Unions and the Black Power Brokers
Sexton, Brendan
MANY YOUNG BLACK ACTIVISTS, hearing from both the Left and the Right that unions are their main enemy, and believing what they hear, have joined the chorus of labor's critics. Some choose...
...Among the more than 2.5 million hospital workers, hundreds of thousands must be black...
...Because of their fear of the "Long Hairs," union leaders have often failed to oppose, and sometimes even joined in, campaigns of intellectual repression...
...Yet, not more than 15 percent of all hospital workers are unionized, though they work for miserable wages under degrading conditions...
...In view of the unionists' marked preference for enlightened and educated advisers and political candidates, I find it difficult to put all the "blame" on them for failing to reach out to intellectuals...
...We ought to stress that unions and leftintellectuals share many common social and political goals...
...In a study of its own employees, Bell Telephone recently discovered to its surprise that the "hard-driving executive, living under constant tension" was less likely to suffer heart disease than an hourly-rated worker...
...The New York Times carried a lengthy front page story on the march, but Woodcock's name was not even included in the list of those who "also spoke...
...The most widely publicized of these, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), has entered candidates in various local union elections, but without any success...
...They suffer periodic lay 3 The mythology of the privileged worker extends to this area as well as to others...
...In the United States, Selig Perlman, in his influential Theory of the Labor Movement, suggested that unions would flourish only if workers subdued the intellectuals who tried to influence them...
...Though they are more likely to suffer serious illness, decent medical care is beyond their reach...
...The young workers who are trying to get a family started are being crushed by high interest rates...
...Cut off from social scientists, for example, unionists deny themselves useful knowledge about organization and communication theory, or about voter motivation and behavior in election campaigns...
...but most, I believe, are simply defensive and wary of putdowns and college-bred jargon...
...Speaking for the UAW, Leonard Woodcock appeared at the annual meeting of General Motors stockholders to support portions of the minority stockholder's report, but his statement was virtually ignored outside Detroit...
...This rising group of disadvantaged blacks can clearly profit from union organization, and they know it.' IIn addition to the AFT, the State, County and UNIONS AND THE BLACK POWER BROKERS U U xIONs have made real economic gains for black as well as white workers...
...Their "racist" and authoritarian attitudes...
...Unions end the powerlessness of workers, black or white...
...While from the beginning its goals were more explicitly social and political than those of the old AFL, CIO leaders wanted simply to reform the system and make it more responsive to the needs of workers...
...In recent months, for example, some ran for local union office in the UAW on campaign pledges to drive out the "honky and Polish pigs...
...Traveling in both union and intellectual circles, I go in a kind of crouch rather like a big-league catcher as a means of avoiding the high hard ones thrown from both sides...
...Political programs speaking to these needs could unite large sections of the white working class with those members of minority groups to whom they also appeal...
...Of published copy in those journals, certainly not more than one in a thousand lines can be written by blacks...
...Many of these paraprofessionals recognize power and status when they see it, even if their young sympathizers mistake rhetoric for the real thing...
...Actually, the intellectuals' contempt for the worker is as old as Aristotle, and the history of their intermittent war against trade unionists goes back to the middle of the 19th century...
...The IWW was a much more practical— and for a time more promising—expression of the same wish...
...Unionized black public employees (State, County and Municipal Workers and the Drug and Hospital Workers Local 1199) have recently waged historic strikes in Memphis, Charlotte, Atlanta...
...Under the injunction `Do It,' an anonymous group at Amherst has called for the disruption of a meeting scheduled this evening at Mt...
...They are often grossly underpaid compared with the professionals with whom they work...
...Most of them are badly housed, in grimy neighborhoods or crackerbox subdivisions...
...makers" in private organizations, "unions had a larger percentage-13 percent—than any other institution...
...Roy Wilkins and others in the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights publicly paid that tribute...
...They simply organized badly exploited industrial workers into trade unions...
...Marx himself had a high appreciation of the political value of political liberty...
