Moral Dave Beck - Unethical Scapegoat

...Laws made out of Beck's defense of his actions, for example, by this rule would come out pious and sanctimonious just as the public demands of prisoners during strikes, mutinies, and jailbreaks have a psalm-like moral flavor...

...To the challenge from the companies that unions are labor boss conspiracies, they reply: unions are democratic, unions are responsible, unions in advancing their own good only support measures which work for the good of the community...

...When the New York Times, the day before the UAW convention opened, reported that David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers had told his staff that they would have to stop taking gifts of $100 and $500 bonds from employers, the IJAW staff and delegates, despite Monsignor Higgins, frizzled with selfrighteous amazement...

...Their intention was to do as much damage to the labor movements as they could get away with...

...The commitment of most CIO unions to Stevenson in advance of his nomination by the Democratic Party, while constitutionally proper, was in fact an undemocratic hypothecation of member resources, the union apparatus, and hundreds of thousands of dol Lars of dues and contributions...

...Their outrage in general applies only to the publicly advertised misdemeanors and to the culprits who have already been apprehended...

...The business man , and their agents in Congress are only tactically outraged by what Beck is supposed to have done...

...Essentially, infra-red and ultra-violet in this ethical spectrum depend on whether the dipping into the till is done decorously, modestly, and according to a set of bureaucratic rules...

...Beck and Hoffa are thus being prosecuted for the virtues of the auto workers, the rubber workers, the electrical workers, and, excluding Dave McDonald, the steel workers...

...NOT SINCE Richard Frankensteen, once a playboy vice-president of the union who has since made a comic and ineffective career in Detroit by attempting to exploit his former UAW connection in the interests of obscure employer ambitions, has any UAW staff member or officer revealed any interest in big-time flamboyance...

...The notorious narrow-minded social corruption of the buildingg trades unions, which is also a growth from arbitrary union rule, has done far more injury to the men in the building trades and to the community than can be matched by a dozen Johnny Dios...

...By these common measurements, then, the UAW and the Teamsters, Walter Reuther and Dave Beck, are polar opposites in morality...

...In passing through this ethical hole, all union leaders become brothers under the bureaucratic skin with the two Daves, Beck and McDonald...

...The lack of membership control, which make arbitrary decisions for Stevenson possible and allow the appro...

...Certainly George Meany, who came of age in the building trades unions in New York, and who has in the past poured out drinks with every AFL labor leader of any consequence in the state, knows enough to file charges against more union leaders than Dave Beck...

...In other unions, brothers, sons, daughters, nephews qualify for their jobs on blood lines, and given the consequences to the members, the lost opportunities, the bungled organizing drives, and the sweetheart agreements, the rank and file would be better off if they got good union administration and the old man cared for his relatives by taking small amounts out of the union treasury...

...a redress of the unbalance between rank and file control and bureaucratic manipulation...

...But this comes long after the need for the regulation became evident and far behind the public clamor for a Rule...

...An example of this is the attitude of the AFL-CIO leaders, the ones that speak out against corruption in the labor movement...

...Within the labor movement itself, within the best part and more moral precincts of the labor movement, the behavior of the actors leads to the conviction that even these moral paladins are more interested in ethics tactically than they are out of zeal for the good or the Godlike...

...Without seeking to benefit union members, Taft and Hartley, through their cynical manipulations, did produce some gain for wage-earners...

...While the presumptive fiction is that the delegates to the convention are the supreme legislative power in the organization, actually they have no glimmering of the true operations of the union, and as a consequence cannot legislate intelligently on anything that comes before them...

...and some provision for fairness in political contests similar to the one demanded by Walter Reuther in national elections...

...Outrage and disbelief are the immediate reactions of most people in and near the labor movement when Dave Beck's financial adventures are equated with convention rigging or hairtrigger resort to administrators in industrial unions...

...Moreover, the arbitrary appropriation of other people's money and resources even for purposes liberals and...

...No habitues of the Stork Club or its equivalents, no approximations of the working uniforms of the Teamster officials, the silk suits, the hand-sewn shirts, the custom-made shoes, and the fifteen-dollar ties...

