LABOR'S NEW CRITICS

...Labor today lacks that vital spark which ignited the nation in the Thirties...

...There is challenge aplenty right in the hometown...

...Certainly, the story of such a march of literally thousands deserves to be told...

...No ideology," the old liberals outside the labor movement tell us...

...Labor must live with the contracts it has won...

...Or it's somebody like Robert Beagel, unsalaried officer of a Topeka Goodyear local union, who helps solve on-the-job problems of his fellow workers by day and travels throughout the Congressional district by night recruiting unionists to man the precincts...

...Some, but not all, of labor's friends are trying hard to corrupt the labor movement of today with the good cusr toms of the Thirties, for the truth of yesterday can become the half-truth of today...

...But the definition of a labor leader is a man who leads his fellow workers...

...Let them sit history out then...

...You can't get a young fellow active in the union without paying him...

...But we take it for granted our readers know about labor's good deeds and that most labor leaders aren't corruptionists," reply the critics with hurt feelings...

...Writers both inside and outside of labor have the precious gift of insight, the spark to light a darkened room...

...Political action for the CIO started in 1943 and for the AFL in 1947...

...Compare these attitudes with the labor movement of today...

...the road labor has traveled has been long and steadily upward...

...The AFL-CIO calls meetings all over the state and invites other organizations to join with labor to finance an independent tax study...

...Community services didn't exist in the Thirties, and therefore there couldn't be much to the program...

...Militancy, massed strength, and physical courage were needed to overcome tear gas, guns, and company thugs...

...Often it is a voice like James Yount, Kansas AFL-CIO vice president, that is heard alone among state organizations doing combat for the under-privileged in legislative halls...

...But there was no political action program, no broad move to accept responsibilities in society...

...Are they really interested in a balanced, thoughtful criticism of labor...

...The true test of selfless dedication comes over a period of many years in which you fight on endlessly without glory or the blowing of trumpets...

...But the man or woman of today who is active in labor has to stay up nights learning how to express himself clearly in writing and studying legalistic contract clauses and complicated economic charts just to help his fellow workers...

...One person as part of a team can cover many miles of sidewalks, knocking himself out for struggling strikers he doesn't even know in far-off Virginia...

...Today's truth of a socially responsible labor movement has marched beyond the truth of organization in the Thirties...

...He made no mention of the local union president who, despite threats from the Ku Klux Klan, appealed to the decency of the membership and won job integration...

...Criticize, but do it honestly...

...Mary's High School in Clinton, Iowa...

...There is a mutually agreed-to law of the plant, and the union must develop a sense of responsibility to live up to its agreements...

...Such a crisis is the Rubber Workers' boycott against O'Sullivan heels, which has become a cause celebre for labor...

...The legislature won't revise the tax laws, won't even study the tax structure...

...Of course, there couldn't be a strong labor movement to be responsible if it wasn't for organization, but «nce organized a union must look for other truths...

...If you devote 90 per cent of a diatribe describing several bad guys and 10 per cent of the time talking about the overwhelming majority of good guys, the obvious impression is that the good guys are in a tiny minority...

...Even today, organized labor comprises a minority of the total labor force...

...What is the biggest organization fighting for public interest legislation like TVA-type multi-purpose dams...

...With balance, perspective, and insight, your criticism can become a contribution...

...He has every bit the dedication of the man in the Thirties who got mad at the company, grabbed the flag, and called, "Come on, boys, this is it...

...Coronet, which has never claimed to be a liberal magazine, recently broke a 12-year-old story of 75,000 labor leaders actively serving the community in a dynamic, idealistic program of the AFL-CIO...

...They aren't like they were in the Thirties...

...Who fights for civil rights...

...When this method is used against union people, they have a right to resent it...

...Trembling Sir Bediveres writing articles and letters to The Progressive and other liberal magazines see their days darkened by the young, the new, the strange present order of social events, and with their eyes blurred by a hazy past and forgetting all sense of historical perspective, they view organized labor, Big Labor, with panicked alarm...

...WILLIAM ABBOTT is assistant education director of the United Rubber Workers of America, AFL-CIO...

...To these Sir Bediveres nearly all labor leaders (for this is the impression they create in their writings) are degenerates, ideological potbellies, Miami Beach playboys, money-grabbing Babbitts, and on a par with the officials of the National Association of Manufacturers...

...In the Thirties, labor's ideology was, and still is, a good one: "organize the unorganized...

...One labor writer dwelt on a mob of whites that threatened a Negro who had bid in on a "white job...

...If a racial explosion in Chicago or Keokuk has a worldwide effect, then America's cause in the world can be helped in the home town by helping to better conditions and relations among citizens...

...We are making history," said an ebullient youthful unionist in Tope-ka, Kansas, absolutely convinced that the liberal movement in the state is the labor movement and that the destiny of labor is leadership of Kansas...

...The salaried president of this local, Alvin Phillis, averages 12 hours a day on union work and still has time to throw businessmen into a panic by offering to head up the Community Chest...

...To walk with them is to know the soul of the modern labor movement...

...It is hard to get excited over arbitration cases which happen to somebody else or tediously to go over collective bargaining figures and charts...

...In the last century, whole state labor bodies denounced "social reformers" and political action, and some even disliked the minimum wage because they felt it would impede organizing activities...