...Still, I believe that unions remain the most powerful and among the most persistent advocates of general social welfare...
...In general, the good things labor does are ignored and the bad things are dramatized...
...In meetings, negotiations, strikes, conventions they provide opportunity for the development of leadership skills...
...Some unions, including the UAW, have rather recently won insurance to provide psychiatric treatment for workers, but the amount of care is limited measured against the population, and the number of workers covered is relatively small...
...Almost all have shirked responsibility to the poor and to minorities...
...Almost unknown outside Harlem until recently, Haughton has spent the last five years at "shape ups, picket lines, demonstrations, and in urgent negotiations," fighting to get black workers into construction unions, according to Marion Sanders in the Times Sunday Magazine...
...New Left attitudes toward unions are perhaps merely an extension into this generation of opinion formed and fostered by sections of the Old Left...
...But important as it is, the war is not the only issue, certainly not when there is the threat of internal disaster...
...Vigorous endorsement by the Alliance for Labor Action of the October 15 Vietnam Moratorium should have given some hope to all but the most sectarian of the New Left...
...From that heritage, cherished in some left-liberal circles, the workers emerge as the chief enemies of black aspirations...
...In Detroit a number of so-called "Revolutionary Unions" have been active in the UAW, principally at Chrysler plants...
...Many young New Leftists who influence black responses seem to think they have come upon an entirely new analysis of social events when they speak of the corruption of the workers who have become "part of the system...
...Some of them are narrow-minded, even bigoted, about their potential allies on the Left...
...Their occupations may be so poorly defined that they wind up handling the unpleasant jobs that the professionals and organized workers don't want to do...
...Certainly George Wallace, combining slick anti-unionism with hatred of the intellectual, should have illustrated the point...
...In the South, black workers are coming to see in unions a real promise of social and political advance...
...Only five out of 380 policymaking positions in these universities are held by Negroes...
...The schools their children attend are nearly as bad as the ghetto schools...
...I don't consider the unions my adversaries," Haughton said...
...I don't doubt that other unions get similar treatment in the news media when they speak out on issues of concern to the Left...
...7 (7,000 members), is led by Negroes...
...Still, DRUM has not yet elected any candidates...
...Hank Gant, the new president of Local 212, another large Chrysler local (10,000 members), is also black...
...I am never theless regarded as a Long Hair by some unionists, perhaps because I read books...
...In my own union (UAW), Negro membership may reach 400,000...
...HAVE little hope for the nation unless the ' deep rift between labor and the intellectuals begins to heal...
...The politically aware can hardly fail to know of the existence of unions, though they may not appreciate their power and potential...
...And what a fall that might have been...
...It is the fundamental nature of unions, not the blind or bigoted conduct of some business agents, that matters here...
...In contrast, the intellectual's view of unions often sounds glib and rather sanctimonious to the seasoned unionist...
...They are discriminated against in the draft, and are more likely to be sent to combat areas, to be wounded, and killed...
...About 80 blacks serve as full-time international representatives...
...The universities (including Chicago, a citadel of radical academic opinion) "had a negligible 1 percent representation...
...In Rebels and Renegades, a valuable and neglected book, Max Nomad argued that many important divisions in the European radical and union movements could be traced to this source...
...They bring authority within reach and under control...
...and lack all the academic merit badges (high school diploma, college degree, etc...
...Even the walls of craft unions can tumble...
...How much coverage has been given, for example, to growing opposition in the AFL–CIO Executive Council to George Meany's Vietnam policy...
...I enter no plea that intellectuals' criticism of unions be muted, only rather that the criticism be paralleled by more realistic statements of their record and potential...
...My own suit against Mr...
...They need look no further than the South for evidence of that, or to Joe McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, stalwart enemies of unions and "Egg Heads" alike...
...They were almost universally New Dealers, be lievers in the welfare state—and they quickly and almost unanimously rejected John L. Lewis, their most effective spokesman and leader, when he departed from that philosophy to move to the Right...
...The total number of production workers alone reached 46 million, and most of them are eligible for union membership...
