A Word of Introduction
H., I.
This issue of DISSENT discusses the present condition of the American unions. There are general articles on new problems facing the labor movement and studies of individual unions focused on...
...Partly this is the result of a new insularity, a decay of human sympathies among intellectuals who have lost a large portion of their critical response to society...
...It may therefore be that the most useful articles in this issue are those providing simple facts—Lens on the troubles of small unions, Widick on life in an auto plant, Swados on the bleakness of the coal towns...
...gressive unions in the United States...
...old gadflys, especially from the left, are becoming scarce...
...Best of all would be a combination of the two...
...If nothing else, these should shock some people into an awareness of halfhidden realities...
...And when problems like recession, regional depressions, automation, structural changes in industry do arise, the unions are not prepared...
...And we learn from union friends that similar hardenings of at titude are noticeable in other industries...
...That the unions are not morally worse (usually better) than the business world with which they deal, seems true—but a pitiable defense, since it hardly then allows union leaders to present themselves as paladins of justice and defenders of the underdog...
...impersonal styles of bureaucratic procedure take over...
...They may not say this, but they have behaved as if momentarily advantageous bargaining positions were now built into the society, as if they had no real task but to float along on the drift of history...
...A certain amount of petty conniving probably infests many unions, as it infests many segments of business...
...Is the continued maintenance of war production the way to preserve jobs...
...As A. H. Raskin soberly reminds us in a recent article: The unions remain the only consistent voice in American society agitating for higher minimum wages, a comprehensive Federal health program, increased government outlays for housing, education, aid to depressed areas, and many other measures that go beyond the bread and butter of their own members...
...speaking of a moral crisis in the labor All one can say in regard to Jacobs' movement...
...Paul Jacobs, in his article on Hoffa, warns that democracy is no cure-all: even if freedom were established in continued on page 445 continued from page 374 the teamsters' union Hoffa might be win in a free election...
...Nor the political problems, with labor winning repeated "victories" at the polls only to see them turn into repeated drubbings in Congress...
...But, of course, the unions are also responsible for the dimming and tarnishing of their public image...
...People who feel obliged to "keep up" with Beckett and Jaspers feel no shame at being utterly ignorant about automobile workers...
...Such a notion is too simple...
...Each writer keeps returning to the fact that there is an uncertainty of purpose, a loss of vitality, a sapping of morale even in the best American unions—and the contrast implied is not to some abstract model proposed by socialists, but to the recent past of many unions themselves...
...Apparently the leaders of American business, hard-headed chaps that they are, still find more truth in the theory of class struggle than the leaders of American unionism...
...Does anyone care...
...The first kind of problem requires militancy, the second intelligence...
...anyone but some unions try to improve their conditions of work and life...
...In the city of New York, the country's commercial and cultural center, tens of thousands of Negroes and Puerto Ricans labor for shamefully low wages...
...Some unions, such as the teamsters, seem to have more than their share of gangsters, and the same can be said for a fringe of the business world...
...For the post-war harmony between business and the unions, always precarious, now appears to be reaching an end...
...Much is wrong with the unions, as writers like Marquart, Jacobs and others point out in the following pages...
...to those which anticipate a possible society of tomorrow (changes in the composition of the labor force, new modes of work, etc...
...but without the unions, the life of the workers would be far, far worse than it is...
...The heart of the matter is reached in the last paragraphs of Frank Marquart's article, where he writes that while the survival of unions per se seems beyond doubt, the future of a labor movement is an open question...
...it would be a pity if any more of them suc cumbed to the rhetoric of "social service" or "community responsibility...
...The range of problems, that is, extends from those which most readily lend themselves to analysis in "class" terms to those which are best understood in relation to the growth of a "mass" society...
...No easy remedy is available, and there is a danger of supposing that it is all merely the fault of "labor bureaucrats...
...Traditional modes of direct participation are disappearing...
...And, for that matter, so would the life of many of the rest of us...
...asumption that the members are al-Problems like these—they could be ways wise and virtuous, or the results piled up indefinitely—warrant our of democratic procedure always good...
...Anyone who can imagine the pressures coming from the members of these unions, will not merely denounce them...
...Yet one would on any simple-minded "rank and dearly like to see them put to this filism...
...the same might reelected...
...That the unions share their uncertainties with the rest of us, is also true—but this merely leaves all the more open to criticism their failure to engage in honest reflection, their effort to get by on a mixture of improvisation and bravado, and most important of all, their indifference to the need for educating union members to the problems ahead...
...Big Labor— as if the steel workers, individually or together, are on the same plane of power and possession as U.S...
...Still, is protectionism any answer to the economic difficulties of the twentieth century world...
...But for the union movement as a whole it can only mean an insidious inner stagnation, a creeping dry rot...
...The unions have been partially discredited in the public eye—another instance of how bread and butter issues are affected by social and moral questions...
...The illness is nothing less than a pervasive moral crisis in the labor movement...
...A major shift in attitude toward unions has occurred among American intellectuals, including many of liberal and left-wing opinion...
...Like so many other institutions in our society, unions are looked upon as a distant, impersonal they—an attitude that is, apparently, often shared by union members themselves...
...without it, not...
...Consider two instances: Recently the garment unions, disturbed by competition from low-wage countries, have urged the reinstitution of tarriff barriers...
