Reflections on the Negro and Labor

...Why should intellectual merit alone be the determining basis for entry into an elite school...

...and the demand for improvement quickens...

...Such tactics are bound to be repeated, and they are understandable...

...Often a union recognizes certain "functional" groupings (for instance, the skilled trades in the United Auto Workers) as legitimate claimants to its own rights of representation...

...How far down does the group right extend within the union...

...The first is symbolized by my friend's observations about the apathy and ingratitude within his local...

...All this may seem a far cry from my opening story...

...He knew all about Robert Michels' "iron law of oligarchy," had read Will Herberg on union bureaucracy, was aware of the growing gulf between the leadership and the rank-and-file, and his reply reflected an awareness of being trapped in this disparity...

...that a predominantly Negro local (composed primarily of shipping clerks) was attached to a larger local of pressers and was thus deprived of full citizenship rights in the union...

...How curious that the labor leadership which benefited from that historical lesson should so plainly fail to see the virtue of applying it to its own institutions...

...Its record of progressive leadership in a variety of areas is too well documented to need repetition...

...Thus, under an old NLRB ruling, employers are forbidden in certain circumstances to give individual workers merit wage increases on the ground that this may be a form of favoritism and would violate the group's rights...

...What is it, then, that the Negro community wants, and why so much more demandingly from its liberal friends...

...And in a way he is right...

...It is, I think, quite convincing as a rebuttal to the specific charges...

...I spend long hours negotiating for them...

...Or, to change the metaphor, and make the issue more plain: The "genius" of American democracy is that the society survived because the older ruling groups learned to share their power instead of resorting to class war, most notably in the acceptance by employers of collective bargaining in the factories...

...The solution is not necessarily a double standard, wherein Negro children with lesser qualifications are admitted on a quota basis...

...Daniel Bell, a regular contributor to this department, is author of Work and its Discontents and The End of Ideology...

...One reason, he said, answering his own question, is that the NAACP is itself under fire from the more militant sections of the Negro community, and to maintain its own position it picks on the liberal unions because they are more vulnerable...

...And this, in turn, is part of a still larger question which few persons have cared to discuss openly: whether in his fight to overcome second-class status, the Negro should receive not merely equality of opportunity but, in order to establish himself as a full citizen, preferential treatment as well...

...The telling phrase in the complaint that my old Socialist friend made was the reiterated "for them...

...a friend in the needle trades recently asked me...

...I was reminded of his remarks recently on reading the charges made by Herbert Hill, the Labor Secretary of the NAACP, of racial discrimination in the Garment Workers' Union, and the outraged rejoinders by David Dubinsky and other ILGWU officials...

...But this is only part of a broader, more vexing issue: the propriety of attacking one's friends, rather than one's enemies, as the Negro organizations are now doing...

...He had negotiated a good contract, for them...

...But doesn't the trade-union movement have a special obligation to help redress the balance...

...But they don't appreciate it...

...Hill's statement was sloppy (Local 89, accused of rebuffing Negroes, is an Italian-language local, and accepts only Italian members—a hangover from an early organizational structure), his figures were often incorrect, and his portentous social analysis (e.g., that the Jewish labor leaders have more in common with the Jewish employers than with the rank-and-file membership) was a piece of pseudo-sociology...

...But precisely because the ILGWU was able to do so, the union succeeded in winning such victories as the establishment of arbitration councils under Louis D. Brandeis and other prominent Jewish spokesmen...

...and that Negroes and Puerto Ricans were under-represented in the union's leadership, which was, and remains, predominantly Jewish...

...He was doing a good job, for them...

...In the end, the image without the body is insubstantial, and quickly fades away...

...Admission to an elite public school like New York's Bronx High School of Science, for example, is by competitive examination, a matter purely of merit...

...I don't understand it," he said...

...Like most of the young Socialists who were active in the Young People's Socialist League in the '30s, I have long had a warm feeling for, even an emotional identification with, the ILGWU...

...Why doesn't it go after the building trades, the electrical unions (apart from Local 3 in New York) and other places where Negroes can't even get jobs, let alone leadership positions, because of union discrimination...

...For what may have been formerly accepted as destined and inevitable now, with the possibility of improvement in sight, becomes intolerable...

...THINKING ALOUD Reflections On the Negro and Labor By Daniel Bell Some years ago, an older friend, an official of one of the out-of-town locals of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and a Socialist, complained to me about the apathy of most of the members in his local, and, in some cases, the resentment of a minority against the union leadership...

...it may require the creation of special classes to coach bright but culturally deprived Negro children, in order to allow them to compete on a better footing...

...He was honest and conscientious, for them...

...The ILGWU'S answer, which appears in the Fall 1962 issue of New Politics, was prepared by Gus Tyler, the union's political director...

...The implicit demand of the Negro community today is for special efforts and even special treatment in order to win basic social rights...

...The union supplied us with some of the best jokes (copies supplied upon request) about the radical movement...

...But why even blink at the "double standard...

...Does the Negro community—if it so organizes itself—have a legitimate claim for representation in group terms...

...My friend was no fool...

...The phrase "equality of opportunity" has meaning if the competitors are roughly equal from the start (which is why there are handicaps in a horse race...

...In economic and educational opportunity, the Negro is in a position of inequality, and the government is bounden to help him move ahead...

...Legally, the individual's protection on the job—where, for example, a union shop exists—is based on the "collective" contract, not on his individual right...

...Clearly, there is no easy answer...

...But the demand for special treatment is nothing new in the United States...

...It is startling to realize that in the quickened pace of the Negro effort to gain higher status in this country, the liberals (Dubinsky, Walter Reuther and even George Meany), rather than the reactionaries, are the ones who find themselves under the gun in the Negro community...