...Paraprofessionals seem especially susceptible to calls for union organization...
...They open avenues to social change...
...We've got to put on pressure where the power is, where the loot is— on the employers...
...Accepting still another cliche, some intellectuals think the argument irrelevant anyway, since unions and the "working class" (so they believe) are withering away in the face of technological advance...
...At the same time, a black man was elected vicepresident of the Dodge local, another as recording secretary, and others to the local union executive board...
...The young blacks who turn away from unions might ask themselves: how can black people—most of whom are workers— achieve power, status, autonomy other than through union organization...
...A friend assures me that non-New Left radicals and liberals are simply unaware of, rather than hostile to, unions...
...In welfare and religious organizations, whose constituents were often largely Negro, Negroes occupied 8 percent of the [policy-making] positions...
...Workers are lectured for their foolish voting behavior...
...Actually, the nearly 20 million workers em UNIONS AND THE BLACK POWER BROKERS ployed in manufacturing at the end of 1968 exceeded by about 3 million the number employed when the last census was taken in 1960...
...Even considering recent advances, only Temple and Wayne State— among all the nation's major white universities— include anything like a representative number of black students...
...All this would have no more than academic interest, except that the mutual distrust has harmful consequences...
...They see their kids drafted for service, wounded and killed in Vietnam, while the children of the radical-liberal middle class escape into the university sanctuary...
...Despite the widely propagated and easily accepted mythology, American workers continue to have a real stake in social change...
...In New York, the percentage of black union leaders might be somewhat lower than in Chicago, but probably not dramatically so...
...and certainly more integrated than the faculty of Princeton University, where the black author of this charge has a temporary attachment...
...Scholars could help develop solutions for economic problems that puzzle union leaders...
...Workers' children are virtually excluded from elitist schools and universities...
...The two reactions are sometimes combined in the same person, as in the business agent who hates all "Long Hairs" but stands in awe of the academician who troubles to cultivate him...
...Though I hold all the proper union credentials (ac tivity in local unions, organizer, negotiator, shop committeeman, local union president, elected convention delegate, etc...
...and they can afford, for special causes, to rent offices, buy supplies, pay salaries...
...Unionists were very proud of their associations with Adlai Stevenson, once they UNIONS AND THE BLACK POWER BROKERS knew he was no snob...
...They were surprised when they were snowed under by both black and white voters at the same time that other young blacks were elected, many to the highest union posts...
...Mitchell [having to do with the Attorney General's refusal to grant a visa to a Marxist from abroad who had been invited to speak at Amherst] rests on certain essential principles: I cannot claim these for myself and my students and deny them to our political opponents...
...As the Chicago study shows, black people are coming on in other unions as well...
...They can affect legislators...
...In the years of the official War Against Poverty, union victories in hospitals and service trades may well have had as much economic impact in the ghetto as all OEO programs combined...
...Teamsters) are organizing in services that are rapidly expanding...
...ERENDAN SEXTON offs and short work weeks—as once again the Republican policy of fighting inflation by encouraging unemployment is applied...
...In its most extreme form, this hostility found expression in Daniel LeLeon's wistful effort to organize "Socialist Industrial Unions...
...The UFT rose in stature to meet them (as even this critic of some of its past activities will admit...
...2 "Black Powerlessness in Chicago," by Harold M. Baron, with Harriet Stulman, Richard Rothstein, and Renard Davis, Trans-action, November 1968...
...A number of UAW locals are led by Negroes...
...and with a few honorable exceptions, faculties are about as integrated as local unions of the Sheet Metal Workers Union...
...The black membership of the UAW and Teamsters (ALA) alone cannot be less than 750,000, and it is likely that another 2-2.5 million Negroes are members of unions affiliated with the AFL—CIO...
...Black and white workers need each other...
...Those close to the scene know, for example, that union power was central in the campaign to keep Haynsworth and Carswell off the Court...
...They have not seen that when a society closes down on the nonconforming social critic, it may throw the union agitator in jail next...
