Porkchppper Passage

...This is, on the job...

...WITHOUT TAKING a census, it is probably true that union staff people are: a) mostly middle-aged and older Irish Catholics b) next in number but far down Protestants no more than two generations from a farm, and most likely a southern farm...

...Its anthems still sing of the outcast and starving...

...Job assignments are misty and tend to overlap, with the manpower so in excess of effective utilization most of the time, that there is competition for work...

...The next generation of union em ployees may have better manners and live lives that correspond closer to the images their incomes generate...

...They are versatile, organizational technicians who can write effective leaflets, make speeches, wheel deals, organize a meeting, or run a caucus whenever the need arises, out of their hats if necessary...

...Actually as nearly as anyone could work out, there are about a thousand union staff workers of whom no more than fifty are Jews...

...Those who last out the first strangeness and deflorescence, while not qualified to take part in the most intimate bonhommeries, are nevertheless accepted and respected...

...There is a steady move ment from labor union payrolls to public relations agencies, labor re lations firms, private law firms, to governments, to printing firms that sell to unions, to universities and to the other side of the bargaining table...

...A very few intellectuals, it is true, stay on as job holders within a cynical invisible retirement, but even these people grant the undoubted competence of the average business agent, grand lodge or international representative...

...They made their porkchops with expense account clusters in a series of trials as exacting as any professional political contest...

...The sad fact is that most union staff people think they are underpaid, even though they better than double the take-home of their rank and file, not counting what comes free in expense account living...

...THE WORKING CLASS origins, prejudices, and virtues of most of the staff people in the labor movement make life difficult for intellectuals who come out of universities to work in the labor movement...

...The labor editor steamed for 1500 words on the bourbon-like snobs who could speak the view that union officials were not as good as company officials and not every bit as qualified to sleep between the same silk sheets in the same supercilious circumstances...

...In fact, to illustrate how great the difference is, wives are relatively without importance in most unions and tend to be left home most of the time, even during conventions and junkets...

...bile, his house full of appliances, his children at college, his rather generous retirement plan, and his regular investments in a mutual fund...

...In state legislatures where union people have won places, it has been the unvarying observation that they have brought the old average, based on lawyers and business men and retired farmers, up to a creditable show...

...In each case, their neighbors will look more like them than their colleagues in the labor movement...

...Except for the common view of their wage, their standard economic circumstance, and their universal acceptance of the present organiza tion of the American society, in fact, if not in trade union speeches, how ever, there is no category of union people which corresponds to the or ganization man in the large corpora tion and in the company suburbs...

...But the disparity between preachment and practice is not even hypocritical, it numbly identifies the views of union staff members with those of their neighbors in the middle income communities where they live...

...you're right, boss...

...In this circumstance, business men behave in the same way...

...In part, this reflects the fact that most of the people who now work for unions came out of the rougher proletarian society of a generation ago, before high schools were universal, before conventional manners became general in the city...

...In any state of the union, for example, the union people in politics tower alongside their nonunion confreres...

...THERE Is NOTHING wrong or immoral about the porkchop attitude, it is the view of most people who work on jobs where they can see what life is like on the next rung...

...Universities that teach students conventional manners standardize the men and women who seek careers in the companies...

...The growing integration of the labor movement into the administrative community politically, economically, socially, is already reducing the privacy which has up until now characterized the lives of union staff people off their jobs...

...But curiously, these people do redeem themselves occasionally, apart from their reliability on the job...

...So long as a staff member works with reasonable responsibility on his job, roistering, carousing, poker playing, boisterousness, obscenity, all the expressions of male animality which a polite corporation society tries to discourage, are accepted...

...It is impossible to confuse him with a UAW staff member out of an Italian local in New Jersey, or a French Canadian out of a textile local in Maine, or a Negro who has made the leap to a union payroll out of a packing-house in Chicago...

...a significant but small number of the Protestants are ex-clergymen c) then about an equal number of people of Italian or Slavic descent, Catholic too d) Jews, chiefly hired as lawyers, research people, or writers e) Negroes,—and finally f) women...

