Labor Enters a New Century

...It was this charge by President Reagan that spurred Kirkland to depart from AFL-CIO custom and signal last September's Solidarity Day mass march on the seats of governmental power in Washington...

...The caucus recommended six names, all black officers of AFL-CIO unions, and one of them a woman...

...They insist that failure on the part of the UAW to agree to far-reaching reductions in labor costs will force them to shift more and more of their production overseas, until there are no jobs at all for American auto workers...

...Going backward would be hard enough to sell to the rank and file under any circumstances when inflation is still close to double-digit levels, with no certainty that it will not start rising again despite a worsening recession...

...Worse still, large numbers are being permanently jolted out of their jobs while many more are forced to swallow pay cuts and make other painful concessions lest they, too, find themselves on the industrial slag pile...

...we have not...

...Scores of major corporations now sponsor PACs to raise campaign finances for their favorites, and the money they collect from business sources dwarfs the sums available to cope and other union fundraisers...

...Kirkland is also trying to remake the Democratic Party by dropping much of the pretense of nonpartisanship the Federation has always shrouded itself in...

...But now the economic pie has stopped expanding and the bigger slice unionized workers could count on every year is no longer there for millions of workers in what for four decades DOUGLAS A. FRASER were the country's most prosperous industries...

...His command is firm, his recognition of the need for change clear...

...With the unions in autos, steel, rubber and other basic industries being reminded that there are no sanctuaries in which they can find insulation for their privileged status, Kirkland may be tempted to invoke the spirit of solidarity-the spirit he has sought to make the engine of labor's hopes for progress in its second hundred years...

...Nor has it changed under Lane Kirk-land, valiantly though he struggles to translate the business-union doctrine enunciated by Gompers in terms that embrace all of humanity's noblest aspirations...

...The working people will never stop in their effort to obtain a better life for themselves and for their wives and for their children and for humanity....In other words, we go further than you...

...When the Federation leadership rejected all six nominees and substituted a black woman of its own choice-Barbara B. Hutchinson, 35-year-old director of women's affairs for the American Federation of Government Employees- Frederick O'Neal, the normally silent president of the Associated Actors and Artistes of America, who since the passing of A. Philip Randolph has been the only black on the Council, took the floor to complain that he was tired of having people make decisions for him without considering his feelings...

...To be truthful, the yardstick was not vastly different on the Congress of Industrial Organizations side of the 1935 divorce or the 1955 remarriage in the House of Labor...

...The tortured plight of those compelled to make such accommodations is being demonstrated in the rigorous experience of the United Auto Workers, the socially minded union that was the foremost pattern-setter on the wage and benefit front through all of the fat years...

...The primacy this country's unions have always assigned to the pursuit of more and better within the framework of the enterprise system was emphasized by the inclusion in the compendium of a copious extract from the celebrated 1914 "debate" between Samuel Gompers, the father of bread-and-butter unionism, and Morris Hillquit, the revered lawyer-mentor of the New York garment workers, championing the cause of democratic socialism...

...JohnL...

...Kirkland, who had done the missionary work required last year to win election of the first woman ever to the 35-member Executive Council, went out of his way this year to demonstrate that there were limits to how far the Federation would let itself be pushed in decisions on just who would be picked from the ranks of women and minorities in filling new Council vacancies...

...Indeed, both companies want to go a good deal further...

...But in Kirkland the Federation has a leader of supreme intelligence and sophistication, who has also shown subtlety and skill in building consensus...

...The obvious way to double the representation of both minorities inside the Council was to choose a black woman, and the Council's nominating committee enlisted the aid of a caucus representing some 30 black delegates before submitting its slate to the convention...

...The parade rolled merrily along in November with negotiation of a 39-month accord that will raise the wages of a half-million railroad workers by nearly a third, along with substantial boosts in pensions, health and welfare benefits, vacations and holidays...

...If the nation is to take seriously Kirkland's call for a "new partnership" of labor, business and government along the lines of the social contracts in West Germany and Scandinavia, the Federation will have to be imaginative in finding ways to temper the inflationary aspects of wage bargaining, and in fostering cooperative arrangements aimed at improving both productivity and job satisfaction by giving members a greater sense of involvement in the decisions affecting their work...

...The exchange took place at a hearing of a special commission established by Congress to investigate "the underlying causes of dissatisfaction" in industrial relations during the Administration of Woodrow Wilson...

...Instead, he took refuge in the excuse that Congress, in passing the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959, had put upon unions restraints that went further toward barring crooks and monitoring internal practices than were required of any business organization...

...As a token of the Federation's determination to move on these fronts, the convention voted to raise the per capita dues paid to the central body 42 per cent over the next two years-an increase that will swell its income by $9 million in 1982 and $14.4 million in 1983...

