DEMOCRACY & UNION CONGLOMERATES
Benson, H. W.
At the corner of 15th Street and Union Square West, on June 1, James Morrissey and Ralph Ibrahim, two seamen, watched outside the Amalgamated Bank while bags of ballots were loaded from the...
...The Knights of Labor, which it supplanted, was a motley one-bigunion combination...
...under the reduced plan, they must wait until they are 55 years old regardless of service...
...NMU members had voted for national officers by mail during April and May...
...What to do about it...
...Both were reinstated by a federal court...
...When that election was over, Curran said this to his NMU National Council: • about the 5th of April they should either be going into the court to certify it or they should be going into the court and asking that it be set aside again...
...With fewer seamen around, the union began to organize non-seamen until by now the number of shoreside workers has probably grown to about one-third the total membership...
...When the NMU treasury was in trouble in 1968, a $100 tax was imposed on pensioners backed by a threat to cut off the benefits of those who would not pay...
...Drivers may already be a minority...
...It would not have been so easy to settle away the reformers' rights a second time...
...The combined total of seamen-pensioners and non-seamen shoreside workers is now probably larger than the number of active seamen...
...The tally is recorded by the presiding officer and sent to NMU headquarters, which announces the result...
...That was just after Ralph Ibrahim had complained to Secretary of Labor James Mitchell who went to court to void the 1960 NMU election, charging that the union had failed to assure a fair election...
...Up to then, seamen could retire at any age after 20 years' service...
...Are the officers who negotiate their contracts dependent upon them or upon someone else...
...Remaining" is precise in this connection...
...Our government employees in many areas shoreside are another example...
...surely their relative importance has declined...
...The NMU reformers remain preoccupied with seamen's wages, seamen's jobs, and seamen's beefs while the base of their union is being transformed...
...But there is also a collective bargaining question: should we demand the required level of payment from the employers, and strike if necessary...
...The international vetoed a council reorganization plan to give self-government to painters while its allies tried illegally to remove him from office, an effort blocked in federal court...
...Pensioners were given the right to vote at the union's convention in 1969 and could vote for the first time in 1973...
...In addition to those mentioned by Curran, Morrissey lists pocketbook workers, brassiere workers, laundry workers, and shoe workers— all with the right to vote for seamen's officers and representatives...
...At these branch meetings, in the scattered ports of the world, seamen who happen to be ashore vote by a count of hands, with only the scantiest notion of what is involved...
...Without the Landrum-Griffin Act, they would have been as helpless as all the dissidents who preceded them...
...So far, there have been no disciplinary moves against rebels stemming from the 1973 contest...
...And that is about perfect as a definition of a self-perpetuating oligarchy...
...He proposes that shoreside workers be organized into autonomous units of the NMU, electing their own officers and collective bargaining representatives...
...What happens to founding principles when printers join the Teamsters...
...Frank Schonfeld was elected secretary-treasurer in 1967, after a reform upsurge, only to discover that he had position but no authority...
...passenger fleet, the number of jobs dropped to 7,000...
...YEARS PASSED, and no government representatives ever appeared to check on the fulfillment of those promises...
...A prime example of this is our Panama Canal Zone membership...
...The reformers shook things up, but they could never have done it by themselves...
...Vincent's Hospital for $6 million...
...The decline of the merchant marine and the drastic drop in seafaring jobs cut deeply into NMU power and weakened its filiancial position...
...To reach that figure, it has become a conglomerate with an organizational roster that reads like the categories in an occupational 396 census: novelty workers, court reporters, printers, building superintendents, school administrators, lettuce -pickers, mailers, salesmen, and also—truckdrivers...
...In 1969, Morrissey got 7,317 to Wall's 13,507...
...By the time of the election in 1973, that figure had undoubtedly fallen below the 20,000 mark...
...And mere arithmetic understates the case...
...It is as though residents of Westchester County, New York, were to vote for the mayors of Newark and Atlanta...
...Six years had passed since Goldberg had whisked the whole thing away...
...Nonhousepainter crafts held the balance of power in the delegated District Council...
...After the 1966 election, Morrissey was dropped from membership on a contrived technicality, and another oppositionist, Gaston Guyon, was expelled on frame-up charges...
...Only those could become candidates who had already served as full-time staff members, which meant they could emerge only from within the officialdom itself...
...All national officers and agents are elected on a single ballot that goes to all members...
...On the other hand, the law would have been futile without the NMU reformers, since only their continuing pressure has kept government officials from remainitig obsequious to NMU officials...
...oil refinery workers become Seafarers...