...In writing a law that had to appear to be fair, they were in part compelled to write equities and sense into some parts of the legislation...

...Simple-minded first degree corruption, the ordinary money taint, and big shot manners are not a feature of the UAW anywhere...

...These changes will not insure democratic control of the labor movement, but they will make it more likely in the same way national elections would gain from the Reuther Five Dollar Bill, which would put a top limit of five dollars on the contribution by any one person to any one political campaign...

...Nor did any of the speeches indicate that any delegates had any grasp of the finances of the union which required a dues increase...

...No Cadillac or Continental drivers, no wives in mink coats, and no one maintaining ex pensive whores as mistresses...

...Each time, as is the rule throughout the union, the answer has been the same: all negotiations are by committee, never by individuals...

...It is this change in environmental regulations that has tripped up so many Eisenhower appointments...

...When there is any doubt, a massive oratorial assault is made on the convention by highly skilled professional rhetoricians which totally overwhelms any ripple of dissent and even the echo of a demand for true reports...

...What multiplies the consequences of true immorality in unions, this arbitrary rule, is that undiluted leader-control is accompanied by a bureaucratic indisposition among union leaders ever to admit their constituents to any more knowledge of what is going on than they already have...

...ETHICAL STANDARDS differ between the craft unions and the industrial unions to about the same degree that they change when you move from a private profit corporation to a government agency, from more or less loose free wheeling in pursuit of a buck to the schematic rules of a bureaucratic civil service...

...Even if the union leaders wished to give constituents all the requisite facts for an intelligent decision, which they, like every other bureaucrat, are unwilling to entrust to any lay group, the time of the convention itself does not give a delegate a chance to begin to understand the complexities he is supposed to control by his decisions...

...When the UAW bargains, negotiations are never in camera, never by phone, never private, never turn on the word of one man, and are never made man to man...

...ACTUALLY, A LARGER INJURY is done to the rank and file of the labor movement by denying them their democratic rights, even in benevolent good faith, than by mishandling the rather piddling amounts Beck is supposed to have fooled around with...

...Even if no money is stolen, the frustration of democracy in the union, the unwillingness to allow members to make the decisions that are theirs to make can do more injury, public and private, than any defalcation...

...northern Democrats applaud, while esthetically more attractive, is not morally different from the arbitrary appropriation of other people's money to send your son through college or to set him up as the Anheuser Busch distributor in the State of Washington...

...OUT OF THE TAFT-HARTLEY requirements came financial reports to union members, which are not adequate but which are an improvement on what went before...

...The Carpenters Union is a fief which was willed from father to son...

...Given union history until now, and presuming some kind of similar movement in the future, these changes will come, denounced by the labor brass, but like some features of the Taft-Hartley Law itself, to the advantage of the rank and file, in a way that outlines the most important fact in the present situation: that no matter which of the actors you look at in the present embroilment, not one of them is us honest or as moral as the large society...

...Perhaps not more ethical, perhaps not more moral, but certainly more etiquette, with a greater chance that the rank and file union member will have a better break in the same sense that rank and file wageearners get a better break in 1957 than they did in 1937 whether or not you argue that the society today is more moral than it was then...

...In the big auto corporations, many officers pay themselves bonuses through personally owned companies which deal with the parent concern...

...Yet what Monsignor Higgins said of the UAW, that it had no cause to be morally arrogant, is true, just as the observation by another Catholic priest at the UAW convention was equally true, that Dave Beck for all his dirty, guilty immorality is a martyred scapegoat for a corps of leaders in the labor movement only accidentally and irrelevantly better than he, if better at all...

...What is taboo at noon in Macy's window is fair sport in Room 1224 of the Hilton Hotel across the street at midnight, THUS, FOR THE DEMONSTRATION that Beck's morals are identical, except in fine points of etiquette, with those of the arbiters of corporation morality, take a look at Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, who is the embodiment in the business community of both the highest virtue and the greatest wisdom...

...Finally, the representatives patrol the convention floor to make sure that the vote goes the way it should...