...The inviolability of the picket line as something uncrossable by any red-blooded unionist, whatever the merits of the strike involved, vanished long ago...

...On another front even more critical to repairing labor's battered image, and thus helping it win friends both politically and in new organizing campaigns, the return of the UAW has been a plus as well...

...Continuing along the old self-centered course represents another suicidal expression of precisely the kind of autonomous irresponsibility that labor has found too costly over the years in politics and in grappling with such internal cancers as racial discrimination and corruption...

...Their response may well be that Reagan was done in by snipers from the Left who never gave his program a fair trial...

...The failure of even one of the unions representing pilots, flight crews, mechanics, and other airline employees to respect the controllers' picket lines and thereby ground commercial air service made a mockery of the symbolic declarations of "solidarity" that poured out of the AFL-CIO and its affiliates as the President carried through, amid plaudits from the general population and large segments of labor's rank and file, his plan to decertify the controllers' union and fire all 11,500 strikers...

...Before the exchange ended, Hillquit had more than held his own in expounding the virtues of a cooperative commonwealth built on the precepts of democratic socialism...

...Every union going its own way makes little sense in an interdependent economy where giant multinationals are making all the pivotal decisions and government is in full retreat from any exercise of restraint...

...Needless to say, GM and Ford havea ready answer for a dilemma of that sort: Cut the wages of all Big Three workers to the Chrysler level...

...As for the Democrats, the assertive role organized labor is undertaking inside the party councils leaves them open to the charge that they are taking their orders from "labor bosses"-the same ogres the Republicans and such mouthpieces of big business as the American Liberty League used to try to exploit in Franklin D. Roosevelt's day...

...But he did not shake Gompers in the unionist's pragmatic conviction that the central mission of the labor movement had to be the quest for higher wages, shorter working hours and improved working conditions...

...There were five spots open at the convention as a result of one death and four retirements, and the word went out that four of them were earmarked for the white male presidents of big unrepresented unions...

...Two weeks prior to the convention, though, Kirkland testified before a Senate committee in all-out support of a bill that goes well beyond Landrum-Griffin in cracking down on faithless union officials...

...Gompers' basic thrust was a rejection of all "ism's" as too restrictive for a movement dedicated to achieving "the highest and best ideals of social justice" by securing for workers and their families a constantly larger share of the product of their labor...

...Without agreement to these givebacks, Uncle Sam would never have come forward with the $ 1.5 billion loan guarantee that kept Chrysler out of bankruptcy...

...What is less clear is that the most demoralizing collapse of Reaganomics will convince many tax-conscious workers that they were wrong to put their trust in the President and his promise to revivify the economy by getting government off people's backs...

...One result of its re-entry has been an easing of the tensions that used to exist between the Federation and many of its coalition partners over the size of the military budget...

...As the vanguard force agitating for higher statutory minimum wages, organized labor has benefited workers in this economic underclass, but union interest in organizing them is minimal outside the hospitals and the great corporate farms...

...This would make clear that labor does have the courage and the wisdom to recognize the need for a unified approach to the multifarious new challenges at the collective bargaining table...

...The frequency with which Kirkland felt constrained to rebuke the Congressional Democrats earlier this year for espousing tax and budget programs almost indistinguishable from those put forward by the Reagan White House is indicative of the perils for labor of over-close identification with the party...

...The frustrations still felt by many women, blacks and Hispanics over their movement into leadership positions in the Federation found expression in the nearest thing at the convention to an eruption of dissent...

...But something more than money will be needed to mend the huge breaks that have developed in labor's political rapport with its rank and file, just as new organizing tactics are necessary to attract a labor force that is today increasingly dominated by professional, white-collar and service employees...

...He never failed to end this litany without an expression of his own high regard for the capacity of the country's constabulary forces to enforce the law...

...Specifically, the measure would make it mandatory for union officials convicted of a crime involving betrayal of union trust to step down at once, even though they had not exhausted their right to appeal...

...But the task of Douglas A. Fraser, the UAW president, has been made vastly harder by the fact that for the first time since WorldWar II, his members are on the cellar steps of the split-level wage structure that has long inflicted cruel hardship on workers in the apparel trades, textiles, laundries, hotels and restaurants, and similar chronically low-wage industries-workers, mostly women and minorities, who year after year have had to watch the gap grow between their pitiful pay standards and those in autos, steel, oil, and other "rich" industries...

...That anti-union campaign backfired, but over the years industry decided it would go labor one better with the Political Action Committee idea as currently embodied in the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education (cope...

...through increased willingness to commit itself on policies and preferences, it is endeavoring to become a dominant element in shaping the party's program and determining who will run under its banner...

...HrLLQurr: "You will strive for better...

...The most dismaying recent reminder of the extent of its absence was provided in the air traffic controllers' strike...