...Even where black workers formed clear majorities, the black racist candidates were defeated...
...Most of these universities had few Negro students, faculty members, or administrators...
...Yet almost half of all the Negro policy-makers were found in these areas137 out of 283...
...In a nation in which an Agnew pretends to have a political philosophy, a functional illiterate like Jerry Rubin may well strike some as a latter-day incarnation of Hegel's world spirit...
...Roosevelt University, the sole institution that had a number of Negroes at the top, was the newest...
...State, County and Municipal...
...They can buy time on radio and TV...
...Some choose to spin their wheels in generally vain efforts to stimulate black business and economic activity, sometimes in already bankrupt or marginal ghetto business...
...They suffer most from the lack of adequate public transportation...
...Life span is related to income...
...Most of the elected blacks won over DRUM opposition...
...Unions collect and dispense significant sums in political campaigns...
...It is, moreover, an unrecognized fact of American life that more black people belong to unions than to any other nonreligious organization...
...Their manners, taste, and style are mocked even by those who have tardily found merit in the workers' preferences for country music and rock, Johnny Cash, Laurel and Hardy, Durante —even Chaplin...
...Some observers have seen the conflict between intellectual and worker as the prime cause of recurrent schisms in labor and radical movements...
...Though still far from equality, unionized Negroes enjoy most of the gains won by whites: equal pay for equal work, seniority, paid vacations and holidays, hospital-medical insurance, pensions, representation on the job, etc...
...There are matters of principle at stake...
...To workers, the language of the professional priest-crafts seem designed to exclude them...
...Perhaps only the NAACP and the Urban League, among social-action organizations, have more blacks working BRENDAN SEXTON at the professional level...
...The maintenance of these freedoms is the precondition for the emergence of any mass movement of critical thought in this country, and therewith a precondition for any new politics...
...The following day he traveled to Atlanta to join Ralph Abernathy at the head of a parade protesting the shooting at Jackson State...
...and many know from experience that an encounter with an intellectual is likely to end in a humiliating put down...
...We have been able to claim this privilege by appealing to the liberties of speech, assembly, and teaching, prescribed by the Constitution...
...Paul Douglas is almost revered by unionists in Illinois...
...Through its pre-apprenticeship training programs, the A. Philip Randolph Institute has placed several hundred young Negroes in building-trades unions...
...and Harvard did not hurt JFK's standing with workers—on the contrary...
...The number of union members, while down as a percentage of the work force, has risen in absolute numbers to a record of nearly 18 million, and the fastest growing unions (Federal workers...
...In contrast, one of the largest UAW Chrysler locals, No...
...This assertion will be hotly denied by some radical intellectuals, but its validity is supported by my own experience and by the only study of black power I know of that included unions...
...I am not a dispassionate observer...
...and while two-fifths of the former AFL locals included no Negroes among their leaders, one-third had leaderships that were 15 percent or more Negro...
...Still, I am close enough to see real flaws in both—the record of racial exclusion in some unions, the Wallace, racist, and extreme law-and-order sentiments among a significant minority of workers, the hard-hat lunacies...
...In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king...
...Membership rosters of most craft unions are about as integrated as the staffs of various radical and liberal publications in which they are denounced...
...UAW statements condemning the shootings at Jackson State and the hard-hat demonstrations have likewise been ignored...
...They issue publications to their members...
...How many DISSENT readers have heard of the Labor Peace Assembly that rallied large numbers of trade unionists opposed to the war more than two years ago...
...The president, Bill Gilbert, who is also a member of the Chrysler National Negotiating Committee, leads a black caucus that has formed alliances with whites...
...More important, the best of the intellectuals are moved by an openness of spirit and mind, a feeling for libertarian and democratic traditions...
...M M ANY YOUNG NEGROES will continue to regard unions with hostility so long as antiunion superficialities remain in vogue among the left-leaning intellectuals who give ideological guidance at first or second hand to young activists...
...In the South and elsewhere, many Negroes have learned that more than secondary roles are open to them in unions...