...The recent debate at the UAW convention on the very modest dues increase (fifty cents a month) and the not unreasonable wage increase for the staff illustrates this...

...Senator Taft and Representative Hartley, from motives identical with most professional labor baiters and in the confusion of another headlined uproar over labor unions, pushed through their amendments to the Wagner Act...

...You could say that Harold Talbot and Dave Beck fell over the same wire...

...The chargeagainst him with its legal complications and its suggestion of entrapment did encourage the most political business men in the country, the Detroit Board of Commerce (Ford, GM, Chrysler, American Motors, Burroughs, Timken) to take over the Detroit newspapers for two days in a series of encomia, eulogies, testimonials and recommendations that suggested far greater betrayal than anyone had ever insinuated...

...But in the reality of miner's lives the arbitrary rule of the union which delayed union demands for fringe benefits many years, entailed costs in illness, in death, in time lost for lack of medical care, in the hardship among miners' families that are many magnitudes greater than the sum of Dave Beck's relatively cheap delinquencies...

...Immorality, in the sense which applies to any public servant, whether he is a union official or a government officer or an executive in a publicly held corporation, is a betrayal of trust, usually by choosing a course which is privately profitable when another course would have benefited the trusting constituency...

...Itemized, without exception, the nepotism, the appropriation of commissions, the capitalization of insider relations, are characteristic of most business enterprises...

...Everyone who has written on political ethics has noted the emergence of a h-gher public standard of ethical conduct generation by generation...

...Clearly, however, any prescription which deals with the greater offense, union totalitarianism, will also clean up the lesser perversion...

...Hoffa has fared better...

...Here the mechanisms of the Taft-Hartley Law are instructive...

...Money spent politically is more scrupulously segregated than earlier, and under the union shop rule, now repealed, workers had a minor protection against being sold and delivered by sweetheart agreements...

...Unfortunately for them, whatever rules they wrote had to fit constitutional criteria and had to conform, more or less, to their own profession of concern for union members...

...The public-spirited citizens, the spiritual and community leaders who came forward in 1946 to umpire the controversy between the UAW and GM, who made up the citizens' committee in the Chrysler strike in 1950, who advanced to testify on behalf of the guaranteed wage in 1955, and who were considering programs for the aged last year, are living testimonials to the morality of Walter Reuther and the UAW this year...

...What they want to put into the law is less than the labor movement needs, which is at least an enforceable assurance of honest elections...

...For example, what comes out of a convention of the IUE, or the UAW, and suffocatingly out of the Steelworkers, is the total helplessness of the rank and file delegates against the bureaucracy in the union...

...On other scales, too, the UAW is undefiled...

...Speaking at the 16th Convention of the United Automobile Workers Union in Atlantic City, Monsignor Higgins, who has agreed to serve on the public watchdog committee created by the UAW to advertise its integrity to the world, declared that organization had no reason to look down its collective nose self-righteously at the Becks and Hoffas in the labor movement...

...In the end, after the open debate has fired public opinion sufficiently, a law emerges, which, even though there are hidden gimmicks, trapdoors, loopholes, and fishhooks, is nevertheless written in terms of the professed morality and the universal pretense of good intentions, and not in accordance with the cynical reality on either side of the controversy...

...Not that these people are Charley McCarthys, moved into position to dress a IJAW window, or that there are interest-free funds for financially embarrassed UAW officers...

...In the process, the opportunities or the temptations for what might be considered unethical abuses will be cauterized in all unions, even in the financially and administratively honest industrial unions...

...Beck, part union man, part business man, is no worse than the lines that cross-bred him, except that attitudes toward business and union morality are equivalent to the attitudes toward sexual morality, in that they depend on whether the acts in question are publicly advertised or only privately known...

...nothing like this exists in business, and nothing like it exists in the labor movement...

...Now obviously if George Humphrey had tried to make off with this money by the primitive straw man dodges of Dave Beck he would certainly have gotten the George Whitney treatment-not for taking the money, but for swilling in the public till without taking his spoon out of his cup...

...Without answering the Monsignor directly, Walter Reuther has cast the same actors to play the same roles they spoke in successful UAW dramas of other seasons...

