A Dyspeptic Observer
SELIGMAN, BEN B.
A Dyspeptic Observer LABOR TODAY By B. J. Widick Houghton, Mifflin. 238 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by BEN B. SELIGMAN Author, "Main Currents in Modern Economics" This book is subtitled,...
...And along the same lines, unions must again organize the unemployed if a genuine coalition is to be built that will impel government to acknowledge the social consequences of automation...
...Whining of the sort to be found in Widick's book won't help...
...This would, of course, enforce a responsibility broader than the confines of the shop...
...It is therefore imperative for unions to learn to negotiate for both insiders and outsiders...
...The unions, at least the larger ones, have achieved a position of relative prosperity, but this in no way makes them the powerful countervailing organizations that Widick, among others, believes them to be...
...The alleged accommodation between unions and management, which Widick claims exists, is so unreal that management, whenever it can get away with it, encourages decertification proceedings before the National Labor Relations Board...
...Instead he has allowed a personal gripe to becloud his vision, and what he gives us is bile disguised as reportage...
...This latter demand is certainly legitimate, but it needs to be placed in a broader context than Widick has been able to provide...
...At no point, for example, does Widick hint that the union provides protection for the men in the shop against the intolerable pressures that management would enforce without it...
...Widick refuses to acknowledge this fact of life in our society, and so behaves like an ideologue who has reasoned himself into an impasse...
...There are no social restraints on automation...
...Attacks on union affluence must also be attacks on affluence generally...
...Delegates at the last UAW convention talked more about shop conditions than about money...
...Reviewed by BEN B. SELIGMAN Author, "Main Currents in Modern Economics" This book is subtitled, "The Triumphs and Failures of Unionism in the United States," but one finds no triumphs in its 200-odd shrill pages...
...Yet there is some evidence to suggest that the unions are beginning to react...
...All is failure...
...For the American labor movement now stands revealed as the creature of American society...
...But the building of political awareness, in Widick's sense, comes slowly and painfully, and as the result of an intermingling of apathy and enthusiasm, of patching here and erosion there...
...And this is so either because Widick is conducting a vendetta or because he wants the union to be solely a political institution, which it is not...
...And the Mine Workers have finally awakened to what John L. Lewis' deal with the coal operators has done to them...
...The Steelworkers are experimenting with a unique arrangement at Kaiser Steel...
...Complaints about unions as institutions are fundamentally complaints about that society...
...This has obviously made a good many of them unhappy, and since no one really knows what productivity growth is, the unions must necessarily continue to press against management...
...Meanwhile we must make do with ad hoc politics and maneuvering...
...The reader who wants a more balanced analysis of what the UAW is doing these days will have to go elsewhere...
...The only time Widick gets close to a genuine problem is in his discussion of automation...
...The chapter on Reuther recounts just about all the hostile comments that might be gathered by a dyspeptic observer and exhibits them like dirty linen on a clothesline...
...Revelations of union corruption open vents on the corrupt air we breathe...
...nowhere does one get a sense of the union's accomplishments in the plant...
...The difficulty, to paraphrase A. H. Raskin, is that most of the union-automation schemes take care of those who are in and overlook those who are out...
...In his desire to be up-to-date and at the same time to tighten his control over the industrial process, the business archon does not hesitate to utilize new technology to the fullest, and humans are thereby converted into just so much excess baggage...
...One has only to read the acid portrait of Walter Reuther to realize that the author can no longer write objectively about the union to which he, Widick, gave so many years of service...
...The West Coast Longshoremen have tried to provide "cushions" for their regular members...
...The book is quite simply a long and painful yawp...
...If union leaders have, on occasion, had coffee in the White House, that does not make them partners in government or enterprise...
...This is a pity, for B. J. Widick has been around the labor movement a long time now, and he ought to have been able to detect some virtues in that complex, sprawling and all-too-human set of institutions known as labor unions...
...But this takes hard work, planning, thinking and, most of all, prodding...
...This does not mean that there is no sentiment for more cohesive action...
...To draw unions closer to what Widick calls true unionism—a notion he leaves quite vague—calls for considerable recasting of the habits of American thought itself...
...In their principal arena of action—collective bargaining— they are apt to be told by government officials to hew close to the productivity line...
...That the unions are stunned and do not know what action to take is scarcely surprising...
Vol. 47 • April 1964 • No. 9
