On the Labor Front: Black and White, Unite-or Fight?

...The black bus drivers had legitimate grievances against the local leadership, charging discrimination and favoritism...

...Because there is a strong feeling among white blue-collar workers that in regard to Negroes and schools the white middle class is guilty of pious hypocrisies...

...Within the UAW itself there have been troubles...

...Here are some quotes: Not every picket line is a Union picket line...

...But from my own experiences I can say that the unions, especially in Michigan, did an effective job in cutting the Alabama demagogue down to size...

...Why was Wallace's attack on "pseudo-intellectuals" so popular with his audiences...

...To a considerable extent they identify these groupswith the Negroes...

...But one thing is clear, and all the experience of American unionism supports this: trying to set up a dual union based on race is a sure way to disaster...

...In both instances rank-and-file blacks attacked the union for not having representation on the policy-making level...

...Leaflets were dis tributed in large quantity, and far more im portant, the secondary union leadership in auto, steel, and rubber got down to some hard and effective work...

...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS AFEW WEEKS before the Presidential election, the auto and steel plants in the Chicago area were flooded with leaflets soliciting support for George Wallace...

...Some of them, I suspect, may be victimized in local union elections next spring for having spoken up so strongly against Wallace...

...That doesn't mean, however, that what Wallace stands for doesn't retain considerable support in the plants or that the threat of increased support in case that riots continue isn't a real one...

...Is he entirely wrong...

...At the Dodge Hamtranck plant there appeared a while ago a black group calling itself the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement...

...In addition, most of the men now working in the plants don't have behind them the experience in militant unionism which made the UAW what it is...

...DRUM also attacked Negro workers who hold elective or appointive positions in the union as "Uncle Toms" (the easiest kind of smear these days...

...He is the only person that can live without working...

...his appeal was a kind of populist racism...

...In the last few decades of prosperity, the unions got •a little lazy and neglectful in the gruelling day-to-day job of education among the ranks...

...In the steel workers' union there have recently been some important steps in this direction...

...III THE PROCESS of "polarization," which some political children look on with pleasure, has been occurring on both extremes within the union...

...Seymour Lipset's analysis fits in with my own observations: Many of the unionized workers who are steadily employed, are purchasing their own homes in neighborhoods which are relatively close to expanding black areas, and are bothered by higher taxes, are beginning to oppose the welfare program as a system which taxes the hardworking to help the lazy and the unfit...

...He can get on the welfare programwhen good, honest, hard-working white people are unable to qualify...

...The black workers in all these situations had real complaints, and what they should have done was to consult with black unionists in other unions who had learned how tomake their weight felt and get union leadership to be responsive...

...One of the most important occurred in Division 241 of the Amalgamated Transit Union in Chicago...

...But in a given situation, racial separatism, for whatever reasons, can endanger the very existence of a union...

...What was the basis of Wallace's appeal...

...Since white union members are much more likely to live inside the central cities than themore affluent middle class, they are also more directly and personally concerned with theproblem of increased urban crime and with efforts at integrating urban school systems through modifying the concept of the neighborhood school...

...Here is a paragraph from one of them: The Negro today is the best-treated human being in the U.S...

...Every decent person understands, of course, that Negroes in general and Negro workers in particular have serious grievances...

...A caucus of black workers pressing for improvements but at the same time making it clear that it means to remain in the union seems the best way out...

...The object is to pit white workersagainst black workers and even black against black...

...They failed to recognize that the blunt class appeal of the thirties, while still needed, was no longer enough, because there were new issues, more complex and troubling and not lending themselves to easy solutions...

...I offer the following speculations: • Old-fashioned prejudice, sometimes even racism, is still around...

...In other mid-Western unions there have been similar developments...

...Threatened on one side by the racist and semiracist rumblings of Wallace supporters, and challenged on the other side by black workers who in their understandable anger sometime succumb to a form of black nationalism that can slip into anti-unionism, we in the trade-union movement are going to have our hands full these next few years...

...He sees himself making a little prog COMMENTS AND OPINIONS ress, and while he is ready to fight for more of it, and ready in the shop to join black workers for a mutual improvement of conditions, he looks upon riots as a threat to the whole way of life he has struggled for, a threat that may bring disaster to everyone...

...He has his own little house, and he's worked damned hard to get it...

...Some of the white workers have come up from the South within the last 20 or 25 years, and retain many of their old attitudes...

...They stressed the rotten labor rec ord of Wallace, knowing that—paradox as it may seem—many of the workers who were swinging toward Wallace were also in favor of unions and progressive social legislation...

...To put it mildly, DRUM leaflets are extremisthate sheets...

...After a second strike, the bulk of the black workers returned to the job but the leaders were fired...

...Whether this represents a "spontaneous reaction," or is a clever manipulation of white sentiment by political operators, hardly matters...

...Similar defeats have been suffered by black workers at a Hotpoint plant who are covered by the Sheet Metal Workers' Union and who talked about forming a separate black local...

