UNIONS: SOME FASHIONABLE FALLACIES ABOUT TRADE UNIONS

...Even retired workers wistfully turn up at the plant gates for weeks and sometimes months after they depart the payroll to savor the pleasure of being back near the job with their fellows...

...No union, however, could survive very long in any of the major industrial centers of the country if it let this kind of debate get into its delibera tions...

...No profound changes took place in the union, in fact, the situation complained about was exacerbated, which, of course, brings up another fashionable but false platitude that is applied to unions, namely that unions are less democratic than they once were, or that they can be democratic if they choose to be...

...Most often union sniping is counterpointed by exhortations to union leaders to democratize their organizations and to union members to take a positive responsibility for what goes on at their union headquarters...

...THE CRITICS OF UNIONS are very much like the pop bottle throwers at ball games...

...It is closer to the truth to say that the trade unions have been dragged reluctantly into a political labor movement than to credit them with a vanguard role...

...Gallantry there was on the part of a few, but militance by the masses there never was...

...The commitments of most well-to-do Republicans in the arts are revolutionary compared to what union leaders cherish...

...Unions not only argue this point of view in court when they are challenged under the provisions of the Taft-Hartley law, they acknowledge it in union political meetings where characteristically they endorse or oppose candidates on the basis of their positions on what are essentially shop issues: not how they stand on the recognition of China, but how they stand on the extension of the minimum wage, or how they voted on the area redevelopment proposal, or their stance on the Landrum-Griffin law...

...Practically all other workers in industry—auto workers, rubber workers, electrical workers, the distributive trades, agricultural laborers, miners, and the railroad workers— receive less than steelworkers...

...Protestant and Catholic union members, for example, have no cause for disagreement in the plant when they are discussing wage demands on the employer...

...What is certainly true, however, is that whether or not there is a grain of validity in the talk about work discontents, their importance is far down the scale toward insignificance when compared with the genuine grievances workers do have because of inadequacies of wages, hours, and conditions of employment, or when compared with the social injustice of the workers' situation in a society that is tilted to serve the appetites of a limited class of owners, rather than the needs of the community...

...Militance is difficult to measure...

...False, all false...

...Even the Communist unions, despite their resolutions, usually attempt no more...

...Strike statistics, however, which are a fair gauge of one aspect of militance tend to dissolve the preterite haze that surrounds the Roosevelt era...

...If stewards and committeemen know what they are talking about, and there is reason to believe they do, because their reports check with the observations of the psychiatrists who must deal professionally with unhappiness, the deep discontents of workers arise not from their relations with their machines, but from their associations with their wives, their children, their parents, their siblings or themselves...

...Wage-earners in the thirties, the majority of them, were much this side of a natural, uncorrupted, effer vescent class consciousness...

...He, they seemed to say, and not Walter Reuther, had been chosen to act for them politically...

...Often the trade unions, for very good reasons, have braked the movement toward a labor party or toward fundamental reform...

...From Victor Riesel to the upper reaches of the Ford Foundation, an orchestrated carping plucks on the anti-intellectualism of the unions, their bureaucratic rigidity, their lack of militance, and the inferior quality of union leaders, who are compared inferentially with the writing fellows...

...The mistake made by those observers who judge the officers of a trade union by the standards properly applied to the standard bearers of an articulated labor movement is to condemn journeyman technicians because they are not national leaders, shoemakers because they are not hide and leather chemists...

...THE RIDICULOUS and brutal smugness about the economically replete wageearner in the affluent society, furthermore, has led to a lot of slush about the worker and his discontents...

...What is significant is that the support of wage-earner voters enables the men and women who cross over from union to party to shrug off pressure from the union leadership and to operate under their own strategies, provided, of course, they stay inside the wider limits of the wage-earner oriented party program, that is, within the confines of the labor movement as distinct from the union movement...

...In summary, the literature about unions in the United States, depending on the point of view of particular authors has said: • unions are less democratic today than they once were, • unions have an obligation to be democratic that they are not discharging, • unions are less militant than they once were, • union leaders should lead the way to the new society, • unions have a central role in social change, • unions are less ideological today than they were in time past, • unions have exhausted their list of possible economic demands, • intellectuals no longer have the impact they once had on a labor movement which has grown antiintellectual, • unions have a special responsibility to the unhappy workers who perform meaningless tasks in the nation's work places...