...Today, conditions have changed...

...Who does battle against the sales tax in Kansas...

...In the 1930's, there was an explosion...

...Is mine an attempt to stifle criticism, to ask writers to throw away the black paint and use whitewash instead...

...This high school student has more historical perspective than many experts on labor today...

...Of course, there are ciphers in labor...

...What chance would many liberals now in office stand if it were not for organized labor's money and manpower...

...In the Thirties, a contract with the company, if it existed, was one or two pages long, and strikes more often than not settled controversies over working conditions...

...No one who has worked on the O'Sullivan boycott can help have his heart beat faster at the thrilling sense of solidarity among labor leaders of every union...

...But just try to find out about it in general publications...

...I submit that the proven idealism of 75,000 labor leaders who serve community causes...

...If you have the eyes to see, you can probably find injustice in your own neighborhood...

...Some critics inside labor carp on the sidelines that "this isn't the way we did things in the Thirties...

...Only recently has the mainstream of labor enlarged itself to branch out into general society...

...What money profit can tens of thousands of labor leaders find who are serving as unpaid shop stewards, on union committees, or working with community social agencies...

...Ignoring the noble to dwell on the base gives away the show of many of labor's critics...

...I think it significant that Coronet printed the story, for many of the old liberals have resolutely ignored the program...

...Speak of the muck and mire if you will, but never close your eyes to the noble and beautiful...

...It had a simple, direct appeal...

...Mass production industries were organized, and thousands of workers bubbled over with strident militancy...

...there's a place for everyone of good will...

...What does one expect in a movement of 15 million people...

...Here union leaders from "porkchoppers" to members of local union boycott committees walked all over cities like Boston, Los Angeles, and Cleveland, visiting shoe repair shops...

...Steelworkers, Mine Workers, Teamsters, Carpenters, those inside the AFL-CIO and those outside put aside their differences to walk together...

...This is regrettable, but it doesn't mean that union leaders are necessarily anti-democratic...

...William McComb is a student at St...

...The new American frontier is the community," declared a Milwaukee report of the CIO Community Services Committee...

...Here is a tiny labor movement, grossly outnumbered, facing a hostile climate...

...Labor needs poetry more than ever before...

...mainly without pay, is of more social significance than the misdeeds of a few whom labor writers have singled out as horrible examples and then generalized into a picture of the entire labor movement...

...He wrote an essay on labor in which he said that in the past labor was almost entirely occupied with bread and butter shop and organizing activities...

...Responsibility doesn't mean weakness or selling out to the NAM...

...Hungary and Algeria are important, but poverty, slums, and human misery still exist in our own backyard...

...Check the history books...

...There is not a person of my generation, the generation which has come into the labor movement in the Fifties, who does not wince when old unionists tell them: "Today's youth are soft...

...In Kansas, labor is asking farmers, schoolteachers, and others— even businessmen—to join in their spirited crusades...

...Maturity, the long haul, the lack of physical excitement mean less drama, and less drama means fewer in attendance at union meeings—fewer people doing the decision-making of the union...

...And who mans the wards and precincts in behalf of liberal political candidates...

...These more than 200,000 labor leaders in the country working to solve day-to-day problems need the help of others to keep up "the soaring mind and the flaming heart," as AFL-CIO Community Services Director Leo Perlis put it...

...This is a reasonable question to ask...

...A union can't rouse its members to strike every time a worker has a grievance...

...It didn't fit into the pattern of prejudice, the dialectic...

...Labor, of course...

...That is hog-wash...

...But there are all too many decadents among us who play harps for some eerie, non-existent past...

...Thousands more, however, acted as scabs and refused to be organized...

...There are more than 200,000 throughout the nation, and most of them are unpaid...

...But the test of any institution is what happens in a crisis...

...The liberal of yesterday who fails to change with the times becomes the conservative of today no matter what he calls himself...

...Here is an indication that something is starting to happen in the South...

...Labor needs the artist, the dealer in visions and dreams, the poets of a new society...

...In Mississippi, a top labor leader, Ray Smithhart, secretary-treasurer of the state AFL-CIO, singlehandedly smashes a White Council and gives workers a strong liberal voice...

...Labor's New Critics by BILL ABBOTT In Tennyson's poem, Morte d'Arthur, a fearful Sir Bedivere wailed: "And the days darken round me, and the years Among new men, strange faces and minds . . ." And a worldly-wise King Arthur answered: "The old order changeth, yielding place to new And God fulfills Himself in many ways Lest one good custom should corrupt the world...

...because of the imagination and dedication of its leaders it is fighting its opposition to a standstill...

...On the contrary, mine is a plea to the critics to talk about situations as they exist today with an open mind, unfettered by their dogma, in order to become more effective...

...A Mississippi local union dominated by whites votes in several Negro officers...

...Labor leaders are becoming more like businessmen every day...

...Many of the old liberals have yet to discover this new frontier, Here is a philosophy, an ideology of social responsibility being hammered out by similar labor committees throughout the nation...

...This is a condition which exists in every organization from political parties to churches, and by spending thousands of dollars on leadership education some unions are trying harder to overcome this handicap than most institutions...

...it's a sign of maturity, a growing up which the old romantics might well ponder...

...Any decent propagandist knows it's the general impression that counts...