...Hence attorneys, arbitrators, and some economists have been extremely influential in union circles...
...Our universities have been a privileged area for critical discourse in American society—the only such area...
...They're too pitiful—just looking out for their own guys...
...With the call to disruption, the American Right may well be satisfied: it now confronts a Left as cretinous as itself...
...The radicals who had dreamt of a revolutionary CIO as a vanguard of the working class, a cutting instrument in history's "inevitable" march to socialism, turned away in bitterness when the CIO opted for a practical but tough program of reform...
...Intellectuals bemoan the anti-intellectualism of workers and unionists, though workers often are simply giving back what they get...
...They have been, and in many places remain, proper objects of black anger...
...UNIONS AND THE BLACK POWER BROKERS As for "higher education," until the last year or two, the record of the universities has been shameful...
...Intellectuals will say "Unions are mostly wrong on Vietnam...
...Black people quite naturally wish to own and control institutions and enterprises within their own communities...
...Is it paranoid to believe, as I do, that the theoreticians of the Nixon administration (the Mitchell-Phillips coterie) hope to promote this division and to make political capital by isolating the organized white working class...
...To the possible amazement and consternation of young radicals who rallied against the UFT in the prolonged Ocean HillBrownsville dispute, black paraprofessionals in the schools, when recently offered the choice, chose the UFT as their bargaining representative...
...Though not yet equally represented in leadership, blacks have done better in the UAW than in any other national nonblack organization known to me...
...Among workers, this antagonism shows itself in hostility to Egg Heads and Long Hairs...
...Black workers need unions...
...Yet they never unfurled the banner of revolution, nor even of democratic socialism...
...MANY YOUNG BLACK ACTIVISTS, hearing from both the Left and the Right that unions are their main enemy, and believing what they hear, have joined the chorus of labor's critics...
...They are all men and women who came up through the ranks and survived many political battles...
...But many intellectuals seem no more perceptive than the more insensitive among union leaders...
...While the racial practices of workers and unions are conspicuously imperfect, they are somewhat less malevolent than those of most other institutions, including those where many liberals and radicals work...
...Isn't it clear that efforts to promote "black enterprise," even if successful beyond Roy Innis's fondest dream, can affect only a handful of black people...
...They know a good thing when they see it with their own eyes...
...The local leadership's willingness to call for, and ability to win, a strike vote among teachers in support of paraprofessional demands is certainly one of the bravest and most imaginative attempts at racial reconciliation that New York City has recently seen...
...Negroes, of course, lead a number of other UAW locals...
...Higher education is inaccessible to most of them...
...The Justice Department is contemptible, but its spokesmen have a right to be heard...
...They could contribute their knowledge of systems analysis and the uses and misuses of computers to unionists who wrestle with administrative problems that seem unmanageable...
...In Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and other cities where industrial unions are strong, it would no doubt be higher...
...I am, after all, inextricably tied in with their history and fate...
...Not only do Negroes live fewer years than whites, but workers live fewer years than the well-to-do...
...In job action and legislative chambers, they have spent significant sums and applied considerable muscle to advance the interests of the poor, the near-poor, and the various minorities who live on the margins of society...
...The Left and Left-leaning journals, for example, are likely to feature every real or imagined union failure on civil rights...
...They hire people: organizers, service representatives, professionals, secretaries, etc...
...The last statement Walter Reuther issued on behalf of the UAW—an attack on Nixon's Cambodian venture and the massacre at Kent State—was not mentioned in any important news media until after his death, and then only in the Chicago Sun Times...
...For these and other reasons, my own union has taken a walk from the AFL–CIO...
...This means power, social power...
...Committeemen and stewards are elected by plant district—trim shop, final assembly, tool room, foundry, etc.—and in many of these districts black workers are a majority...
...Industrial unions are probably the most racially integrated organizations we have—not necessarily because of inherent virtue, but because the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) saw from the beginning that it had to enlist black workers on more or less equal terms if workers were to be organized at all...