...Still remembered from that era is the "Clear It With Sidney" label that the GOP sought to make a Democratic badge of shame in 1944 when the CIO organized its first full-fledged Political Action Committee under the chairmanship of Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers...

...Rather, they expect that all the inner contradictions of the Reagan program and the disarray within the Administration will combine to create a debacle of such dimensions that the tide will shift sharply back toward popular support of an expansive, compassionate role for centralized government on the New Deal-Great Society model...

...Can a movement so dependent on what Jimmy Hof fa used to describe inelegantly yet accurately as "bringing home the highest buck" for its dues-payers discover a satisfactory substitute to lift it out of the doldrums when major unions find it necessary to bargain for less, not more, to keep companies alive...

...This is a high-risk undertaking for both labor and the party...

...Last year the increases averaged 9.2 per cent in the same period...

...It's like asking the people of New York to select a Congressman for New Jersey," he said...

...However, Kirkland has exhibited considerable skill in forging and maintaining a broad coalition to fight cutting of social programs in both the Carter and Reagan regimes...

...If anyone can restore the movement to its indispensable place as an effective countervailing force in the American economy and public life, he is the one to do it...

...Although both leaders had been called as witnesses, they got into a colloquy where each took on the role of interrogator while the commission members listened in fascination...

...And those who are left are earning $300 a month less than General Motors andFord workers doing the same work, a two-tier system no union can live with for long...

...Major contracts negotiated in the first nine months of 1981 covering 1.5 million coal miners, supermarket employees, building crafts, and many additional groups provided first-year increases averaging 11.5 per cent, and that average does not include the automatic increases many pacts assure under cost-of-living escalators...

...Gompers: "It won't stop at all...

...What the Federation leaders are counting on most to enable them to turn the 1982 Congressional elections into Solidarity Day II, and to go on from there to recapture of the White House in 1984, is not outspending the opposition...

...RASKIN As the AFL-CIO marked the centennial of the modern American labor movement November 16-19in New York, no theme was sounded more insistently than the need for adapting to the breathtaking pace of social and technological change...

...It has given Kirkland the reinforcement he needed to take at least a modest step toward convincing the community that the Federation is serious about trying to rid itself of the racketeering elements that have become increasingly powerful in several of its most prominent unions in recent years...

...The need for originality is even greater in the two fields that are properly uppermost on labor's agenda for the 1980s-political action and organizing the unorganized...

...Up to now Sol C. Chaikin, president of the International Ladies' Garment WorkersUnion, has been a lonely voice in the AFL-CIO high command, urging that the movement assign some priority to addressing the problems created internally and externally by the ever-widening chasm between the two worlds of unionism-to say nothing of the even larger spread between scales in the advantaged unions and the catch-as-catch-can earnings of the working poor outside any union...

...Lewis, Philip Murray and Walter P. Reuther bore little resemblance in rhetoric or personality to their AFL opposite numbers (or even to one another), but all three recognized that the foundation of any union's ability to command the loyalty of its members had to be the consistency of its success in bringing back more and better for its members...

...Under Douglas Fras-er's prodding, the Federation now combines its continued strong support for adequate national defense with a warning that this does not mean a blank GEORGE MEANY check for the Pentagon or laxity in rooting out waste in arms spending...

...A. H. Raskin for many years the chief labor correspondent of the New York Times, is a frequent contributor to The New Leader and the co-author of David Dubinsky: A Life with Labor...

...The history of airline labor conflicts is an almost unbroken string of situations where every union has scabbed on its striking brothers...

...Now the AFL-CIO is not only the Democratic National Committee's chief bankroller...

...Even that Federal life raft, though, was insufficient to keep the company from having to cut tens of thousands of workers off its payroll...

...When Hillquit pressed the American Federation of Labor's founder-president for clarification on what the movement would do once it had won the best obtainable wages and conditions for workers, Gompers replied: "Why, then, we want better...

...Nor is the record unblemished elsewhere in labor...

...Organized labor has been the most potent institutional force pushing for that concept of governmental responsibility for a half-century, and it is clear that it will have to be-as it was on Solidarity Day- the hub of any progressive coalition that could hope to check or reverse the country's political surge toward the Right...

...For millions of Americans, the finest fruit of the reunification of the AFL and CIO in 1955 was the strength it gave George Meany to expel the giant International Brotherhood of Teamsters and other tainted unions after televised Senate hearings exposed the degree to which they had become vassals of the underworld and how their own leaders and members were too frightened or too powerless to clean house...

...The boost in the Federation's per capita dues and any prospective yield from the voluntary political check-offs labor is trying to induce employers to establish in union contracts will not reduce business' financial edge...

...So is the strong rejection of Jimmy Carter by rank-and-file unionists in the 1980 elections...

...You have an end...

...HnxQurr: "Now my question is, Will this effort on the part of organized labor ever stop until it has the full reward for its labor...