...Working conditions, vacations, hours, job continuity, the retirement age, medical care for workers and their families, despite what unions have accomplished, still fall far short of ade quacy by any contemporary humane standard...

...But this association was a product of the prevailing joblessness...

...Union programs, vocabularies, arguments, even the picket sign slogans are tissued layers of fashionable radical cliches deposited in the union mentality by intellectuals over the last six generations...

...What is wrongly taken for granted by most of the people who impute some kind of misleadership to union officials is a central switching authority which could turn the society over that union leaders do not have, and which is not located in the unions in any event...

...Within unions, the criticism of rank and file leaders is not that the top officers are not showing enough imagination dreaming up new programs, but that they are exercising their imagination on affluent society projects when they might better concentrate on the grievance commonplaces, speedup, pay, layoffs, hours, and what appears to be the frustrating ineffectiveness of the appeals procedure...

...In its stead there is the quiet but determined acceptance of the union, and of the necessity to strike when the occasion arises, by almost every member in a union movement embracing sixteen million Americans...

...IN EVERY GENERATION of American life, trade unions as such have disavowed the radical demands of leaders from the non-union side of the labor movement...

...This, of course, is exactly what has happened in civil rights and what is developing in the emergence of a national attitude on education...

...It is not only that leadership on crucial national issues comes from outside the unions, but if unions are to survive it is essential that union leaders keep their places in the second and third rank...

...The insistent pressure on the leadership from the rank and file, is that the union get on with the problems in the shop...

...But what data exists seems to indicate that workers do like their jobs and that when they do not, it is not because the work lacks content but because their employers do not pay enough, or they are worked too hard, or too fast, or because they are pushed around, or because they think their rights are not recognized, or, according to Mayo, because they are not being paid attention to...

...Political parties have their justification in their ability to find practicable compromises of this sort of disagreement...

...Unions have come late, if at all, into the campaign for civil rights and civil liberties...

...Most often when they are unhappy as workers, it is because they have lost their jobs...

...Power is delegated irreversibly to control groups, which can never be removed from the driver's seats...

...The expectant focus on unions is clinically an example of the ideological blurring of the distinction between the trade unions and the labor movement...

...The labor boss complaint, which is a fraud, was never taken seriously so long as it was the cry of the National Association of Manufacturers alone...

...All this is set against an invocation of a time past, the thirties, when unions were, presumably, none of these things...

...It is, of course, true that thousands of unemployed college graduates or drop outs did picket, write leaflets, and demonstrate between 1929 and the Second World War, alongside hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers...

...But as for the work itself, the reports of the companies, of management society studies, of the General Motors Company, of the opinion researchers, all indicate employed workers like their jobs because of the pay, because they find the companionship of the work place congenial, because they take pride in what the job demands of them, be cause they identify with the company or the product...

...Latest, easiest and cheapest, since it is the least hazardous, intellectual fashion is to dissent against unions...

...Actually every verbal expression that comes out of American unions is an illustration of the statement by Lawrence Durrell that history is a fleshing up of a skeleton provided by writers...

...Trade unions are, and always have been, the organizations least committed to reform in the alliance which constitutes the labor movement...

...If a man or woman assumed what is advertised to be his organizational responsibilities he or she would have to live in a day of infinite duration and do nothing but check financial reports and attend caucuses and committee meetings...

...In unions even this check tends not to work, if there are no rival services...

...In the community, they conceivably could differ violently on a law regulating the dissemination of birth control information...

...What lends a meretricious conviction to the militant recall of the thirties was the desperation forced on a union cadre by employers who had not accepted unions...

...At the end of the 1920s when Selig Perlman wrote a final proof that in dustrial workers could not be organized and that it was the genius of the American labor movement to be nonpolitical, his thesis strengthened the convictions of the leaders of the American Federation of Labor long past the time when their own interests should have led them to abandon a judgment which was not only not so, but was, in addition, a senseless selfinjury...

...By a different criterion, that of measurable economic consequences in the society, there is no more effective instrument of democracy than unions, and the criticism of the union democracy becomes an empty falsehood...

...but characteristically few company actions produce as much militant protest as the effort to improve the factory milieu by relocating machines, or by injecting meaning (and additional responsibilities) into the operations...

...Labor shortages caused by two wars and the Negro people have made civil rights the battleground of reform...

