Playing Poor Politics

...That is the numerical logic of a lib-lab alliance...

...Still others are un-derpensioned, living on retirement benefits that were inadequate initially and have become even less adequate with inflation...

...The most immediate beneficiaries were and are the poor...

...There are excellent self-serving reasons for these programs...

...The more workers earn, the more they spend —a spur to fuller employment...

...Occasionally, the afl-cio leadership has had to argue internally with its own affiliates because BAYARD RUSTIN they consider some measures injurious to their own short-term interests...

...The crux of a hopeful dynamic is the expansion of opportunity for all...

...Consider this constellation: 1. The "poor" are black...

...It is true that skilled craft unions tend to balance labor supply with manpower demand, narrowing new entries—black and white...

...Is there a program of common concern to union members and the poor...

...Ironically, this idea is being pushed not by the Establishment but by well-to-do intellectuals in the name of anti-Establishment-arianism...

...But the push to do the "right thing" is on...

...It's the right chemical mix, unlike the mesalliance of top and bottom—a phony and frustrating marriage based not on love but on pity or convenience, and destined to end when the underparty no longer wants to be "used...

...3. Public investment...

...This is partly correct: The percentage of poverty is greater among blacks than whites...

...To include labor as a champion of the poor would spoil the "image" of a war between white fat cats and poor dark mice...

...The bent of myth-makers is such that even when the labor movement is script-writer, impressaric, financier and producer of dramatic acts to organize the poor, the credit lines somehow are placed beside the name of some prominent figure who is not automatically identified with unions...

...Under the ancien regime, peasants regarded the urban bourgeois and sans-culottes as atheists out to destroy civilization...

...signed a Manpower Training Contract ($460,-740) to train 100 minority youths...

...The Lumpenproletariat of 19th-century Europe was turned against the working class...

...The rich engineered the reapportionment of American legislatures (state and national) in the 1890s to swell rural power against industrial and urban areas—a refined and subtle variation of the Bourbon-peasant coalition...

...Seizing upon genuine injustices, they encourage the poor (as well as the young and the black) to intensify their conflict with the proletariat while leaving untouched the power and wealth of the elite...

...The gestalt of myths has become the rationale for a dangerous policy of egging on the "poor" against the white worker...

...They can "make it," however, by providing the margin of victory to a liberal coalition which includes labor...

...The same lobby has been the muscle behind every major move to do through public investment what is not being done by private enterprise in the areas of education, housing, health care, research, mass transit, air-water pollution, sewage disposal, job training...

...W. Arthur Lewis (in the New York Times Magazine) put it crudely: "The trade unions are the black man's greatest enemy...

...The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that in 1967 a family of four in these communities needed $192 a week for a "moderate" and $116 for a "lower" standard of living...

...Today we are burdened by new myths, many of them arising from half-truths that, stated as full truths, become untruths...

...3. White poverty is rural, not urban...

...Tyler, Assistant President of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, is the author of many books, including the forthcoming The Great American Riots...

...2. By Law...

...Left (perhaps unwittingly) and the affluent Right united against the underclass, which is divided along ethnic and economic lines...

...In these many efforts labor has had to combat the conservative coalition in Congress, generally without organized help from the poor, who are among the first beneficiaries...

...Labor representatives on Capitol Hill have also been the people's lobby for a Fair Employment Practices Act, inclusion of agriculture under the Labor Relations Act, a job corps, area redevelopment, adequate unemployment compensation, up-to-date Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public power, consumer protection...

...But when a fourth category?worker"—was added, a majority placed themselves in that slot, including quite a few who are plain poor...

...On the basis of this arithmetic, the country's most knowledgeable political demographer, Richard Scammon, concludes that "if you count on the young, the black and the poor to do the job, you can have sound ideological purity as you leave office...

...For instance: To break through the color barrier, the afl-cio and its Building and Construction Trades Departments—together with the U.S...

...Some are, but in fact the "poor" outnumber the jobless about four times over...

...But the full truth is that if every skin in America were bleached albino, the number of persons living below standard would not change appreciably...

...The community of interests between workers and the poor does not mean that there will be no family spats...

...They have all been properly honored by the media...

...upper," "middle," "lower," class?a majority, many of them manual workers or downright poor, chose "middle...

...And blacks are at least as well represented in unions as in the labor force...

...But these also indirectly affect the total economy, opening new opportunities for the poor...

...Millions of union members live in or near poverty, needing money, schools for their kids, better safeguards against old age, unemployment, accidents and illness...

...In a study carried out by Nicholas Kisburg, Teamster Joint Council researcher, covering the 14 major manufacturing industries for which data was available in the two counties, there was not so much as one industry where the average weekly earnings met the "moderate" figure, and there were seven that failed even to meet the "lower" level...

...Moreover, since even with unionization earnings in service trades lag behind those in factories, overall income is less than Kisburg reports...

...The central goal of the American labor movement, at least from the time of the Great Depression, has been full employment...

...As a result, the ancient class struggle is reenacted with the affluent In this piece, the twelfth of his series, Gus Tyler examines the relationship between the "poor" and the labor movement...

...4. The poor are unemployed...

...The challenge to liberal leadership is to make this reality stand out in black and white despite befogging media-myths...

...6. White workers consider themselves middle class and therefore have little sympathy for the poor...

...In the cosmos of this mythology, the blacks are seen as locked out of jobs and doomed to poverty by the affluent white middle-class unionists of the American cities...

...In 18th-century France, the Bourbon monarchy used peasants to suppress the restive people of the cities...