...When they were based in a single major area, Detroit-Flint for auto and Akron for rubber, rival caucuses and independent conferences could easily reach the unions' main centers...
...In two contested elections, I. W. Abel was chosen president even though a majority of the basic steel votes were recorded against him...
...But how widespread...
...The Call, a tabloid published by the Morrissey reformers, said they were "trying to do for seamen what Arnold Miller and the Miners for Democracy did for miners...
...In the fifties, when the fund got started, pensioners on maximum got $55 a month...
...Is he right...
...The men aboard ships were clearly pleased that someone was saying these things...
...and a small public was watching...
...Before the suit could be resolved, the Democratic administration took office, and John Kennedy appointed Goldberg as secretary of labor...
...Seamen are being elbowed aside by an accidental assemblage of miscellaneous workers so that their collective bargaining structure is deformed...
...The persistent opposition vote is a symptom of rumbling dissatisfaction...
...DC 9 is a portent for union painters in the nation...
...High on the list in Morrissey's platform was: "Return the union to membership"—a demand with a familiar ring...
...On the matter of raising the retirement age, Morrissey wrote in the Call, "They've been able to get away with it because the membership is never allowed to participate in making decisions...
...Can it count on the support of most seamen...
...but now Morrissey, a hard man to subdue or silence, was busy...
...The officialdom, holding together variegated groups without special industry bonds, becomes the only cohesive force able to act, thereby drifting beyond the control of a scattered and diffuse membership...
...Not necessarily...
...There were four opposition candidates for president, including an ultra-radical who denounced Morrissey for appealing to the capitalist courts in defense of union democracy and who picketed Arnold Miller for supporting Morrissey...
...By 1973, with the decline in American-flag shipping and the demise of the U.S...
...The exercise of democratic rights becomes futile if the structure of the union leaves nothing to be decided...
...He went to court and a federal judge ordered several million dollars returned to the union treasury...
...Therefore they resent the fact that the NMU has accepted the challenge and moved forward to establish our union on a broader basis through shoreside organizing...
...Instead of recognizing that this is the very lifeblood of an organization—especially when other parts of the industry are afflicted with hard times— there are characters who act like anything done for other workers is taking something away from them...
...With no interest in painters' conditions, they generally went along with the international against Schonfeld...
...You now need 70 days' employment to earn a quarteryear pension credit instead of the previous 50...
...By this time, a less tractable secretary of labor had taken over, Willard Wirtz...
...There is an actuarial question: how much money is needed to maintain a given level of benefits...
...Ibrahim had been at it since 1960, when he ran for New York port agent against the official slate and then complained to the Labor Department that the election had been illegal (that, belonging more to history than to current events, was when James P. Mitchell served as secretary of labor under Eisenhower) . Joseph Curran, NMU president since its founding in 1937, retired in 1973...
...ballpark attendants become Painters...
...Wall was wise to play it cool in 1969, when times had changed somewhat...
...The NMU is changing...
...The NMU is a single national organization without locals...
...Curran's assistant, who had resigned with an estimated $100,000 in benefits, was directed to repay the money...
...Most of all, men like Morrissey and Ibrahim must be able to survive...
...Morrissey and Ibrahim failed as candidates, but they have had spectacular success as reformers...
...In Panama alone, there are perhaps 8,000 nonseamen with voting NMU books...
...He wants, according to his platform, "Agreements to be ratified by secret ballot after full discussion of contract terms in Pilot or Pilot supplement...
...but by now basic steelworkers are outnumbered by men in the fabricating plants...
...the reformers were in tune with a widespread mood...
...coal miners become Operating Engineers...
...it is like building a structure on sand dunes while the surf undercuts the foundation...
...most of its members are no longer seafarers...
...Morrissey's cry of outrage echoed so loud and wide that it moved George Meany, who conceded to reporter John Herling over TV that Curran's demand might be excessive...
...The administration inisists that the change was imperative because jobs had been reduced by two-thirds, with a consequent loss of income to the pension fund...
...Why rock the boat...
...In 1966, there were about 21,500 deep-sea jobs under NMU contract...
...Goldberg rose to the Supreme Court, went to the UN, ran for governor of New York, and passed into near oblivion without ever looking back on his NMU deal...
...These observations are not intended as a complaint...
...The administration still has a majority...
...Is Morrissey plugging a lost cause...
...To save jobs, he insists, it was necessary to limit retirement...
...But it does matter, critically, to union members...
...According to seamen, contracts are negotiated by the officers and submitted abruptly to branch meetings without much preliminary explanation...
...When one disease is conquered, the executives of a philanthropic institution can move over and campaign against another...