...They often influence the investment of vast pension and insurance reserves...
...That division, I believe, helps to create conflict between black and white workers, the poor and the nearlypoor...
...Hubert Humphrey is not injured by the unionists' awareness of his past academic associations...
...Unions played a similar key role in campaigns for reapportionment, tax reform, welfare improvement, expansion of education, improved public health, expanded medical research—but without attracting much attention or applause from the Left...
...Though generally disavowing explicit expectations that unions would become revolutionary vehicles, the Left nonetheless continually denounced unions for failing to raise revolutionary banners...
...Many unionists distrust intellectuals, ji BRENDAN SEXTON even as, paradoxically, many are far too respectful of the professor and the expert...
...Workers are more likely to suffer pulmonary disorders and other illnesses, and more likely to be afflicted with mental illness, but much less likely to be treated by a psychiatrist...
...Are black people represented beyond token numbers (if at all) on the staffs of the New York Review of Books, Commonweal, the Village Voice, New Republic, or the Nation...
...In recent months cooperation between the Left and the many unions that opposed ABM might have swung the one precious senatorial vote needed to defeat the Pentagon on that issue...
...The University of Illinois had one [policy-maker...
...And intellectuals need both workers and unions if they are to function creatively in a sane society...
...Some of the nation's largest housing developments have been built with such funds, as well as hospitals, clinics, resorts, and other community facilities...
...The UAW, the Teamsters, and other unions have taken strong stands against the war...
...Whites are included in the leadership of the local, even though an all-black slate could conceivably be elected...
...But the CIO leadership never made revolutionary claims...
...Martin Luther King went to his tragic death in one of these struggles, and Ralph Abernathy to jail in another...
...They do not enjoy professional status or tenure...
...James Haughton, organizer of the Harlem Unemployment Center, has led groups of black men to construction sites in the early morning, there to badger union stewards and construction foremen until some of his men are hired...
...Many white union workers, often alongside black workers, are employed in demeaning, dangerous, or health destroying occupations...
...Unions need the good will and interest of intellectuals...
...In the war between unionists and intel lectuals, I tend to be a double agent...
...Much of their ignorance may result from the failure of unions aggressively to publicize their work...
...In fact, the closer we get to people, the more faults and imper fections we see...
...2 That study, conducted for the Urban League in Chicago and Cook County, found that among black "policyMunicipal Workers Union—especially in its New York District 37—and Drug and Hospital Em ployees Local 1199 have campaigned for and sometimes won their support...
...In short, anti-intellectualism among workers, while unfortunate, is not wholly unjustified...
...Yet, in the past few years each has printed its quota of attacks on "racist" unions and workers without any reference to their own failures...
...They have access for eight hours each day to millions of workers on the job...
...With short and periodic lapses, the intellectual Left in the United States has always been hostile to unions...
...Though blacks must go into the streets to enter some unions, the struggle often reflects a more realistic assessment of the union potential than that made by many radicals and liberals...
...Aside from their primary power on the job, unions can lay their hands on strategic levers of social change...
...Under black influence, strategic and constructive investment of these funds could enrich life in more than one corner of the ghetto...
...Holyoke College, at which four officials of the Justice Department are scheduled to meet with students and faculty to discuss the Department's policies...
...Moreover, AFL–CIO unions have organized and thereby raised above poverty levels at least a couple of million workers...
...Even now, the militants are trying to batter down walls that virtually exclude them from some craft unions in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit and New York...
...Gilbert, a proudly selfconscious, intelligent, and militant black man, has eschewed overblown rhetoric in favor of straightforward assertion of his and his brothers' rights...
...Little is known, for example, about labor's lobbying activities on domestic issues in Washington, even though, from the Left view, it is almost always on the side of the angels...
...They might instead be creating centers of black power and influence inside already organized unions, or through the organization of black and brown workers at the margins of the economy...
...Even the hated AFL looks integrated compared to Chicago's universities, churches, and welfare groups where many of labor's most savage critics cluster...