...The Secretary's administrative decisions affecting those companies in which he is financially interested probably cost the people of the United States more in taxes than the total take from all labor rackets in the country for the last dozen years...

...Now, far more sensitive to public political currents than Beck or Hoffa or Joe Ryan, they are racing President Eisenhower so they can get in first with their bill to regulate welfare funds, and perhaps to provide a more detailed accounting for union funds...

...The community, the society, the public, changes from year to year in ways that are comparable to the technology...

...He also supported the Republican Party in Michigan in the last two elections, as Beck did nationally, so that, it was implied, if anything had gone wrong, if Jimmy had really wandered past some dividing line, it was either a very small offense, or a highly technical violation, of the variety business men not infrequently encounter picking their way through the complexities of New Deal regulations...

...Stock purchase plans, participation in real estate syndicates, the deep involvement in tax avoidance-tax evasion (taking into account the all but invisible technical boundary which separates avoidance from evasion) , the dreamlike expense account arrangements, some or all these are marks of identity for any old-line, big time activist, whether his organization is listed on the Big Board or is -affiliated with the AFL-CIO...

...Then the staff, at .a caucus, gives the delegates the line which determines how they will vote...

...This dynamics of lawmaking, which applies as well to corporations, atomic energy, and public utilities, in a sense extrudes enactments whose substance is the simpleminded, but moral, public ideal instead of the sophisticated, amoral private experience...

...It is certainly predictable that the law which will eventually be passed as the result of the McClellan crucifixion of Dave Beck will require a responsibility and accountability in the operation of unions which will aproach that now required of many public agencies...

...Apparently as non-governmental agencies, with more or less quasigovernmental powers, touch on the lives of the people in the community, a public opinion will emerge that will insist on moral behavior among these evolving civil servants very much like that in the true civil service...

...What should be avoided, however, is quack surgery aimed at amputating Dave Beck, that does not get at the undemocratic source of the disease...

...Thus by blind irony, from a cast of characters, all more or less immoral, some much more, some much less, caught on the escalator of an increasingly exacting society, there seems to be emerging a labor movement whose behavior will more nearly approach its pretensions...

...When union officers make speeches, or when their publicity directors get out press releases, they come up against the limiting compulsions of the publicly advertised morality just as Senators Goldwater and Curtis do...

...Arbitrary power in these situations is far more immoral and far more dangerous than anything a devoted husband like Dave Beck could possibly dream up...

...On the union side of the railroad tracks, Beck is not the only head of a family who looks after his own...

...At the same time the public naivete which made Beck's sacrifice so successful an attack on the labor movement has allowed the mortgage companies and the banks which were associates of Beck in his mortgage clipping to escape public blame altogether...

...BECK HAS BEEN MADE into so powerfully affecting a symbol of trade union evil that business men who might sympathize with him cannot possibly intervene to save him...

...Stealing, embezzlement, cutting commissions, nepotism, payroll padding, inflated expense accounts, favored company relations !are obvious examples of this kind of immorality...

...Concisely, Beck and Hoffa are being charged with crimes by a business community which does not believe that what they have done is criminal in order to gain a tactical advantage against that part of the labor movement which is not corrupt at all in these terms...

...The tax writeoffs for two of the companies, Iron Ore of Canada and National Steel, exceeded $100 million with the immediate private gain to Secretary Humphrey greater than the entire treasuries of most unions in the country...

...To them, this, which the ILGWU and the Times seemed to regard as innocent play between company and union, was unspeakably obscene...

...When this kind of democratic political accounting for every action does come, or is offered before it comes, union leaders will cry disaster, will scream out against the imposition of chains...

...priation of cash to his campaign without any true public accounting, is also the context in which corruption takes shape...

...but to almost anyone who has been in the middle of the disorder of union conventions, these new rules will be real gains, and will make the Becks and Hoffas as obsolete in the labor movement as Clive of India is in the British civil service...

...Daniel Webster's money manners were rather worse than Congressman May's, but Congressman May went to jail, while Daniel Webster is a national hero...

