CAPTAINS IN REVOLT
Benson, H. W.
captains in revolt by H. W. BENSON Almost from the moment the AFL merged with the CIO, the new, giant labor organization took strong measures to clean its own house of the racketeers and the...
...Nothing can adequately explain away that failure...
...Crooks organized his own caucus and, campaigning on a platform of democracy and reform, was elected patrolman against the opposition of the Durkin administration...
...But he remained president of the local...
...They represent the top maritime craft...
...Six days later, a large membership meeting suspended the old officials and elected new ones...
...But' the active membership would not trust him because he was an international appointee...
...In any case, the new trustee had good intentions...
...they published newspapers and handbills...
...On each freighter, tanker, and passenger liner, four men hold full authority and responsibility: the master, popularly known as the captain, and his three mates...
...When the International cleared Jones, Tupper was staggered...
...He refused...
...On the contrary, when Atkins, on trial for grafting, needed good character witnesses, Paul Hall, head of the Seafarers International Union, came to his aid...
...Instead of threatening new expulsions, he admitted old injustices...
...Last spring, when the ballots were counted in New York's MMP Local 88, a rank add file reform ticket, the Party for Union Democracy, had won a remarkable victory for democracy after a battle against corruption which began in 1952...
...Is the two-party system possible in Local 88...
...Among the acts newly categorized as crimes were "gross disloyalty, or conduct unbecoming a member...
...He tacked up a warning: "Anyone posting or passing out scurrilous literature, or soliciting funds from brother members on the premises of the local or aboard contracted ships, will be brought up on charges and taken off the Night Mate list...
...After the elections, when they were declared defeated, the insurgents formed a continuing caucus...
...Local 88 President C. T. Atkins (also international president), who had presided over the expulsions, and a local job dispatcher were arrested for selling jobs...
...Sixty MMP members in Houston, reported Tupper, demanded an investigation of illegal shipping practices...
...Sometimes it is argued that the AFL-CIO has no power of subpoena and cannot gather the facts...
...In 1960, it seems about to become the first international to be restored to decency and democracy by its own rank and file, unaided by a single top official...
...Of seven seats on the local's executive board, the Party for Union Democracy won four...
...After his conviction, he continued to preside at local meetings, and the local executive board planned to restore him to office upon his release from prison...
...abuse of fellow members and officers by written or oral communication...
...perhaps the harried international officialdom was momentarily confused or off guard...
...It was too patent a fraud...
...During the trusteeship, their paid local staff was appointed and controlled by the trustee...
...In the MMP, rank and filers have had to fight the battle for decency and democracy by themselves, and they have given a spur to union idealists elsewhere...
...Before their mimeograph ink was dry, five reform leaders were expelled for "dual unionism," "unauthorized meetings," and similar offenses...
...While these important reform movements were rising on both coasts, an insurgent group organized itself in Texas' Local 20...
...The five expelled men were ordered reinstated and awarded damages...
...But experience has proved that action by top union officials is not enough...
...While on trial for job-selling, he continued to dispatch from the union's hiring hall...
...But the international, which had patiently tolerated corruption, moved quickly to defend the old regime against the insurgents...
...The International," announced his friends in a handbill, "has betrayed Local 20's membership in the same fashion it betrayed Local 88's...
...Too many respected labor officials feel uneasy before the democratic striving of rank and file reformers and are reluctant to stimulate or assist them...
...The International Organization of Masters, Mates, and Pilots, with a national membership of some 11,000, holds a strategic position in the maritime industry...
...There were codes and resolutions, suspensions and expulsions...
...Here, then, is an international union being reshaped by simultaneous waves of rank and file reform...
...The first round is over...
...He was asked to put the reform leaders on trial and deprive them of their right to speak, vote, and hold office...
...Sometimes, alone and unaided by unionism elsewhere, they conquer entrenched corruption...
...At the MMP convention in July, at which Lurvey was the self-appointed delegate from Local 88, a new constitutional clause was devised to take care of the dissidents in Local 88...
...It was triggered by Local 88 where an effective combination of persistent union militants and socially conscious professionals triumphed over bureaucrats and crooks...
...Later in the New York Supreme Court, Judge Baker commented, ". . . none of the signers of this resolution contemplated a trusteeship in the true sense...
...Lurvey acted promptly to smash the reformers...
...Later in court, he agreed to an election under impartial auspices...
...But the five men were not completely alone...
...Only one top post went to the corrupt incumbents...
...the restoration of autonomy where a trustee appointed by the international had arbitrarily ruled for two years...
...The local board's placid corruption was disrupted when the reformers, after a four year battle, won a decisive case in the New York State court of appeals...
...Atkins continued to chair the international executive committee until December, 1957, when he resigned after insistent private prodding from George Meany...
...The story began in 1952 when an opposition slate ran against the local administration, demanding democracy at meetings, honest hiring procedures, stricter accounting of union funds, and vigorous contract enforcement...
...The reformers had succeeded in electing a president, business manager, and first vice-president...
