Labor: Reality and 'Sociology'
SELIGMAN, BEN B.
Labor: Reality and 'Sociology' Intellectuals in Labor Unions. The Practice of Unionism. Reviewed by Ben B. Seligman By Harold L. Wilensky. By Jack Barbash. International-affairs analyst,...
...interviews and case numbers properly codified...
...This, I suspect, is what happened to a good deal of the author's fine research...
...Barbash addresses his job soberly and without pretense...
...An inside picture, as it were, it nevertheless spares nothing...
...The Practice of Unionism is a sound book...
...Wilensky might say about professionals in unions...
...Wilensky displays...
...Wilensky's leg...
...These are the major aspects of union practice today and Mr...
...Oh, he has all the required intellectual lumber: a preliminary and unfortunately unreadable chapter on theory and methodology...
...But the more I read his book, the more perplexed did I become and finally I turned to some older hands for their reaction to the picture painted here...
...In addition to the Facts and Figures Man and the Contact Man, there is, he says, the Internal Communications Specialist...
...How artificial all this is was emphasized when I thought of one trade-union intellectual who frequently puts together some pretty careful and cogent reports on the incidence of taxation, which he then delivers to key Congressmen and during the summer lectures on the subject at labor institutes...
...But let's look at Wilensky's "typology" seriously for a moment...
...This business of capitalizing, as in Contact Man (one of Wilensky's types), seems to be a convenient handle on which to hang a supposed profundity...
...What Mr...
...Ably written, it fully displays the ideals, attainments and failures of trade unions...
...Whatever one needs to know about unions today has been included: structure, administration, jurisdictional disputes, techniques in collective bargaining, union weapons (strikes and picketing) and the problem of leadership...
...Amazingly enough, not one was able to recognize the curious portrait of the labor technician that Mr...
...the increasing administration of unions as institutions...
...Wilensky's book, all his research is quite beside the point...
...No shamefaced apology is made for those few areas where racketeers have been able to capture control...
...It has become, I imagine, a new sociological ritual...
...For example, when a particular attitude on the part of some trade unionist is characterized as a myth, the reader is offered several long footnotes on the sociological relevance of such feelings which "validate a collective sentiment...
...and a magniloquent creation of a set of Weberian ideal types replete with capitalized names...
...Barbash outlines them exceedingly well...
...Barbash finds particularly significant is the relatively recent broadening of the labor movement's scheme of things: the disappearance of any marked distinction between "business" unionism and "welfare" unionism...
...Surely, somebody was pulling Mr...
...Moreover, these are all put together in a cohesive, interesting and readable manner and amply illustrated with pertinent case material...
...Free Press...
...Harper...
...At least one can say this is a report on American unions by one who really knows them...
...somehow a fact acquires significance if the upper case is used...
...Barbash tells us more about this phase of union practice in some 35 pages than Wilensky is able to do in a whole book...
...The chapter on "The Uses of Technicians" is illustrative...
...Barbash's work, however, is something else again...
...Each of them is described by the author as a distinct type with duties and functions unique to his special realm...
...contributor, "Dissent," "Commentary'' As a relative newcomer to the confraternity of labor intellectuals, I was especially interested in knowing what Mr...
...6.00...
...and the creation of a new climate for the conduct of labor-management relations...
...One is tempted to inquire why they stopped at that point...
...The best thing that can be said about the Barbash book is that it is essential reading for an understanding of what unions do...
...But, above all, Mr...
...The point is that the author's approach is rigidly artificial, cramped and, like the blind men examining the elephant, quite unable to detect reality...
...nor has the author glossed over the bitter experience of Communist infiltration...
...My suspicion of the author's inadequacy was reinforced when, in presenting his case material, he gleefully related a story about a certain union leader's objection to courses in parliamentary procedure because "already the workers are making too many motions...
...the accentuated concern with domestic politics and international affairs...
...quotations and citations from all sorts of respondents...
...Less sociologically minded readers may recognize these as the researcher, the legislative representative and the labor-education director...
...Wilensky admits to the interesting fact that his publishers insisted on removing 170 pages of manuscript...
...There are many like this fellow who do not fit the Wilensky pattern...
...5.00...
...International-affairs analyst, VAW...
...465 pp...
...As for Mr...
...336 pp...
...This apocryphal tale was current in the garment trades some fifteen years ago, and I picked it up myself for a Commentary article back in 1945...
...If he isn't giving us the real inside lowdown on Facts and Figures Men and Legislative-Liberal Missionaries in trade unions, then we are treated to a panoply of scholarly artifacts entirely unrelated to the realities of trade-union life...
Vol. 40 • February 1957 • No. 6