...The increasing responsibilities of unions in the society, the steady increase of personnel, for both valid reasons and in response to Parkinson's law, staff organization, accounting demands, and the die-like pressure of agencies like the McClellan Committee are slowly but inevitably transforming the labor movement into a civil service...

...Talk in private revolves about staff claims to a higher wage more often than it is concerned with the unpleasant situation of the people who pay dues...

...At this moment, however, the labor movement is a sanctuary where you can still find the non-organizational man, the 19th century entrepre neurial leader, surrounded by his workmen, all hired personally, all on a first-name basis with the patron, and not one of whom dares answer the old man back...

...Girl friends are not uncommon, and relations with them incur no penalties or even expressions of disapproval...

...A Hoosier factory worker who gets a job on the staff of IUE from an Evansville factory is still a Hoosier farm boy, talks like one, dresses like one and eats like one, even after he goes on the union payroll...

...Each one despite TV, radio, and mass produced clothes advertised in national magazines bears the stamp of his origin, at least this year...

...An incredibly offensive article which appeared last year in the AFL-CIO News puts the situation on the big screen in technicolor...

...The newest appointinents to union staffs even now are beginning to appear in the latest model, usually with some college training, usually genteel, usually with the evidences of national and working class origins polished off...

...Jerks ply their trades in all kinds of professions, but this piece was printed in the AFL-CIO News on the editorial page...

...Written by a labor editor who now runs a public relations firm that handles only labor organization accounts, it reviles a business paper for critizing union leaders who stay at the best hotels, eat in the credit card restaurants, and have developed tastes for expensive consumer goods and services...

...Union staff people, with their own union accents and a characteristic emphasis on first names and nicknames work in a "yes, boss...

...Off the job, he is his own man and subject to none of the universal pressures which harass husbands and wives in organizational families, lodged in the otherdirected rabbit warrens of the new bureaucracy...

...Now, it is obvious that the youthful militant fought on the picket lines not to change the society but at most to change places in the society, and sometimes simply because he was unemployed and flatbroke with nothing better to do...

...most of the pretenders were never radicals, instead were honorable militants, brave decent bullies on an organizing drive, and intensely loyal to the union, which was administered like a gang, company and boss haters in the same way tough teen-agers are cop-haters, but with few exceptions, never radical in the sense that they wanted to plough up the old growths in the society and begin again...

...The New Yorker cartoon which asked "Has anyone ever thought of making Walter Reuther a vice-presi dent at a hundred grand a year" was wrong about the UAW president, but as exact as a mathematical for mula about most union officers, rep resentatives, writers, research people, and lawyers...

...pretty good, boss" universe...

...Unions still are informal societies, whose authority rests on the charisma of a gang leader, or on what amounts to the same thing, a political boss...

...What is true of Washington is approximately true of the country: Union staff people and Jews in the labor movement tend to be highly visible so that there seem to be many more of them than there actually are...

...One reason is that the labor move ment administration is still unor ganized, that is, has not become the ordered, regulated, classified bureauc racy which is the nature of most big companies and government agencies...

...Put another way, the union organization man is not an organization man because there is no organization to belong to...

...Wages, despite half hearted gestures toward standardization, are set by personal negotiations and depend as much on cronyism as anything else, though despite this fact they are surprisingly clustered around a democratic eight or nine thousand dollars a year, not including expenses...

...On the contrary, there is a glad-you-made-it gaiety, usually a farewell party, and a goingaway present, sometimes even an engraved watch, bought with a collection to which everyone gives generously...

...They, on their side, come finally to a recogni tion of the genuine intellectual capacities and wisdom of the average union staff person...

...Almost invariably to win their places on the staff the representatives had to survive a brutal, rough and tumble competition which demanded sharpness, intelligence and very fast judgment...

...Even when he moves out into the Democratic Party in his community, as he most often does, he will resemble the intligenes in the community, the characteristic small business men, or successfulon-a-limited-scale insurance man, or the enlightened bar owner more than he will resemble a transcontinental class...