...Durkin is president of the International, too...
...An average master or chief mate earns $12,000 to $14,000 a year...
...the international did not trust him because he would not use the iron fist...
...Only in Russia is there only one party...
...For many, H. W. BENSON is a labor journalist who has been studying the struggle for reform in the corrupt sectors of organized labor...
...They appealed to labor attorney John Harold, who represented the five reformers for six years without a fee and even paid out-of-pocket expenses himself...
...Men in their forties make up the new administration, men who became seamen in their youth and have been union men for twenty years or more...
...and, in the end, they won...
...membership meetings were cancelled...
...Give any union member "his"—goes a familiar argument—and he is indifferent to how the official gets "his...
...Their platform demanded honest hiring in a local whose former president had sold jobs...
...No one in the official liberal or labor world paid the slightest attention...
...The trial disclosed a long criminal record for Atkins: highway robbery, larceny, assault, and embezzlement...
...This movement has not enjoyed the slightest aid or encouragement from high officials in labor...
...There are decent and democratic union leaders who sympathize genuinely with reform elements in other unions, but it remains a passive sympathy, barred from public expression by the diplomatic considerations that govern relations among the various officialdoms...
...But why no help for the reformers...
...Its reform victory portends a revamping of the International...
...there was not a ripple of protest...
...Crooks resigned as trustee and went back to the West Coast to find that the president of his local, Robert Durkin, was campaigning against him...
...The future of labor's war on corruption is at stake...
...What of tomorrow...
...And that, the argument cynically concludes, is why union corruption is tolerated...
...For a year after Atkins' arrest, nothing altered the union's routine, as though its top local and international official had never been indicted for graft...
...They wanted decency too...
...Will these democratic unionists, and others like them, get help...
...In 1953, this union received great notoriety for voting against the expulsion of the corrupt International Longshoremen's Association from the AFL...
...Local autonomy was instantly lifted...
...they maintained their caucus...
...There was no help from the AFL-CIO or its ethical practices committee...
...The next round requires a summons to local leaders and active militants among the rank and file union members...
...They—including Atkins himself—signed a resolution calling upon the international to take over the local "upon the express condition that Captain Roy Lurvey will be appointed as trustee...
...reform from above has reached an impasse...
...In April, 1958, the AFL-CIO Maritime Trades Department complimented the Local 88 trusteeship in an open letter...
...but here the evidence was spread out publicly, and was readily available...
...The Texans organized a Committee for Integrity and sought cooperation with Local 88...
...And there are thousands of them prepared to fight for decency in their unions...
...five reform leaders had been expelled...
...Somewhere there must have been a slip-up...
...The militant young Catholics put their meager resources —a mimeograph machine, a typewriter, a meeting hall—at the disposal of the reform unionists...
...Why is such a union in ferment...
...None has ever held high union office before...
...Pressures on Lurvey became intolerable, and he resigned, to be replaced by Charles M. Crooks, a local official from the West Coast...
...In New York, Local 88 with more than 1,800 members enrolls nearly one-fifth of the national membership...
...and a multi-party system, a startling proposal in a labor movement ruled normally by so-called "one-party governments...
...Lurvey, the man suggested by Atkins, was rushed in as trustee...
...activities which tend to bring the local organization of the international organization into disrepute...
...In every nation in the free world there are two or more parties...
...they asked in a handbill...
...the local officials were to continue in actual control...
...They were spurred on by members of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists which, in New York, had attracted a group of young students devoted to more than formal religiosity...
...Sometimes, as in Chicago's Lodge 113 of the International Association of Machinists, where two reform leaders remain expelled to this day, high placed federation leaders repress them with impatience...
...Early in 1958, they were available to give new leadership against the exposed Atkins regime, and events moved rapidly to a showdown...
...And from whom...
...the pay alone was not enough...
...Crooks and his friends set up their caucus as a permanent institution and now publish a paper, The Main Channel...
...A prime example is the case of the Masters, Mates, and Pilots Union, AFL-CIO...
...These men," he wrote of the expelled reformers, "were damaged by the officials of Local 88 at the time of their expulsion...
...On March 6, 1958, the executive board members decided to sacrifice the convicted officials—Atkins and the job dispatcher—in order to hold on to their power...
...Abruptly, in the fall of 1956, the reformers were publicly vindicated...
...But they never surrendered...
...The trustee was empowered to bring any member of the local to trial before a special drumhead court set up by the international executive committee...
...On December 10, 1958, the new International president, Durkin, received an angry letter from Joseph H. Tupper, who leveled serious charges against his local president, Robert L. Jones, a member of the International executive committee...
...captains in revolt by H. W. BENSON Almost from the moment the AFL merged with the CIO, the new, giant labor organization took strong measures to clean its own house of the racketeers and the hoodlums...
...Resentment against the trusteeship mounted...
...Lurvey was to be trustee in name only, and...
...But in Local 88, that explanation has a hollow ring...
Vol. 24 • September 1960 • No. 9
