The Teamsters and Labor's Future

...It becomes increasingly apparent that, practically unopposed, he will be the next head of this great union...

...But this brings us to the second basic presupposition in dealing with the problems made vivid by the Teamsters' low standards...

...It is significant that Beck and Hoffa have used their original services to what were then "poor" teamsters as a source of prestige and, therefore, power, much as the Communist leaders in Russia used the memory of imprisonment in Siberia as the source of their prestige...

...One additional problem of union democracy must be mentioned, which cannot be solved by a constitutional separation of powers...

...Hoffa has a long record of partnership with gangsters, including the nefarious Johnny Dio...

...But the exercise of power requires more than the inner restraints of a social tradition or a moral mood...

...This theory was partly based on illusion...

...If labor had not grown to become a fairly even match with big business, the injustices of early industrialism, which gave the Marxist creed such a plausibility in the latter part of the 19th century, would have also made for the realization of the gloomy Marxist prophecies of catastrophe...

...The Teamsters seemed not to be bothered by Hoffa's standards any more than they were by Beck's, and they regard Hoffa as superior to Beck because he did not steal from the widow of a labor friend, which was obviously Beck's crowning offense in the Teamster moral code...

...We have outgrown the old liberal society in which government supposedly was the only power and it dealt with individuals...

...In both cases extreme partisanship is one of the causes of moral decay...

...This matter is important, because in Western democracy many nations have not benefited from the explicit "separation of powers" of our Constitution...

...It is the problem of '"one-party" government...

...Even in Adam Smith's day the big corporation loomed, and Smith rightly suspected that it did not conform to his picture of a self-regulating market economy of fairly matched individual enterprises...

...That presupposition is that both big business and big labor have acquired semi-governmental functions...

...It also reveals that trade unionism as a whole, despite the laudable efforts of George Meany, Jim Carey, Walter Reulher and Dave Dubinsky to eliminate corruption as they previously eliminated Communism, faces a more fundamental problem than the low standards of morals in some unions, the Teamsters being the most conspicuous example...

...We cannot merely rely on the general relaxation of the mood of partisanship, just as labor was wrong in relying too much upon the mood of "idealism" which had presumably actuated the first exertions of labor leaders in the hazardous days of organization but did not guarantee their probity in the easier days of power...

...The Western democracies righted their imbalances and regained new' health by many strategies of justice...

...The Dave Becks, Jimmy Hoffas and their like may have performed a negative function in proving that the labor movement may have to re-examine its constitutional checks upon human nature...

...For, contrary to the old liberal theory, democracies must and do have oligarchies which wield actual power and whose power must be made responsible...

...He is undoubtedly abler and even more ambitious than Dave Beck...

...There is, in short, no balance of power in many unions...

...We only know that a powerful portion of the oligarchy has declared for him and that, consequently, his election is almost a foregone conclusion...

...Until that disclosure, he thought he could brave it out...

...But he supported it, and the boost which this act gave to the organization of labor may have been more important than any New Deal achievement...

...My country, right or wrong" is always an amoral principle whether applied to nations, classes or unions...

...In neither case did this guarantee the right use of their power...

...Whenever this kind of partisanship dominates a group, we approach the standards of Communism, no matter how explicitly the creed of Communism is disavowed...

...But the friends of labor cannot deny that the trade-union movement faces a more general problem than the venality of particular leaders when the Federation, under George Meany's leadership, failed to win over the corrupt Longshoremen's union which it had ousted but which was still able to win elections against the Federation-sponsored union...

...The problem of any democracy is how to make the oligarchy responsible to the democracy...

...The problem of the big corporation is too great to be solved merely by the enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the Clayton Act...

...James Hoffa and Dave Beck have moral and political standards which remind us of what we should not have forgotten: that is, that the original passion for justice among leaders of a group which was defrauded of justice does not guarantee their probity in the use of the power which they have acquired in the struggle for justice...

...In the case of the Teamsters, we do not know what the members think of Hoffa...

...There is no cure for this partisanship, except perhaps that the same relaxation of heroic polemics which brought about the moral decay will also bring about a relaxation of the partisanship, and persuade the Teamsters to judge their leaders by the general standards of the society of which they are a part...

...Of these, the rise of the labor movement was the most important...

...The liberal devotion to labor ought not to obscure the fact that even the best unions are defective in the constitutional safeguards against the misuse of power...

...That solves the over-all problem of justice...

...It has provided that equilibrium of power without which justice is unattainable...

...It set organized power against organized power, which is the prerequisite of justice in a highly organized technical society...

...The necessity of trade-union power in the economy of justice makes the weakening of the unions, as is intended by the "right to work" laws adopted or pending in many state legislatures, dangerous to the health of our country...

...It is a problem created by the peculiar conditions of union democracy...

