Great Expectations
SELIGMAN, BEN B.
Great Expectations THE STATE OF THE UNIONS By Paul Jacobs Atheneum. 303 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by BEN B. SELIGMAN Research Director, Retail Clerks International Association; author "Main...
...Even Jacobs would not deny this...
...In that function they have in the main been successful...
...The laborer is an instrument for achieving success and once management takes him for granted, as it inevitably would prefer to do, there is need for a union to protect him...
...Thus, while Jacobs says: "The tragedy of American unions isn't so much in their present state as it is in what they could be and aren't," he has the good sense to add: "But then isn't that the plight of America, too...
...Only a few weeks ago, George Meany roared at an AFL-CIO convention that such predictions fall wide of the truth, that labor has lost none of its militancy, that its success could be measured in the dollars and cents of high wages, and that he would gladly let his critics cling to their nostalgia for the Great Depression...
...Reviewed by D. MULHOLLAND Russian Research Center, Harvard University David Magarshack continues his efforts to free the Englishspeaking world of those misconceptions about Russian literature which Constance Garnett imposed on it long ago...
...The irony, though, is that the genteel expression of such behavior in the upper reaches of the boardroom does not arouse the violent tempers of the editorial writers as do the actions of a Hoffa or, on occasion, a Hayes or a Reuther...
...As far as they are concerned, to do more would be irrelevant...
...and the alienation of Negroes, liberals and other onetime friends...
...The pilot—a labor aristocrat if ever there was one—wants an extra seat in the cockpit, just in case...
...Even a cursory perusal of all the schemes that have been worked out to date—in meatpacking, coal, machine tools, on the waterfront, in steel—suggests that they merely postpone the proverbial day of reckoning...
...Had he died in the middle 1860s his Poor Folk and Notes from the Underground would remain literary curiosities of the period, though his main claim to recognition would have been Notes from the House of the Dead (to which certain enthusiasts last year compared Solzhenytsin's novelette...
...Perhaps nothing typifies the devilish complexity of modern industrial relations so much as the situation in those trades...
...And the benevolent paternalism, the demand for unwavering loyalty, quite patently stems from such a situation...
...and nuts and cranks, such as Gogol and Tolstoy...
...the persistent Bourbonism of the Boulwares of industry...
...Consider the issue of automation...
...He too dislikes "unwork" but given the choice, as Jacobs perceptively notes, between no work and made work, he will select the latter...
...It is this muscle, he suggests, that other unions would like to exercise through what has been called the "strategic alliance...
...The Uses of Journalism DOSTOEVSKY'S OCCASIONAL WRITINGS Translated by David Magarshack Random House...
...And it is in the Teamsters President—with his insistence on absolute loyalty, his paternalism, and his fearful determination to crush opponents with as much muscle as possible—that Jacobs sees reflected the behavior of some other labor leaders as well...
...334 pp...
...If there is distrust of internal opposition in unions, for example, do we not see the same pattern in the corporation...
...Labor leaders are not yet ready to accept this diagnosis, however...
...Given the values of our culture, unions could not have done otherwise but to create a new middle class, as Jacobs recognizes...
...It has indeed become a social problem that ought to command the attention of everyone, particularly policymakers in Washington...
...And yet, despite all the talk and all the fears, no one knows what to do...
...According to Jacobs: 'Automation and the particular unemployment it brings to a particular plant are problems obviously beyond the capabilities of unionmanagement collective bargaining...
...He is angrier still when he looks at the lower depths of the work force— the migratory farm hand—and finds that society and the unions have forgotten these people completely...
...The high expectations he had when he crawled across the railroad tracks have not been fulfilled...
...The consequence, of course, has been the phenomenon of James Riddle Hoffa, who boasts of the excellence of his contracts, and in the same breath speaks of "my men" and "my business," an attitude that makes it difficult to distinguish between union business and ordinary business...
...At the age of 40, he sat wellgroomed in a panelled board room arguing with corporate officials for a 25-cent increase in meal allowances for members of his union...
...Part of the explanation of Hoffa, according to Jacobs, is that he is really a James Cagney villain come alive and, like many such dreamland personalities, has become a rather likeable culture hero, victorious against all the hostilities of respectable society...
...And yet, despite the author's censure of the unions, there are those of us who know in our bones that without them America would be a much more callous place to live...
...He points to the increasing drain on the labor movement imposed by automation and the new technology...