...What agitates the people in the stands who urge workers to democratize their unions, or who lament the lost militance, is the presumption that unions are a central levering organization in the society...

...Historically, the trade unions, with some exceptions of course, have not produced the leaders of the labor movement, its programs, or its strategies...

...WHILE UNION MEMBERS do not write articles in order to demonstrate this thesis, they understand it in their guts...

...Everywhere in the world and not least in the United States, the trade unions are a large, and essential, but not the directing and decisive component in the labor movement, which, in England and the Scandinavian countries, is made up of the Labor Party (or the Social Democrats), the cooperatives, the radicals, the peace movement, the nut-and-date eaters, sometimes the anti-vivisectionists, people who make their opposition to capital punishment their life goal, inarticulate sympathizers, and the entire miscellany of human beings who, out of one generous human impulse or another, want to reconstruct the society in order to institutionalize a larger measure of justice or kindness...

...If lawyers, doctors, accountants, mathematicians, artists, writers, actors, playwrights, and dancers wished to picket and demonstrate today on the same terms, they could...

...Someone might suggest two trucks and a dual highway, which is encouraged in a sense by the NLRB, but in this situation most workers have discovered that a union with a very bad reputation is better than two unions using up their energies trying to strangle one another...

...Even the most intelligent union leaders fail to speak out on the degradation of TV, radio, films, and the printed media, except to lament their hostility to unions...

...But unions unfortunately do not play in the big leagues...

...Both adjurations have as much point —less actually—as a plea to come to Jesus...

...The sit downs were minority coups, under taken for the very good reason that there was not sufficient support of the union to shut a plant down by a secret strike ballot...

...There, once the majority sense of wage-earners, which means the nation substantially, is fixed on a particular goal, union leaders can play an important subaltern role in organizing support for the objective...

...It is arguable, indeed, that the impetus for the organization of the unions themselves came from outside the union movement...

...Censorship, birth control, the events in Guatemala and Cuba, the gradual evolution of Demo-Christian unions and politics evoke no expression of outrage from union leaders...

...What enabled the criticism to go was the impulse that pushed intellectuals with liberal reputations to take up the labor boss and bureaucrat cry...

...SIMILARLY, THE UNHAPPY comparison between the thirties that never were and the dolorous present we know, usually assigns to wilfully reactionary and anti-intellectual union leaders the responsibility for the loss of perceptiveness and virility among wage-earners...

...For the wage-earner, the union is as specialized as his insurance company, his church, his PTA, his doctor, his dentist...

...But there was nothing democratic about the CIO organizing committees...

...Yet, at this moment, union contributions to the NAACP or support for a federal effort to achieve genuine, equal education are still sufficiently in question that in some internationals, in some local unions, and in some areas union staff people try to keep these matters off the agenda...

...Despite the wage increase won in their last strike, steelworkers, the highest paid industrial employees in the country, still on the average in 1960 receive in annual wages slightly less than the Heller Committee of the University of California says is necessary to maintain a family of four in health and decency...

...What success unions have had in getting support for political programs has been achieved by showing that some shop problems can only be resolved at the legislature...

...The Teamsters, indeed, against the better judgment of union personnel, were expelled from the AFL-CIO...

...The problem is not that union leaders are hostile to intellectuals but that they are too gullible under the spell of non-participating advisors whose glibness is not matched by a continued on page 199 continued from page 106 competence in organizational problems...

...Factional warfare in the thirties did give off a sound like a democratic vibrato, but in the event what took place was a struggle involving two or sometimes three, or even more cliques while the rank and file by and large stayed home and read the score in the newspapers, if they bothered at all, as is the case in steel today...

...NovELS AND STORIES dealing essentially with moods in factories themselves tend to rebut the myth of the unhappy worker, even when they claim the factory discontent as their theme, in that work, as the plot develops, has nothing to do with the personal frustrations...

...G. Mennen Williams as governor of Michigan could and did act independently of the UAW and of the CIO, despite the fact that his majorities came out of these organizations, because wage-earners almost invariably supported him when he differed with the unions...

...Moreover, strikes today, in rubber, FBIN,, steel, in the chain stores, on the high ways, or among garbage collectors characteristically engage every person on the job, and are quietly unani mous...

...Teamsters stick with Jimmy Hoffa because there is no other truck going up the same highway...