...Legislative malapportionment was justified by the notion that the cleanliving country men had to save the nation from impure city slickers...

...But is there a political logic as well...

...None of this implies that unionists are more altruistic, moral, or public-spirited than anyone else...

...Unions reach for higher wages, shorter work hours and fringe benefits, each of which directly benefits dues payers...

...They know they are weaker when divided along ethnic or economic lines...

...5. The poor are underpaid because they are excluded by organized labor, especially if black...

...By political push labor has raised this from 25 cents to $1.60 an hour, and has extended the Fair Labor Standards umbrella to millions of workers originally excluded from coverage...

...Department of Labor, the Workers' Defense League and the Urban League—have since 1967 sponsored a program which by October 1968 had moved 8,000 Negroes into registered apprenticeship programs (almost twice the 1966 and virtually four times the 1960 figures...

...Yet another half truth: When Fortune offered test respondents three choices of self-image...

...But the afl-cio and other unions—adding manpower, money, sympathy strikes, boycotts —end up shirt-tailed or forgotten...

...But could it...

...In post-Civil War U.S.A., immigrants, Negroes and Chinese were employed as strikebreakers...

...But, considering the movement as a whole, major drives in the last three decades have aimed at organizing semi-and unskilled workers in mass production, trucking, hospitals, subways, farms, laundries, sanitation...

...Shorter hours, shorter work years and earlier retirement also create new jobs and raise income...

...The officially defined "poor" make up about 13 per cent of the population and an even smaller portion of the voting public...

...But these are tensions that tighten when opportunity is tight, and that can be relaxed when opportunity opens up...

...The blacks (many of whom have already been counted as "poor") constitute approximately 10 per cent of the population and less than 8 per cent of the electorate...

...Others are just plain underpaid...

...2. Poverty is caused by racism...

...Friction between better-and less-paid, between employed and unemployed, between black and white, between young and old over jobs, wages and neighborhoods will occur...

...Furthermore, in any given area or industry the union, by raising wages, compels nonunion employers to do likewise to hold on to their employes or to head off unionization...

...When it is realized that the average is a midpoint and therefore about half earned less than the average, it is apparent that the dividing line between the poor and unionized is not hard-edged...

...7. A Coalition of the top and bottom could create a new electoral majority...

...The deserving stars of some recent struggles are the daring and dedicated Cesar Chavez among grape pickers, Ralph Abernathy and Coretta King in the case of the Charleston hospital workers, and the late Martin Luther King among the Memphis sanitation men...

...This does not render their votes meaningless...

...In July 1969, the building trades of Washington, D.C...

...1. Union action...

...if 18-year-olds are enfranchised, it will come down to 40...

...The 20 million inhabitants of the Appalachian subnation (and their counterparts elsewhere) are heavily white-rural...

...If employment and wages arc now at their highest point (and poverty, despite its presence, at its lowest), the credit should go, almost exclusively, to what the myth-ologists like to describe as those "selfish unions...

...Many of the poor are only partially employed...

...How does this program square with the needs of the poor...

...It simply indicates that they cannot succeed alone even when led by a gaggle of articulate affluents...

...Mythology has always played a big part in the mesalliance of top and bottom...

...afl-cio President George Meany suggests a simple basis for union-poor cooperation when he says that the cause of poverty is the lack of money: The poor need jobs, income, education, homes—all gut concerns to workers, too...

...Similarly, fringe benefits (such as disability, supplementary unemployment, and medical services) are forms of income that ultimately have the same effect...

...In the many wars against poverty—so named or not —the single most meaningful accomplishment has been the extension and elevation of the Federal minimum wage...

...Public investment means a better neighborhood and city and—more work...

...Almost 15 per cent of those working full time for 50-52 weeks a year earn less than $4,000...

...Its program for achieving this consists of expanding aggregate demand through union action, law and public investment in areas shunned by the private sector...

...Bitter trauma has further taught that large numbers of poor endanger jobs and earnings, and that everyone can move up a bit when the bottom rises...

...Recent installments have analyzed the frustrations of the contemporary American middle class, previous efforts to reform the two-party system, the 1969 mayoral primary contests and elections in Minneapolis, Los Angeles and New York, and the nature of the liberal coalition and the need for its revival...

...The young are less numerous than they sound: The present median age of voters is 45...

...Early in the industrial era, the unemployed, immigrants and racial minorities were deluded into believing that jobs could be found by undercutting other workers...

...Consider the condition of factory workers in the prosperous, suburban Westchester and Nassau counties of New York State, where unions are relatively strong...

...In June, the Detroit Building Trades Council agreed to erect prefabricated housing...

...And in the 1960s, a more sophisticated version of the same idea has reappeared in the media-inspired myth that the workers and the poor are natural enemies...

...First, it should be noted that although for purposes of discussion we tend to separate these two groups, the distinction is in many cases artificial...

...This, too, is not wholly false: Blacks who are still trapped by the heritage of slavery have a harder time "making it" than whites...

...The alliance of organized labor and the poor is natural precisely because it is motivated by self-interest...

...But in New York City alone, there are 128,000 white and 80,000 nonwhite families below the poverty level (1967...

...But, in truth, white indigents outnumber black two and a half to three times: 4.3 million white, as against 1.7 million black families live below the poverty level (1966...

...As Bayard Rustin has so often said, there must be a job, an education and a home for everyone to abate black raae without arousing white fear...

...Hence, let the blacks combine with the young, the affluent and the intellectuals to destroy that "greatest enemy...