...It is by now a rather trite observation that the great Russian authors of the 19th century can be roughly divided into two groups: the sweetly reasonable, which includes Pushkin, Turgenev and Chekhov...
...Its typical character is the tough, small owneroperator struggling in an economic jungle in which stealing accounts from rivals is the normal way of life...
...If membership commitment to unions is tenuous, it is equally so in other organizations...
...Often they simply ignore it, let it pile up, and then trade it off for another coffee break...
...The printers make up "bogus" or reproduction work as a defense against technological unemployment, but their pride of craft impels them to voice a hatred for such non-work...
...Between these incidents, pregnant with the symbolism of our time, Jacobs had experienced enough as an organizer and labor intellectual to wonder why the coin had become dulled and tarnished...
...the shift in the work force from factory to office, a place notoriously difficult to organize...
...His disillusionment is expressed most sharply in the last of the essays collected in this book, a corrosive lament for collective bargaining which in his despairing view has aged well before its time...
...But this is the nature of American life itself, and the unions may very well be a perfect mirror image of it...
...the inability or unwillingness of the unions to settle their own household quarrels...
...But he is an honest man, and he writes the story as he sees it: that some would not always agree with his view of the unions today is another matter...
...Automation is a kind of tidal force that neither the unions nor management can control...
...the lack of any genuine political thrust and a preference for coffee hours in the White House...
...Dostoevsky definitely belongs to the second group...
...Or as Charles Zimmerman, a Dubinsky aide, told Jacobs: "Union members don't become saints because they take out union cards...
...Some of the essays, however, are of more than passing interest...
...If members do not attend meetings, a fact that Jacobs bemoans, neither do they go to church with any regularity nor to their lodges nor PTA'S...
...It is not surprising that the Teamsters became the most powerful organization in so chaotic an industry...
...He also pinned the curse of automation onto the lapels of management, which he said was racing to produce more with less...
...author "Main Currents in Modern Economics" At the age of 18, Paul Jacobs crawled on his belly across railroad tracks to join other strikers converging on a flour mill to drive away scabs who had taken their jobs...
...Magarshack claims that none has been translated before...
...They are, rather, service organizations seeking to improve the economic status of their members...
...While all this is true, Jacobs would probably reply that current union activity must be viewed in the much broader context he has sought to establish in his articles and essays...
...Did not David Dubinsky himself exclaim: "What's good for the capitalist is good for the proletariat...
...The workers are isolated from their fellow drivers, engaged in dangerous work, harassed by highway patrolmen and, before the union gave them protection, were apt to be stolen blind by employers...
...Yet because he ostensibly gives his members what they want, Hoffa is their popular choice—or at least he seems to be...
...Jacobs is clearly angry...
...Nor has the parallel with the needle trades' unions, in the sense that they can dominate an industry which without them would be a morass, been lost on Jacobs...
...Jacobs illustrates this sort of frustration in his well-known essay, "Dead Horse and Featherbird," which tells of the insecurity among printers and airline pilots...
...For too many of them the reason is understandable...
...If "Jimmy" takes care of their economic interests, that is all they ask...
...6.95...
...Unions have in fact become precisely the kind of thoroughgoing business institutions that American workers and the American public wanted them to be...
...Trapped by time and technology into doing what he would prefer not to, he rationalizes and quarrels bitterly with fellow unionists for the right to fill the empty seat...
...Hoffa's strength and that of the Teamsters, however, appears to stem more from the condition of the trucking industry...
...the desiccation of the beliefs and social energy that impelled the unions during the '30s and '40s...
...Again, is this not a reflection of the larger society...
...The charges Jacobs levels are not new and, in an objective sense, may be difficult to rebut...
...He can hope only for "a revival of the instincts of social compassion and indignation—qualities recently absent from our society, perhaps because it is so difficult for the prosperous majority to identify itself with a destitute minority...
...The culmination of Jacobs' indictment is that, in this situation, collective bargaining is no longer the instrument it once was, and can no longer fulfill the broad social, economic and political needs of those it was intended to serve...
...His latest contribution to that worthwhile endeavor is this book made up of odd pieces by Dostoevsky...
...To the worker who must labor all his life, business is the same whether it strives for profit or merely searches for its corporate soul...
...The unions in this country are not (perhaps to their detriment) adjuncts to political parties as unions were in Europe...
Vol. 47 • January 1964 • No. 2
