesty of the officers...

...A steadily mounting number of union nominees hold political office on all except the highest levels in every public jurisdiction in the country...

...If in the same period the President of the United States had declared that NATO was a nest of homosexuals, and the governors of two of the more important states in the union, of his own party, had turned out to have conducted a thieves' carnival in their election, with the implication that practically all elections of all top officials of the party were largely unrelated to actual votes cast, the national hullabaloo would have been historic...

...The presidents of most state universities and almost as many private universities, take unions very nearly into as careful account as the major business corporations in their domain...

...If there was any jubilation among the dues paying members, it was only a weak hurrah aroused by a hope that the brass would now put their quarrels aside and get on with the work of the union...

...Nor should it be supposed this assimilation of the union leadership to the world of paneled board rooms and seminars at Aspen is the price of betrayal...

...Success has not spoiled the American union movement, though the items about unions which appear in the Daily Labor Report, read only by specialists, and on page 37 of The New York Times, which are hardly read at all, indicate that success is spoiling its leaders...

...The prevailing lack of public interest in the activities of the leaders of the American unions suggests that no one takes them seriously any longer, whether they are decent and dedicated citizens, or knaves, or fools, or simply senile...

...in the Dominican Republic where the people who tried to overthrow the junta there also thought they had good reason to throw bricks at the AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor Development...

...At least so far as the rank and file are concerned, the criteria are in the performance of the unions as revealed in the contracts and in legislation...

...The interim settlement in steel is a remarkable fruit of negotiation...

...Had the lid been lifted on a corporation and a comparable smell blown through the city from the business community, at least one Congressional investigation and an SEC inquiry would have been launched...

...The possibility of workers retiring at age 60 on pensions of $400 a month, the contract provision which offers mental health care to wageearners and their families, the virtual realization of a guaranteed annual wage, and the grant to industrial workers of convenience leave may not mark the end of the industrial exploitation of workers, but these and other features of the new contracts do provide wage-earners with dignities, perquisites, and amenities no proletariat has ever enjoyed before...

...Because unions do serve their member wage-earners, and by expansion, the community, so well, the members of unions pay almost no attention to the alleged crimes of Jimmy Hoffa, or the comic antics of George Meany, the buffoonery of David McDonald, the incredible cynical context of union elections, or for that matter the inspirational sermons of Walter Reuther...