...What you take out of the icebox, the orators have been repeating for at least a generation, depends on what you put into the ballot box...

...He does not accept union decisions on political questions as authoritative...

...After all, many large companies employ more Negroes than have found jobs on the staff of the AFL-CIO...

...The old-time democracy that preceded the bureaucratization of the labor movement is an aging radical's optical illusion diffracted through an imperfect memory of what happened twenty-five years ago...

...Most of these people, however, as their incomes and places in the community have risen, have lost the need or the desire to picket...

...The five to thirty thousand members of big industrial union locals, the lesser numbers in business agent locals, the tens and hundreds of thousands of members in national and international unions, with what is known now, cannot possibly conceive of a method of government that would enable the members to have a meaningful say in the operation of their union, and still have a union and a livelihood, any more than the Republican and Democratic parties have yet been able to construct any organizational form to permit individual Democrats or Republicans to exercise a one-man, one-vote control of their operations...

...There are still picket lines and demonstrations, and the chances are if they drove up in their Buicks or Jaguars, Volkswagens or station wagons their presence would still be welcomed...

...With almost five million workers unemployed, while the number and proportion of the unemployed rise steadily, this statement is the equivalent of the Republican claim that the Democratic charge of poverty in the country is a left-wing lie...

...Political parties are the alembics in which the separate interests of the specialized groups in a society are combined into a transcending generalization which reconciles the conflicting and opposed demands...

...The unhappiness of workers here is a gratuitous deduction from the work of Elton Mayo, the Mohammed of the industrial sociologists...

...No ONE CAN DENY that our trade unions serve a critical need for workers on the job, at the bargaining table, on payday, when people are hired and when they are laid off, when they get sick, and when they retire...

...AT THE SAME TIME partial recognition of the self-limiting role of unions has led, unfortunately to a generalization that is almost cruelly false, namely that the American unions, operating in an affluent society now at a terminal point in collective bargaining have won every possible legitimate demand and today are confronted by the need to exercise their imaginations to find new bargaining goals over on the other side of town, or out in the suburbs where every Jack is doing all right...

...Once they get elected to political office this independence becomes even more conspicuous...

...On the con trary, one reason democracy is irrelevant to unions is that there is a practical unanimity of view among members so long as they confront employers...

...The headquarters labor unions build are less imaginative and project fewer human aspirations than the monuments to the profitability of whisky or any modern bank...

...When they did show, it was not because there was a different attitude on the part of workers, or union leaders, toward intellectuals from that of today...

...If, under the smart of the criticism, union leaders actually began to conduct themselves like the leaders of a labor movement, the unions, which are the source of what power and importance they have, would dissolve underneath them...

...Once the union leaves the place of employment and moves out into the community, it is faced with a diversity of demands from many groups which it neither has the competence nor the power to resolve...

...One mnemonic affect which warms the democracy delusion is the impression that democracy did characterize the CIO in its heroic period...

...The mental trick by which intellectuals who were unemployed and alienated in the thirties, remember a happy youth when they shacked up politically with workers, arises from another kind of subjective deception...

...the book-readers themselves were in a different situation...

...Most of the windfill is not so, the historic assumptions are untrue, and the conclusions, when they are made, are mainly misapprehensions...

...Teamster members largely ignore Jimmy Hoffa's voting instructions just as they did Dave Beck's...

...If anything, union leaders react with greater hostility to collective bargaining by their subordinates than Tom Girdler in his green apple period...

...Today the need for a cornered courage in defense of the right to bargain collectively has largely passed...

...First, the so-called resistance of unions to the thoughts of the thinking men...

...On the job, UE is not different from IUE, contract negotiations and union activities have not changed among the fur workers because these wage-earners now belong to the AFL-CIO rather than to an unaffiliated Communist union...

...In effect they say if the unions only behaved as they should, if the union Ieaders were not fumbling, the DISSENT home team would win the revolutionary ball game, the transformation of society pennant, and the international socialist party world championship...

...No revolution, and no major social transformation has ever come out of a trade union...

...Meany before a congressional committee, Reuther before a national conference of social workers, McDonald in negotiations, the president of the retail clerks before his union convention, union lecturers before local union meetings: if they don't quote the social philosophers and scientists from Marx and Engels and Pope Leo XIII to Keyserling, Galbraith and Rostow, they at least parrot them...

