Labor's Stand on McGovern: Two Views 1. CARL GERSHMAN
TWO VIEWS Labor's Stand on McGovern During the campus turmoil of the mid-'60s, a small group of student activists vigorously opposed the tactics and ideology of the New Left. Arguing that reform...
...In the days when Meany was fighting to remove Communists from the labor movement, McGovern was working for Henry Wallace...
...Given Meany's attitude toward Communism, he can hardly look kindly on a Presidential candidate who has criticized "cold war paranoia," referred to Communism as "another economic system," offered a sympathetic security rationale for the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, declared that preventing the spread of Communism is "a choice other countries have to make," and said "it would not fundamentally affect our interests" if India and Brazil turned Communist...
...Steven Kelman, YPSL's national president in 1969-70 and author of "Push Comes to Shove," a critique of the 1969 student strike at Harvard University, explains why he feels the labor movement should back McGovern...
...As a top AFL-CIO official put it, the Federation does not want any part of the "debacle of the McGovern candidacy...
...Now the AFL-CIO is notifying him that its interests are not identical with those of the party and that its support does not come automatically...
...Today, some of the staunchest original advocates of that policy find themselves divided by the AFL-CIO's rejection of Senator George Mc-Govern's bid for the Presidency...
...Yet if that change promises to make the Democratic party the province of a small elite and turn the Republicans into the new majority, it can be argued that labor has no choice but to oppose it...
...This is the party of working people...
...He insulted the labor movement...
...In addition, by remaining neutral, Meany is in a better position to bargain with the Republicans...
...George Meany's personal lack of enthusiasm for McGovern derives in large measure, no doubt, from their differences on foreign policy questions...
...What has been popularly characterized as a conflict of generations may turn out to be more accurately described as a class struggle: A recent Gallop poll found that the children of Middle America and of trade-union families do not differ as much from their parents as the New Politics advocates-the children of the professional elite-would have it...
...To protect labor's interests, Meany has promised that his Committee on Political Education (cope) "will work like the devil for candidates in the House and Senate" favorable to the union cause...
...This is not simply a case of labor behaving like a sore loser: Meany and other AFL-CIO leaders see the New Politics as a threat to the well-being of their movement...
...McGov-ern's fine words for "the workers" reinforce rather than refute this view, since they tend to call to mind that other champion of a New Populism, George Wallace, who also addressed himself to working people...
...McGovern would dispute this, especially now that he is so desperate for union support...
...Moreover, despite the New York Times' charge that AFL-CIO leaders are "uninterested in even the most perfunctory appraisal of rank-and-file sentiment," Meany couldn't ride roughshod over his members if he wanted to...
...After all, the South Dakota senator is a spokesman for the revisionist view of history that places most of the blame for the cold war on the United States and regards the Soviet Union as interested primarily in its own security...
...he has merely claimed that he has the answers to working people's problems while Wallace didn't...
...Ironically, the UAW can hardly be said to be in closer touch with its membership than the AFL-CIO: It couldn't prevent a Wallace landslide in the Michigan primary, nor is it likely to be able to win the state for McGovern in November...
...Still, Meany's decision was based more on pragmatic considerations than on ideological ones...
...Already the Nixon Administration has stopped pushing a bill to prevent strikes in the transportation industry...
...This accounts for the ambivalent attitude of the McGovern forces toward labor: First they denounce organized labor and claim that union "power brokers" don't represent anybody...
...he never consulted Meany about the divisions within Democratic ranks...
...Labor's opposition to McGovern, it should be made clear at the outset, goes far deeper than its anger over his past votes for "right-to-work" laws and against minimum-wage bills-Grounds on which Richard Nixon is obviously much more vulnerable...
...Few liberal journalists, however, have taken the trouble to seriously examine George Meany's reasons for not supporting the Democratic nominee...
...Significantly, McGovern has never shied away from the comparison...
...In his nominating speech for Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson at the Democratic National Convention, United Steelworkers President I. W. Abel stated the unions' case clearly and concisely: "We're tired of the politicians who denounce 'big labor' and 'labor bosses' on Monday, and then come to us on Tuesday with their hands outstretched...
...Only one of the three television networks covered Abel's speech, and it was almost entirely ignored in the print media...
...Meany and many other members of the executive council firmly believe that the Democratic ticket will cause widespread defections by workers, Catholics and Jews, leading to a "catastrophe" for the party in November...
...These may have been among the things on the union chief's mind when he told reporters, "We don't think that this man is good material...
...Indeed, it is difficult to escape the feeling that were it not for the apparent attachment of these writers to the New Politics, we might be getting a somewhat different picture of labor's role in the struggle now going on within the Democratic party...
...to transform "big labor" into little, fragmented labor...
...If it happens that the bright hopes of July are dimmed by the pale light of November, some liberal Democrats may take a second look at the labor movement and reconsider the course they have chosen...
...Carl Gershman, YPSL national vice chairman and director of the Youth Committee for Peace and Democracy in the Middle East, offers his reasons for supporting the Federation's decision...
...From the unions' perspective, both men shared the same objective: to dislodge workers from their traditional loyalties to organized labor...
...he preferred lawyers to unionists on his delegate slates...
...then they tum around and proudly display their endorsements from the autoworkers and meatcut-ters...
...Labor has hardly sought to hide its point of view...
...If some of these new politicians had worked as hard to support our party as they subsequently worked to reform our party, we would be meeting here today to renominate and lay plans to reelect President Hubert Humphrey...
...In short, he acted on the assumption that labor would have to support him if he won the nomination...
...The extent of this division is reflected in the following articles by two leading spokesmen of the Young People's Socialist League...
...In fact, his own constituency is deeply divided on the Presidential issue...
...The liberal press has portrayed the Federation's top leaders as "autocrats" and "nabobs" who, in the words of one New York Times writer, are "cast in the role of King Canute holding back the waves" of change...
...Recent polls show a majority of union members supporting Nixon...
...But unionists remember how he scoffed at "labor bosses" before the convention and how his cadres sat on their hands while Humphrey went down to a narrow defeat in 1968...
...Though it is true, as Meany has always maintained, that the AFL-CIO does not control the rank-and-file vote, the Federation's political clout is still formidable, as was demonstrated in 1968 and again in 1970...
...History may prove that Meany is in fact playing the part of a King Canute, trying to hold back the waves of a fundamental change in American politics...
...Give us a candidate working people can support...
...approximately five will go with Nixon, and the rest will probably remain neutral...
...What lingering doubt there may have been on this score was wiped out by McGovern's violation of all the rules that have traditionally governed the alliance between labor and liberals...
...And, according to one labor official, an AFL-CIO survey indicates that only about 30 of the 117 international unions affiliated with the Federation will endorse McGovern...
...Arguing that reform could be achieved only by operating within the system, they sought to counter the prevailing mood by supporting labor's strong plea at the time for a new coalition politics embracing workers, liberals and minorities...
...1. Carl Gershman The AFL-CIO executive council's refusal to endorse Senator George Mc-Govern's Presidential candidacy has further tarnished the image of the labor movement in liberal circles...
...Of far greater concern is the feeling that the prairie populist and the New Politics movement he represents want to deny organized labor the role it has played in the Democratic party since the New Deal...
...Instead, they have merely served up a host of superficial references to the conflict between a new generation of young idealists and the entrenched political and labor "establishment...
Vol. 55 • September 1972 • No. 17