...In construction, where the skilled crafts already receive wages double or triple those in the "poor" industries, and where the unions lose no opportunity to bemoan the abysmally low volume of housing starts, skyrocketing mortgage rates and threats to weaken Davis-Bacon Act guarantees for payment of "prevailing wages" on government projects, first-year pay increases have averaged 13.9 per cent this year...

...The prospect for further solidification of groups that have more in common with labor than they have in conflict has been heightened by the return to the AFL-CIO last July of the United Automobile Workers...

...Moreover, the reality is that this year has brought an acceleration, not a slowdown, in the brisk pace of the wage parade in industry generally, notwithstanding the highly publicized cases of surrender in auto plants, tire and metal-working factories, airlines and other beleaguered enterprises...

...In his presidential keynote, Lane Kirk-land was quick to remind the representatives of 15 million space-age workers that their ranks did not include any delegates from the mainstays of the tiny band that gathered in Pittsburgh 100 years ago to found the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions- among them such now forgotten groups as the Horse Collar Workers, the Architectural Cornice Makers, the Box Sawyers and Nailers, and the Umbrella and Walking Stick Makers...

...The UAW members at Chrysler have already been obliged to surrender a billion dollars in wage increases they would have been entitled to under the 1979 Big Three contract formula...

...The abandonment of a group whose dismemberment had fateful implications for every union, public or private, had little to do with the illegality of their walkout or the arbitrariness of the manner in which it was called...

...When Kirkland took over the Federation helm two years ago, he shrank from any frontal attack on the resurgent forces of corruption inside the House of Labor...

...This accent on collective bargaining gains as the cornerstone on which rests organized labor's capacity to play an effective role in society did not change under William Green or George Meany...

...Gompers: "Yes...

...In endorsing the main points of the legislation, Kirkland stressed the Federation's belief that labor leadership was a calling, not a business, and that the morals of the marketplace were not adequate to guide those who entered it...

...But the Federation's zeal for self-policing evaporated when the teamsters prospered in exile while AFL-CIO unions stagnated...

...Strains of this kind within labor's ranks are multiplied a thousand times in the endeavor to hold together an encompassing alliance with environmentalists, consumers, the elderly, civil rights groups, and miscellaneous other challengers of the status quo, whose goals often collide with the protectionist impulses of labor where jobs are at stake...

...The fantastic productivity of the American economy, bolstered by the richness of this country's natural resources and the substantial contribution of its enterprise-oriented work force, made it perfectly viable for organized labor to assign such centrality to the expectation of a steadily advancing standard of living for workers and their families via the bargaining table and the picket line...

...The road into labor's second century is strewn with booby traps, some of them self-planted, some of potentially devastating destructiveness...

...That left one vacancy available for assignment in a Council with only one black and one woman as members-a situation neither minority considered emblematic of the anti-bias principles that had made the AFL-CIO the spearhead of the drive to outlaw racial and sexual discrimination in industry or unions in the Omnibus Civil Rights Act of 1964...

...The arbitration machinery set up by the AFL-CIO two decades ago to keep unions from stealing members from one another has been working creakily, especially in the civil service field, where three of the Federation's largest affiliates fought in the courts and before administrative tribunals this year for control of New Jersey's state employees...

...Appeals by Jerry Wurf s American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees for convention action to lessen internecine warfare were put over till next February's Executive Council meeting...

...The U AW and the Communications Workers of America, headed by Glenn Watts, have been pioneers in encouraging experiments to increase worker participation...

...Despite all the brave talk at the convention, solidarity is something less than total inside the Federation...

...Unfortunately, lingering hostility of most unions toward ventures of this kind has allowed employers-including some of the most intransigent union-haters??to persuade their employees that they respect them as individuals with worthwhile ideas while unions want only to take their dues dollars and make the decisions for them...

...Regrettably, however, the very fact of the day's success in bringing hundreds of thousands of unionists and their allies to the streets of the capital to deplore the Administration's "Bonzo economics" has had the negative effect of restoring the complacency that remains one of labor's most unshakable deterrents to self-examination and change...

...Kirkland did his best to jolt his flock out of excessive smugness with his forceful keynote address, indubitably the best oratorical effort of his career, as much because of the uncharacteristic vigor of his delivery as the sparkle of his always redoubtable wit...

...Called in the face of much head-shaking by more timid or deal-minded union chiefs, the mobilization represented a spectacular vindication of Kirkland's vision...

...Nothing angers union leaders more than the criticism that they have lost touch with their membership...

...But if that necrology made graphic the importance of re-examining all of labor's most hallowed programs and practices, an anthology of historical readings prepared for the convention at the direction of the Federation's scholarly president provided equally compelling evidence of how difficult it is likely to be for this tradition-encrusted institution to move far enough fast enough...