...And for anyone who has known the long devotion to liberal causes of such men as Charles Zimmerman, the manager of the union's Dress Joint Board, the idea of their condoning overt racial discrimination, even for reasons of expediency, did not ring true...

...It arises for the same reason that Tocqueville noted in all revolutionary movements...

...His reply, on reflection, was that the workers could not negotiate a contract: They did not possess the skills, the boss would outmaneuver them, they would be too exorbitant in their demands, they did not understand the economics of the industry, etc...

...The fact is—and this is the "bite" in Hill's charges—that the Negroes are underrepresented in the leadership of many of the unions where they form a significant proportion of the membership...

...A former managing editor of The New Leader and labor editor of Fortune magazine, he is now Professor of Sociology at Columbia University...

...To return to my original tale, the tragedy of old institutions is that they are like Cheshire cats: The image remains after the body has disappeared...

...Ivy-league colleges such as Harvard, Yale and Columbia maintain geographical quotas in order to gain a representative national student body, on the ground that such mixtures are more valuable to the educational process than those selected by grades or college-board scores alone...

...It also seems clear that the original occasion for the statement was unfortunate, since the Congressional hearings were being conducted, in New York rather than in Washington, during a primary campaign by a Congressman who had been denied endorsement by the iLGWu-dominated Liberal party in New York...

...And they usually provoke the response (which Reuther, for one, has articulated) that this is Jim Crow in reverse, that a man ought to be judged on the basis of individual merit and not for any "extraneous" capacity...

...A few years ago, the ILGWU did begin to make more determined effort to bring Negroes and Puerto Ricans into leadership positions...

...It is the very basis for the existence of the labor movement...

...Why does the NAACP pick on us...

...On the same basis, a larger proportion of Negro children in the elite schools would both act as a spur to these children and "broaden" the experience of the other students...

...Once the older generation passes, the ILGWU will be a different union...

...It provided intermittent employment for many of us (I did "educational work" and editorial chores for Local 62 during my graduate-school days...

...Yet, wrong as Hill's charges are in detail, deeper problems remain, problems that have been obscured by the stridency of charges and replies...

...Through generous contributions, it supported most of the Socialist institutions during the bleakest days of the depression and after...

...Yet there is a curious paradox in this "democratic" response...

...The Italian bosses run worse sweatshops, they said, yet the unions pick on us because they can shame us in the Yiddish press...

...The idea, therefore, that the ILGWU practiced racial discrimination seemed absurd...

...The other problems are of equal difficulty, going far beyond the dilemmas of the ILGWU...

...Yet the number of Negro children in that school is scandalously low, and this failure to get on the first step of the educational escalator becomes a self-reinforcing vicious cycle as regards future opportunities...

...I work hard for them...

...Wasn't this, I asked, exactly the reaction that the Jewish employers in the needle trades had 50 or more years ago, when the ILGWU was first trying to get a foothold in the industry...

...A second, more complex fact is that the basic existence of the labor movement is rooted in the conception of "group" rather than individual rights...

...Farmers receive price supports, subsidies, mortgage insurance and the like...

...The first problem (which has been caricatured by the charge of racial discrimination) is really, in its way, the familiar family chronicle of the original generation that built an institution (or a business or a store) and won't let go for the next one...

...But as I tried to tell him at the time, sometimes people like to do things for themselves, even if they do them less well...

...that certain locals excluded Negroes...

...In the case of these unions, what the Negroes want is "recognition" at the level of top leadership and a growing share of the spoils of office.* Demands such as these are usually voiced behind closed doors rather than openly, because they fly in the face of the American mythos that all individuals are equal and there is no such thing as a group identity...

...For one thing, the realistic political process in the United States, at least in the northern urban centers, has been one of ethnic groups advancing themselves precisely in this fashion: by organizing on bloc lines, electing their own kind, and using the patronage system to enhance the wealth and status of their group...

...But in many instances, even if a genuine equality of opportunity—for jobs, school places and the like—prevailed, the Negro would still lose out, with harmful social consequences for the community, simply because of extra, inherited handicaps he bears...

...Hill's statement, compiled originally for a Congressional subcommittee, stated that Negroes were excluded from the higher-paying jobs in the garment trades (specifically in the cutters' local...

...Besides," he said, "I am 55 years old...

...The preamble to the Wagner Act points out that equality of bargaining is a necessary aspect of social justice, and in order to redress unequal power, the workers have to be given the added protections of the law to organize, to compel the employer to bargain, and so on...

...This has to be answered in a still wider context, which is the unspoken premise that "equality of opportunity" is an inadequate springboard from which the deprived sections of the Negro community—that is, the overwhelming majority—can advance economically and educationally...

...When I asked him if they could not learn— after all, he had come up from the shop—his answer was that they were not interested, that in his generation the talented people had gone into the shop because there was nowhere else for immigrants to go, but now the more educated ones did not go into the union, and so on...

...Am I supposed to get out of the union now, after 30 years of service, because the new membership, which had little to do with building the union, is ethnically different from me...

...But, ironically, the union found that leadership training enhanced the market value of its best candidates and, because the ILGWU pays relatively poorly, it "lost" the trainees to other unions or to government, where they could command more money and status...

...yet there is a consistency and a connection...

...The tragedy is that the change is going on now, amid circumstances of growing resentment rather than of honor...

...Increasingly radical demands are made not when one's lot goes from bad to worse, but when it goes from bad to better...

...He had helped build a useful social institution, and had identified himself so completely with it that he found it hard to conceive of its continuing without him, and others like him...

...I don't let the boss get away with a nickel...