...They have no independent judiciary for one thing, no court to which a member may appeal which is completely independent of the current union leadership...

...Incidentally, it may be significant that of the most respected union leaders today many have been trained in the school of an idealistic 19th-century socialism—Walter Reuther and David Dubinsky, for instance...

...Thus his character is similar to Beck's except that power rather than self is first in his hierarchy of values...

...In analyzing this problem, we ought to establish two basic presuppositions in regard to the life of trade unionism in our technical culture...

...The first is that the organized power of labor has done more to increase the health of both our economic and political life than any other factor...

...It may even face the defiance of a Hoffa who not only promises to take over the Teamsters but to make industrial union raids upon the old craft unions and thus enlarge his dominion either inside or outside the Federation...

...He is more "honest" than Beck only in the sense that he will steal for the union but not from the union...

...points out, in his first volume on the "Age of Roosevelt," that FDR was not fully conscious of the importance of the Wagner National Labor Relations Act...

...The more mature portions of the nation, of whatever economic class or interest, have accepted the realities of both big business and big labor as ineluctable facts of our economy and our democracy...

...A more important defect is that there is no separation of powers...

...Significantly, our own nation did not catch up with the general standards of Western democracy until a quarter century ago...

...It requires constitutional restraints...

...This problem is created by the fact that the means of communication in a union are all controlled by the official leadership of the union...

...But no democracy has maintained its vitality if only one party could function and if the wielders of power were not under the constant scrutiny of an alternative government...

...but they approach the totalitarian status because of the peculiar difficulties in organizing parties which will appeal to the general membership rather than to a section of the oligarchy...

...Inner restraints must have operated in maintaining these relatively high standards...

...The late J. B. S. Hardman, who made this problem a life-long concern, reported how in the days of the late Sidney Hillman his proposal to make an alliance with the Communists in the now defunct American Labor party, though Communists were rigorously excluded in his own union, was secretly opposed but openly supported by many members of the union oligarchy who did not dare show open opposition...

...The problem is "big labor," which has become a sovereignty so great that, with big business, our society has features which are as similar to the old feudalism as they are to the old liberalism...

...But ultimately all government, including the sub-government of business and labor, cannot rely too much on human nature...

...But this kind of individualism is too anachronistic and too tendentious to prevail in the nation as a whole...

...Let us put aside, for the moment, the problem of the giant corporation with its combination of prestige and power, its right to hire and fire, which certainly makes big business a part of government...

...He has a tremendous itch for power which probably dominates his not inconsiderable greed...

...Unions are not totalitarian in intent...

...But it is not the problem which concerns us here...

...In short, the two great giants are fairly evenly balanced...

...But an even more significant defect is that in many unions the executive committee is composed of members who are dependent for their own positions upon the president of the union...

...In theory, the only legislative power rests in the annual convention...

...That such a man should have such bright prospects of heading a great union, so recently humiliated by the Beck exposures, proves that the union is suffering from a deeper corruption than the unique moral defections of Beck...

...Significantly, these laws are proposed not in the Congress but in the states, many of the legislatures of which have built-in conservative majorities in which the countryside has constitutional advantages over the great urban centers...

...There is no representative legislature...

...It is worth observing that the constitutional safeguards in the trade-union movement are not strong enough to have guaranteed the relative probity of the leadership which the unions have enjoyed...

...It must guard against the abuse of power by proper checks and balances...

...There is no room for a "loyal opposition" because there is no economic base for an opposition press...

...Arthur Schles-inger Jr...

...They must, therefore, conform to the moral and political standards of our political system or our whole system is imperiled...

...The enemies of labor will try to make the Teamsters' picture appear typical for unionism as a whole, and that would obscure the virtues, the honesty and the devotion to the genera] welfare which characterize union leadership as a whole...

...In these legislatures, the anachronistic individualism of local business leaders, who have not come to terms with the social facts of modern society, can find alliance with the individualism of the farmers, to whom the collective pressures and counter-pressures of industrial society are mysterious and dangerous mechanisms...

...By Reinhold Niebuhr The Teamsters and Labors Future Jimmy Hoffa, the redoubtable ninth vice-president of the Teamsters Union, having been cleared by a jury in the Federal Court of a charge of bribery, immediately announced his candidacy for the office of president of the Teamsters, vacated by the venal Dave Beck...

...But I think I know enough, as an outside but friendly observer of trade unionism, to say that they are problems which must be solved before one of the great subordinate sovereignties of modern life can approach the standards of the ultimate sovereignty in our scheme of government...

...but it does not solve the subordinate problem of assuring justice in these subordinate centers of authority which have, in Hobbes's phrase, acquired "chips of the block of sovereignty...

...I am not wise enough to suggest even a tentative answer to these problems...

...A century of history has passed, and the subordinate sovereignties of business and labor have grown...