...There are some in our union who don't seem to understand this kind of basic trade union responsibility...
...Leaders without the zest or ability to extend their sphere find their unions decaying, like the Plasterers, or Furniture Workers and Upholsterers...
...The Steelworkers union broke through in basic steel...
...IN THE Painters union, an international officialdom uses miscellaneous crafts to resist democracy in District Council 9, New York...
...In 1961, the administration quietly rewarded its hired professional staff by adding them to the elected-officers pension plan, a plan financed by members' dues out of the union treasury...
...Unions are driven beyond their "normal" jurisdiction because they need strength...
...THE "SOMETHING" the seamen fear is being taken away is nothing less than their own union...
...The administration remains in power, but it is now subject to challenge...
...When Ibrahim ran in 1960, the NMU officialdom had already begun to seal itself off from the possibility of challenge...
...it is widely evident in the labor movement...
...Since then, their checks have increased steadily to $250...
...We have reason to believe that from the cooperation they got, especially from our Secretary-Treasurer who worked like hell with them and kept his cool all through it too, it would be all right...
...International President S. Frank Raftery, an image-conscious Ieader, wants to organize anything around...
...Of these about 4,000 voted in 1973, almost all for the administration...
...In six years, the union lost two-thirds of its seamen's jobs...
...By election time in 1973, there must have been close to 13,500 seamen on pensions...
...In 1973, the voters filled 71 posts, including 5 national officers, 28 port agents, and 38 patrolmen (equivalent to business agents...
...The opposition ticket, the Committee for NMU Democracy, ran Morrissey for president and Ibrahim for secretary-treasurer...
...Now that the industries are decentralized and the unions diversified, it becomes a major project to assemble a national grouping against, or even outside, the official structure...
...The reply is not simple...
...In 1973, Morissey got 5,338...
...A total of 22,613 votes were cast, Wall receiving 14,396 votes and Morrissey 5,338...
...In a resolution prepared for the 1969 convention, Morrissey wrote that permitting nonseamen to vote on seamen's officers "leads to swamping and flooding of elections through bloc voting by people who have neither connections with nor personal stake in shipboard conditions...
...He may have had a little difficulty withbalky Wirtz, but he got everything he needed from the Labor Department's local man, Benjamin Naumoff...
...Ibrahim in 1960, then Morrissey in 1966, then the reform ticket in 1969, and again in 1973—all forced a change in the constitutional structure...
...A year later, the number had dropped to 400...
...Assuming a laundry worker understands, can he possibly care...
...When Curran retired, he promptly applied for almost a million dollars in a combined lump-sum pension and severance payment, a claim that came at an awkward moment, just when seamen's pensions had been cut back and seamen were finding it hard to get jobs...
...With dues from a million members, a union can back up a long strike that would quickly bankrupt a union of 100,000...
...we can understand what he expected from friend Goldberg in 1960 and speculate on what he got...
...The Panama votes were not included in the 1966 tally...
...With Morrissey's encouragement, pensioners picketed the union, went to court, and defeated the tax...
...The drift of union leaders away from their original base is not peculiar to the NMU...
...In the ensuing clamor, Curran backtracked slightly and agreed to accept his pension in periodic installments instead of a single bonanza...
...When one industry is doing badly, it may not matter to union officials if they shift over to another...
...Morrissey wants "one man to a foc'sle...
...In the search for a substitute base of support the NMU administration has turned away from the sea...
...I would never have kept my cool, I`ll tell you...
...There is power in sheer numbers, but something is lost...
...What is a foc'sle anyway...
...Meanwhile the number of pensioners rose from 9,469 in 1968 to 12,618 in December 1971...
...Part of Morrissey's election challenge this year charges that voting books were issued illegally to many pensioners...
...but when he ran in 1966 he called attention to the broken promises...
...Without Morrissey, it would all have been forgotten...
...Curran's tough-guy stance takes you behind the scenes for a moment...
...At the corner of 15th Street and Union Square West, on June 1, James Morrissey and Ralph Ibrahim, two seamen, watched outside the Amalgamated Bank while bags of ballots were loaded from the vault onto a truck for delivery to the National Maritime Union headquarters where they were to be counted by the Honest Ballot Association...
...Analogous trends are evident almost everywhere, even in such democratic unions as the United Auto Workers and the United Rubber Workers...
...The issue became acute last year after the NMU pension fund was forced to cut back on benefits...
...Wall got 14,396...
...Morrissey had been bucking the Curran administration since 1966 when he ran for national secretary-treasurer, the union's second highest post...
...In this, he is not particularly building a painters union but rather using painters as a base to create a new and different kind of power...