...Constitutions were amended, codes of ethical practice drafted, boards of review established, Ombudsmen invoked...

...There are many more arguments for the irrelevance of democracy to unions, but they are unnecessary, for it is a sociological truism that workers are not only members of unions...

...The miners and John L. Lewis parted company on Roosevelt...

...Strikes like those in steel and auto and rubber today, in which the de cision is announced and the work stops and stays stopped without even the need to put a picket at the gate, were inconceivable...

...Given the unbroken, historic backwardness of the trade unions on practically every significant social issue except jobs, wages, and working conditions, any expectation that the unions are going to be in the vanguard of a break-out toward a new society must end in a sterile, apathetic immobility...

...Enabling workers to live a little bit better year by year, to have somewhat more security from negotiation to negotiation, shielding them from arbitrariness and bullying by the foreman and the company, are vital functions that only the union can perform, and which absorb almost all the resources of the union in manpower, comprehension, and money...

...In the lower echelons, this penchant to separate union assignments from political assignments produces a continuing and persistent irritation for COPE...

...Complaints that were ignored when they came from employers and the commercial press were credited even by union leaders when they began to appear in Commentary, the Harvard Business Review, the occasional papers of the Fund for the Republic and DISSENT...

...Tolerance of variance in people, except for larceny, drunkenness and card-playiug is about on the level of an Indiana Baptist church or a Brooklyn Catholic parish...

...Consider the prevailing fallacies and misconceptions current about unions...

...Union recommendations on education are as banal and reactionary as the ADA proposal for hundreds of thousands of merit scholarships...

...they also belong to PTAs, insurance companies, citizens' associations, political parties, lodges, veterans' organizations, patrotic societies, bowling leagues, the NAACP, and unfortunately, even to White Citizens Councils...

...There may somewhere be a record of a strike because of the discontents and the psychological emptiness of the work place, rather than on account of the traditional grievances...

...The thirties, any year of the thirties, had fewer strikes, both in terms of people involved, and strike incidents, than in recent years...

...Norbert Wiener, Veblen, and even C. P. Snow lard practically every union meeting called to order, they oil presentations at bargaining sessions and Congressional hearings, and they grease union briefs submitted in arbitration, over no matter how narrow or technical a grievance, just as they are the messianic lubricants in union newspapers...

...The rank and file and the leadership of the UAW, for example, were at odds on the treatment of Communists within the plant...

...Instead the unhappy workers, in reality, are shown as anguished people who very likely would have suffered in the same way (and do in other novels) if they were rentiers or owners of the plant, or advertising coypwriters, or novelists...

...If change comes in the future, as it has in the past, it will come from outside the trade unions, as the New Deal emerged from bankrupt or near-bankrupt farmers, the impoverished litle business people, the unemployed, and particularly from the vital leaven among the unemployed, the unhappy intellectuals and radicals...

...God knows, responsibility and sensitivity to the rank and file are a massive and tangible reality under Meany, Reuther, Carey, or even the current president of the Hodcarriers (partly on account of changes in the law) compared to what existed under John L. Lewis and Lee Pressman...

...The attribution of radicalism, when it has not been wishful self-deception, has come from the fact that the economic demands of the uinons, because they have been advanced in opposition to the establishment, have been misread as anti-establishmentarian...

...EVERYONE, OF COURSE, has his own definition of democracy, but if it is formal democracy the critics are talking about, i. e., the devices by which the people who belong to an organization can actually exercise control over it, then the criticism is irrelevant, for this control in unions, as in corporations, government, and any multimembered organization today, is impossible and will continue to be until a Thomas Edison of the social sciences comes along and invents mechanisms that do not yet exist...

...Union members who are elected as Democratic precinct captains or Democratic committeemen insist on behaving as Democrats and not as Steelworkers or Auto Workers or Plumbers, or Carpenters or Teamsters...

...About the only restraint on the ruling directorates, ultimately, is that the rank and file will slowly wander off and stop pushing, if the machine doesn't move in the right direction...

...What is suggested is that unions, having completed their economic tasks, should now examine the work place to reorganize jobs in order to provide psychological satisfaction for the proletariat...

...Racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice, except in the contract and the resolutions (which should not be underestimated) is considerably higher than among unaffiliated professional and middle-class people...