...Not that there was no expression of radical moral disapprobation...

...Middleaged or older and wind-broken, he continues to mouth the old picket line agitational formulations, as if they expressed his views and grievances, despite his Pontiac, Buick, Oldsmo...

...This desire to better oneself is supposed to be a right every American has, but, of course, the labor movement rhetoric which is organized around the vocabulary of 19th century socialism, insists on the contrary...

...there was not even a gesture of disengage...

...ment to indicate that if no one felt particularly guilty about his wage and working condition at least there was democratic conscience enough to twinge over an ostentatious display of privileged status...

...However you judge them they come out very well, they hold their own in bargaining sessions with the wellpaid and well-trained company representatives, in politics they do better than hold their own in the fastest leagues against lawyers, college professors, business men and the rest of those who increasingly try their hands at political ambitions...

...Off the job these ethnic, religious and racial affiliations play as important a role in determining the social character and behavior profile of a union employee as his identification with the union...

...No one protested, no one was sufficiently embarrassed to become public about the uneasiness...

...Despite the recent recognition of a staff union in the AFL-CIO, most staff members of the various international unions benefit from none of the protecting regulations which govern the life of a company or government white collar worker, and none of the contractual guarantees which secure hourly rated workers against the whimsies of supervision...

...Frequently, the conventionally learned ones mistake differences in manners, speaking habits, and interests for differences in intelligence...

...Not long ago in Washington someone wanted to know how many union staff people worked in the city and whether an accurate estimate could be made of the number of Jews with union staff jobs in the community...

...In the middle of a staff bitching session, for example, a man will say: Nothing is too good for the workers—representatives, intending the double irony...

...But the convention behavior of union employees also arises from the character of their work, the fact that they travel a great deal, live much in hotels, are very often men away from home...

...he is, in an unfortunate but completely unreprehensible way, a gang member in a personal association with a gang leader...

...The recent departures have not been featured by conversions, psychic traumas, or bitterness...

...Again their opinions will be closer to those of their friends in their church or lodge than to those of people on similar jobs in a different union in a different part of the country...

...Similarly, despite the advertised contention, there are enormously fewer racketeers and crooks, and hardly a smidgeon of the radicals in the labor movement that everyone takes for granted—though in this there is an excuse, for a surprising number of sagging middle aged limpets around union offices insist truculently that they are still revolutionary radicals, a generation after their political glands have entirely shrivelled...

...Many do hang on, however, despite their sense of presence in a foreign country and their uneasiness in the midst of the staff stiffness toward longhairs, a word, by the way, which with New Yorker, Brooklyn, CCNY, and easterner very often is a synonym for Jew...

...Continuing public scrutiny will require the relaxed masculine behavior of old times to be put aside...

...the mortality of marriages among business men who move to Washington has been noted in the Washington press: like union staff in a comparable new situation, they shed old wives for younger secretaries...

...A Bell Telephone or GE man or a bank representative on the Junior Chamber of Commerce is almost interchangeable with any of his similars from San Diego to New Haven, but a New York building trades business agent could never be mistaken for a Rubber Worker staff person in western Oklahoma, and only a Tibetan would confuse either one of these men with an Amalgamated Clothing Worker staff person out of Philadelphia...

...Forces are already operating to shape union staff people in the same kind of matrix as the corporation types in other institutions...

...Union staff people do not go through such a patterning process...

...Walter Reuther's antiseptic private life will likely become the model for the porkchoppers' deportment in the bureaucratic era ahead...

...For about this matter, there can be no argument...

...Because they tend to undervalue the skills and mental attitudes needed for leadership in an informal society and put too high a price on familiarity with books and formal knowledge, first encounters produce misunderstandings which very often are fatal for the tenure of the intellectuals...

...The first guesses offered were that there must be about five thousand labor staff people in Washington, and of them, maybe half Jews...

...It isn't even that the radicalism is a genuine memory...