...Morrissey's point, however, is that such decisions are removed from membership control and are made manipulatively by the officials...
...By June 5, when the ballots were tallied, it was clear they had not succeeded...
...some years ago, we expanded our organizing activities to shoreside fields," said Curran in his retirement message...
...The solution lies partly in assuring the right to dissent within the powerful structures, to proIN THE WORLD OF LABOR tect due process through public review boards...
...THE ANTIDOTE to bureaucracy is democracy...
...In any event, Wirtz intervened upon Morrissey's complaint, went to court, where the 1966 election was voided, and a rerun election was held under DOL supervisions in 1969...
...Their numerical weight inside the NMU has been dropping fast...
...In some ways it is bizarre...
...The Teamsters union, once a union of truckdrivers, now claims a membership of over 2 million...
...But, as events in the Painters union and the NMU have demonstrated, dissent is not enough...
...Membership control will remain a rallying cry in the NMU, and it means more than fair election of officers, though that, too...
...Goldberg hastened to settle the case out of court, within the family so to speak, agreeing to withdraw the suit on Curran's promise to run elections fairly in the future...
...Some of those Labor Department officials, the way they were running around there, I would have thrown them right out of the God-damned window, but Shannon Wall kept his cool...
...The American Federation of Labor, historians say, was based on the organization of workers into homogeneous unions in distinct crafts or industries...
...The place of shoreside workers in the NMU became one of the hot issues of the 1973 campaign...
...Back in December 1966, there were 28,400 active seamen available for those 21,500 jobs, By the end of 1971, the active seamen dropped to 20,474...
...Everyone was happy except Ibrahim, the original complainant, whom no one bothered to consult when the deal was consummated...
...Within the sprawling structures, for example, certain recognized collective bargaining units must be guaranteed the basic rights of self-government, like painters in the Painters union...
...they were included in 1969 and 1973...
...When Morrissey, then unknown, announced his first candidacy in 1966, letters came from ships' committees and individual seamen, some scrawled by hand, some laboriously typed, some with accompanying cash...
...Every voting member may vote on all 71 posts, so that the vote of a factory worker in Panama helps decide who will be port agent in New York or California...
...But that's a whole other story...
...There are also the growing ranks of contract service employees on Army, Navy, and Air Force bases...
...In any case, Morrissey had driven the point home: the officials were treating themselves royally while the maritime industry declined...
...To save money, the union is selling its showpiece National Headquarters Building at IN THE WORLD OF LABOR 36 Seventh Avenue, Manhattan, to St...
...In 1966, Morrissey got 5,875 votes to Wall's 11,205...
...In 1973 almost every voting and working member could at least run for top office...
...When Arthur Goldberg was IN THE WORLD OF LABOR secretary of labor, for example, he sloughed off the rights of NMU members to conciliate Curran...
...Morrissey stumbled over the facts in 1969 while scrutinizing union records...
...The rise in the administration vote this year reflects a change in the character of the electorate...
...If seamen had all the facts before the 394 contract was signed, they may have voted to accept it...
...While the courts have voided the NMU provisions that restricted candidacy for top office, any shrewd officialdom can devise more acceptable alternative restrictions...
...They can express gratitude now with their votes...
...By the time painters wake up, they may discover that, like seamen, they are a minority in their own union and control has somehow slipped away...
...Regardless of what first triggers rebellion, an opposition quickly reaches the problem of democracy: the officialdom and the union appear to have slipped out of control...
...During the next seven years, when he protested against neglect of the membership, when he demanded "enforce the contract, settle shipboard beefs promptly, eliminate unjust firings and backdoor shipping, [demand] dignity for seamen," when he called for parity with West Coast wages, there was a sympathetic response...
...In 1949-50, there were mass expulsions and men lost their union books without a trial...
...By the time Morrissey made his first run in 1966, fewer than 500 of the NMU's 50,000 members were even remotely eligible to run for top office...
...Morrissey's votes, it seems clear, come mostly from seamen who IN THE WORLD OF LABOR go to sea...
...The administration ticket was headed by Shannon Wall, former national secretary-treasurer...
...Curran explained, but after the recent agreement was signed, that to maintain the plan intact would have required so steep a levy on employers that their competitive position would have been undermined...
...but the severance pay he took in a single gulp...
...and there were 1,159 votes for three other minor presidential candidates...
...THE REFORMERS want a new method of ratifying contracts...
...In his farewell message Curran wrote, "The fact that the Deep Sea Pension Plan has stood up under the impact of loss of ships and jobs is a tribute to the soundness of the Fund and its administration...
Vol. 20 • September 1973 • No. 4