...At that point there began to be talk about setting up a new black union—and the aggrieved blacks made the mistake of turning for advice not to experienced black unionists but to religionists who have little understanding of what can or can't be done in unions...

...It is important for you to know and understand that these picket lines are not UAW picket lines...

...Many workers see the pressures for school desegregation as coming fromthe well-educated middle class which lives in the suburbs or sends its children to private schools...

...A much bigger step forward was taken this year when, for the first time in UAW history a Negro unionist, Marcellius Ivory, was elected Regional Director in the Detroit region which includes the huge Ford River Rouge plant...

...The governmentwill set him up a brick buildingwith steam heat, pay the housing project where he can live for very little rent, and go to the mail box once a month and get his welfare check...

...Within the UAW there has developed a black caucus of active unionists, led by such veteran fighters as Buddy Battle III, who are pressing for the legitimate claims of the black workers without succumbing to separatism...

...The pre-election polls showed heavy support for Wallace among unionized workers, though not necessarily more support than among certain segments of the white middle class...

...11 ONCE THE NEWS of the polls got around, an enormous effort was made in the unions to cut down the Wallace support...

...A democratic vote must be taken in which ALL members of the local are able to participate...

...How many of the workers who had been inclined toward Wallace were won away by union efforts, I can't say with any precision—perhaps no one will ever know...

...Who's being mistreated...

...When the CTW led a strike and it came to seem, no doubt unfairly, that the main issue was a black effort to take over the union, white support melted away...

...In reply to DRUM, the Dodge Local 3 officers, regional director, and the director of the Chrysler department issued an open letter to the ranks entitled "Common Sense—or Chaos...

...Black nationalist in outlook, it put out a paper called DRUM which appealed to black workers along "hate Whitey" lines...

...They called upon the solidarity of the workers...

...The issue for them has become one of the well-to-do forcing the white working class to send its children to school with black children...

...He believes in the stability of the family as an institution...

...By a voice vote the convention rejected this idea...

...More important, in the forthcoming union elections it seems likely that the Baltimore district No...

...So it would seem that, while the internal racial problems of the UAW are by no means solved, it does set a useful precedent for how to achieve growing influence of black union COMMENTS AND OPINIONS ists without sliding into the dangers of black separatism...

...Legal picket lines of the UAW can beestablished only after strikable grievances havegone through the grievance procedure...

...in both instances black leaders spoke of the need for being elected on the basis of individual merit and not race...

...He can have illegitimate children, and can get by with it...

...White workers feel threatened—rationally or irrationally (mostly irrationally)—by the Negro upsurge...

...And it should be noted, this is a region in which the majority of UAW members is white...

...8 will send a black steel unionist, Lee Simms, as its representative to the Executive Board...

...A step forward was taken when a Negro unionist, Jack Edwards, was elected to the International Board of the UAW, not as a representative of blacks but as part of the whole union leadership...

...Now, in the UAW this issue had been debated a long time ago, at the 1943 Buffalo convention and then at the 1949 Milwaukee convention...

...The appeal of the unions was alright, as far as it went...

...He can have ten common-law wives, and nobody seems to care...

...But if unions are to survive in this country at all, we will have to find ways, in the day-to-day unglamorous life of the white and black workers, of creating the kind of solidarity which only a few decades ago gave birth to industrial unionism...

...They formed a group called the Concerned Transit Workers, and for a time had some support among white members of their union...

...In the last few months DRUM has subsided...

...The election of Nixon isn't going to help—and neither, I might add, will the snobbish contempt and plain ignorance which some intellectuals favor these days toward unionism...

...He has begun to dig in socially...

...The average white worker—if you can create such an abstraction—is troubled by riots and disorder...

...It succeeded in organizing a couple of wildcats on a racial basis...

...they are the inheritors of the struggle, not its initiators—a fact for which they aren't to be blamed, of course...

...The point is that it skilfully combines an appeal to traditional race prejudices with a new-style appeal to white workers on the grounds that it is they who are now being discriminated against...

...Wal lace never attacked unions as such...

...The government makes the rules for the welfare department, and just about every Negro can qualify...

...Three new staff representatives, a member of the education department, several other full-time workers—all black have been added...

...His kids are probably going to a municipal or state college, the first time that's ever happened in his family...

...A few examples: • At the convention of the steel workers' union, held this past fall, a bloc of Negro delegates proposed that a certain number of posts in the union's leadership be automatically put aside for blacks...

...Maybe it's a bit less respectable to express it, but it's there...

...And don't suppose that these workers aren't shrewd and perceptive in their way, or that they don't catch on to the double-bookkeeping of affluent intellectuals who, say, denounce the teachers union in New York for damaging public education while they themselves abandoned public education for their own children years ago...

...Since I am writing this report for a magazine read by intellectuals, let me reinforce Lipset's last point...

...There's just no easy way out of some of these difficulties...