...There, two connected and modest pieces of legislation were discussed on the floor of the convention in such a way that it was obvious that not one of the rank and file delegates had any notion of what the pay of the staff was, or what it would be if the legislation passed...

...The public cry, even though it is largely synthetic at the moment, seems certainly to be near requiring a bureaucratic punctiliousness from union leaders...

...Granting the formal integrity of men like Carey and Reuther and Buckmaster, it is naive to believe that administrative honesty survives when it depends entirely on the presence of honest men...

...Jimmy Hoffa, these people said at length, whatever the charges against him, was a man whose word was better than his bond, he was a man of understanding, sympathy, consideration, and the Lord knows what-for business men, of course...

...They are not at all concerned with morality or the application of some kind of antisepsis to corruption, while they are very hot for some kind of law that would sterilize whatever in the labor movement is not corrupted, its effectiveness on behalf of wage-earners and its increasing mastery of the methods of political party operation...

...Now there is nothing in the manner of life, in the speech, in the beliefs, in the commitments, or in the behavior of the leaders of the UAW or the Rubber Workers, or the IUE or most of the other industrial unions to indicate that the Beck taint is on them, but the bureaucracy of these unions shares with the Becks and the Hoffas the same absolute power over union affairs, even though their power is exercised in a biennial democratic charade...

...As a consequence at union conventions, the democratic ones, that is, the staff prepares the reports which give the delegates the raw material of union cliches to mouth in debate...

...The point is, unethical behavior does not begin with stealing money, or stamps, or watermelons, and it doesn't end when a union leader says may my right hand wither before I take a bribe again...

...Union decisions can move plants from one community to another, speed or delay technological advances, elect one or many political candidates over others, determine the kind and amount of taxes, and powerfully shape the lives of many people in hundreds of other ways...

...This kind of morality is so rigid that with very minor exceptions, card playing is hardly allowed at UAW meetings, and drinking, which is increasingly discouraged, is at worst decorously social where it is even allowed...

...The recommendation Jimmy Hoffa has from the companies he deals with, that his word is as good as his bond, has never been written for Walter Reuther by any company official, because here, as in the question of money, the UAW is impeccably and piously honest, and no UAW officer or staff member would dream of giving the union's word away as his own any more than he would think to give the union's money away as his own...

...Here, too, the propriety of Beck's behavior by mortgage banker standards is revealed not alone by the fact that these financial agencies were his accomplices, but by the active competition among the six percenters to get Beck's business...

...While the McClellan Committee re-enacted the maneuvers Dave Beck used to provide for his family: the chiselling, commissions, sharing kickbacks, and exactions that altogether ran from $2,500 to :a doubtful $300,000, the Congres sional Record (May 8, 1957, page 5801) told how the Secretary of the Treasury authorized fast tax writeoffs totaling more than $1 billion for 29 companies in which he had a personal interest...

...Even a decision in the labor movement for which most liberals hailed union leaders, reveals a ripe color and taint that suggest horror and the ten commandments are the wrong rules for the assessment of union corruption...

...Of course, the legislated mores of the civil service are far more puritanical than the rules anywhere else in the economy, the scrupulous accounting for all expenditures, the insistence of prior authorization for spending, the more or less open access citizens have, through hearings and the press and public documents, to all the facts of bureaucratic life...

...Hundreds of times in his career, as in the union life of every UAW leader, Walter Reuther has been asked to meet privately with this or that company official, including top shots in the Kohler Company, al^ wrays with the suggestion that this thing could be settled if it were possible to get together alone...

...By the Lutheran criteria, the UAW is as unblemished in its morality as some of the widely advertised Bakers and Teamsters and Jewelry workers are blemished...

...COMPLETELY HONEST UNION LEADERS with arbitrary powers can and do make decisions in which the rank and file have no say that affect their wages in amounts that may run into million of dollars a year, that may affect their pensions, their health, their welfare benefits, their working conditions, their hours of employment...

...Yet not only is there no clamor that the Secretary be challenged to invoke the Fifth Amendment, but the facts with trifling exceptions are not even reported in the newspaper...