...They enable the lowly among us—garbage workers, for instance—to force the powerful to consult with them, to negotiate the terms of their employment...
...It is difficult to make this statement without seeming too defensive in respect to workers and unions...
...And if the black employees of the new enterprises are not BRENDAN SEXTON organized, won't they suffer the same unrestrained exploitation as most workers employed in small business...
...Major social reforms have been won when the two groups found reason to cooperate—in support of FDR and JFK and opposition to Goldwater, for instance— and not much good has resulted when the two have fired away at each other while the Right shelled both with triumphant impartiality...
...The intellectuals' expectations, however, were probably never higher than they were for the CIO...
...Personally I don't know a single union leader who doesn't respect "people with brains...
...Several members of the shop committee, probably a somewhat more important group than the executive board, are Negroes...
...Unionists and intellectuals can find common ground in such programs, and in the process may come close enough to make mutual exchange of views and sentiments possible...
...Unionists would profit from exposure to such men, as in less prosperous times they once did...
...That's not a point to be passed over lightly...
...Union efforts to bring their activities to public attention sometimes run into what looks to us like a conspiracy of silence...
...The fact that almost all health indices show direct relationship between health and family income is another bit of American reality from which much of the intellectual community has sheltered itself...
...At Ford Local 600—UAW's largest—for example, many units (in size the approximate equivalent of locals) are led by blacks...
...Well-organized unions are inherently powerful, and their power is accessible to those blacks, browns, or whites who lead or influence them...
...I think some serious effort by young leftists to learn more about unions is clearly needed...
...They are certainly more integrated than the staff of the New York Times Sunday Magazine where "unions" (all unions, not just some of them) were recently described as the "principal barriers" standing in the way of black progress...
...3 In old age, they are still likely to live a threadbare existence...
...But—on what I believe is the more objective side—I have also seen blacks and whites work together more effectively in unions than anywhere else in our society, and I have seen blacks rise to a sense, and a state, of real power in unions...
...Some black militants have come into the unions, but as sworn enemies, bent on destruction...
...Though their representation in leadership is inadequate, Negroes have won more power and status in unions than in any other significant social institution...
...Labor's struggle "against the intellectual who would frame its programs and shape its policies," Perlman wrote, is of "equal importance to the struggle against employers...
...They can hire anyone they want...
...The young and the black, beginning with little or no knowledge of unions, have taken their cues from the Left intellectuals through whom so many of them get their first exposures to radical thought...
...They provide legal counsel for the victimized...
...Or to actions of the State, County and Municipal Workers, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and a large number of important local unions and leaders in opposition to the war...
...In three-fourths of the former CIO local unions, Negroes were found to be represented in leadership...
...Young radicals especially jumped on its bandwagon—and the Old Left (after some early hesitation and vacillation by the official Communist party) flocked to its support...
...They might be expected to see that a nation where workers are atomized and powerless, as they would be without strong unions, is not likely to provide a congenial setting for the serious social critic...
...On Free Speech — for Right and Leftt We excerpt a few paragraphs from a document that was distributed to students last October by Professor Norman Birnbaum of the Sociology Department at Amherst College...
...The record of many unions is a sad one, of course, if we judge by absolute standards...
...Unions have been blind to their identity of interest with the intellectual community, just as they have often been blind to the justified claims of black people...
...For the smart blacks want in...
...Two of the 22 members of the union's International Executive Board are black, as are the directors of some of the union's national departments...
...Unions and workers are relevant and will remain so for many decades to come...
...Further, The elected political offices and the elected trade union offices account for only 11 percent of all policy-making positions in Cook County...
...Much of the failure to break through is probably due to the contempt many union leaders have for the Left...
...Teachers...
...The staggering number of injured and killed at work is rising every year...
...That, also, is a key to factional bickering on the Left...
...But such control can have only a minimal and long-delayed effect on Negro life as a whole...
...They carry a disproportionately heavy and unfair share of the tax burden...
Vol. 18 • February 1971 • No. 1