...Is this the best we can expect from some of the more pro- plexing circumstances...
...Unions are no longer regarded with warmth, let alone a sense of identification...
...Then, suddenly panicked, union members demand the impossible, for they have not been educated as to the inherent and growing limitations of unionism in our society...
...And notl ing can solve this point—but it seems the essence of crisis except a resu gence of critical the matter—is that with democracy intelligence, social idealism, demoimprovement and growth remains cratic participation: n short, a growth possible...
...If, a few decades ago, American intellectuals often deluded themselves by contriving an image of the American worker as a potential revolutionary, today they are inclined to accept an equally false image of him as someone whose socio-economic problems have been solved and who is joining the universal scramble for material luxuries...
...It is easier for the building trade unions to do this than for the UAW or the textile workers...
...But that speculation, apart, there are other and more pragmatic motives for the business offensive...
...Running through most of the articles in this issue is a concern with the status of democracy in the unions...
...Unions have every reason to fight on bread and butter issues...
...But in our modern society, for the unions adequately to look after the material needs of their members, they must be able, in the long run, to see beyond the limitations of bargaining in their own industries...
...they have been allowed to suppose that the unions can do almost anything...
...In university diningrooms one can often hear intelligent men repeating facile notions about Big Business vs...
...that there has been a drying up and sometimes a brutal destruction of inner democracy...
...So the unions will again have to fight, in a decidedly hostile atmosphere, and under increasingly per • Under increasingly perplexing circumstances, because the range of problems facing them extends from those which liberals are accustomed to relegating to "the past" (union-busting, repressive legislation, etc...
...that few unions retain the kind of devoted militants who were largely responsible for the creation of the CIO...
...But there is surely enough here for thought and discussion...
...the general trend toward dissociation from social movements and institutions...
...Nor do the problems raised by our recurrent recessions...
...There are general articles on new problems facing the labor movement and studies of individual unions focused on particular problems: democracy in the steel union, racketeering in longshore, etc...
...For a time, some can...
...The leaders have not thought, the ranks have not been educated...
...Racketeering is, in a sense, the least of it...
...Comes a crisis, and this apathy can't be erased overnight...
...In one way or another, this is the underlying theme of every article in this issue...
...Naturally, the assumption that all is well leads to quiescence and apathy in the membership...
...The employers, adds Raskin, "have clearly determined to make their stand at this time, no matter what the costs in strikes or future ill-will may be...
...For racketeering is merely a gross sympton of a deeper illness, and it is the illness, not the sympton, that matters most...
...Perhaps so...
...that shamefully little has been done, in this era of prosperity, to organize or help the lowestpaid workers in the country, such as the textile and migratory farm workers...
...it need not depend on the test...
...To notice that all too many union leaders, living high off the hog, regard their unions as a kind of private possession, a benevolent barony...
...What would the UAW do if peace broke out...
...No pretense is made to completeness, and certain omissions—labor's role in politics, recent "labor reform" legislation— are obvious...
...Automation is eating away at the more progressive industrial unions...
...But the larger problem doesn't lend itself to simple trade union action...
...And now, for a complex of social and psychological reasons, the possible relaxation of the Cold War abroad may spark a renewal of class conflict at home...
...That it is hard for unions to avoid the corner-cutting, crudely materialistic ethic of the corporations, is equally true—but a sad lapse into a vulgar sort of social determinism...
...Steel...
...Hoffa might of consciousness...
...Qualified commentators agree that the steel strike is the result of a decision by the industry to beat back the union's power and regain for itself, as Raskin writes, "the primacy of the boss in all aspects of wage determination and internal plant management, thus restoring more or less the conditions that existed before the New Deal...
...Most unions and • their leaders have recently functioned on the assumption of social stability, indeed, almost on the assumption of social changelessness...
...In this sense, the problem of the unions is but a reflection of a general problem in our society: have we truly reached a point of stasis, where there is no longer much need for social idealism and moral striving...
...It is to acknowledge hard facts...
...And two UAW officials pleaded last spring for a continued high level of war production to be channelled to Michigan in order to provide jobs...
...At the moment, for example, the membership of the industrial unions is being reduced by automation...
...The drying up of democracy in the unions, as elsewhere, reflects major changes in our society: it reflects the appearance of a new kind of worker, radically different from the worker of a few decades ago...
...And they can't...
...A strong com-even be said of other, more important mitment to democracy need not rest dictators in this world...
...in short that the unions, instead of resisting the decline of consciousness and idealism which has afflicted our society these past few decades, have all too readily submitted themselves to it—to notice such things is not to become an enemy of labor...
...Something can be done in traditional union terms: a program for largescale worker retraining, for example...
...A criticism to be made of some unions is not that they are too narrowly concerned with material needs of their members, but that, in the complacency of the post-war years, they have not been concerned enough...
...and much more...
...The pressure of events may now force such a growth...
...intense interest among the members is, at best, sporadic...
...The "myth of the happy worker," as Harvey Swados once called it, has become part of the unexamined stock in the minds of people who in other respects are highly skeptical of the current cliches of our culture...
...Such facts are alarming, but not necessarily decisive...
Vol. 6 • September 1959 • No. 4
