Labor's Past and Present

...Withal the inference is unmistakable that the union is not a co-manager of industry...

...From varying vantage points the detail of the transformation is filled in by a trio of works...

...Brody's book goes farther back into time than Bernstein's and begins with the origins of steel unionism in the immediate post-Civil War period and ends with the virtual destruction of steel unionism in the aftermath of the great steel strike in 1919...

...The senior author is the late Sumner H. Slichter, and his colleagues James J. Healy and E. Robert Livernash, all of Harvard...

...All of the books' authors, in varying combination, were trained or sponsored by Harvard or California...

...you can take or leave the authors' theories without affecting your respect for their research...

...In all of these works the quality of the underlying scholarship is high...

...6) and Father Theodore V. Purcell (Blue Collar Man—Patterns of Dual Allegiance in Industry...

...The factors working on steel unionism represent a microcosm of the economic and social forces that transformed industrial America in the post-Civil War period: "trustification," eastern European immigration, rapid technological change, business control of the political process, the systematic repression of unionism, and the romantic, self-indulging, threadbare ideologies which the business hosts fabricated to justify the state of affairs...

...Here again, their conclusions are prudently qualified, but I do not believe that they prove their case, at least for the United States—which is the only one of their cases which I feel qualified to comment on...

...Galenson undertakes to illuminate the problem of union democracy in the United States by examining union democracy in other national contexts...

...The ingredients of this "conspiracy" are to be found in general in Irving Bernstein's The Lean Years (Houghton Mifflin...

...As Horowitz points out, the problems of internal accommodation within the unions and within management have been more demanding perhaps than the accommodation between the union and management...

...From the struggle for survival the unions have moved into a sytem of shared authority rooted in collective bargaining...

...2.25) and by Arthur M. Ross and Paul G. Hartman (Changing Patterns of Industrial Conflict...

...Horowitz examines how a diversity of unions and a diversity of employers organized themselves to develop a viable collective bargaining relationship...

...The Lean Years covers a broader territory over a narrower time span than Brody's book, but the ingredients remain the same...

...The Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers, at first an important union in the developing labor movement, applied a narrow craft-consciousness and an equally constricting anti-ethnic policy in the face of a technology and a changing labor force that demanded industrial unionism and a policy of ethnic assimilation, if the union was to survive...

...He is an informed observer with a capacity to capsulize important tendencies in a variety of national labor movements, but nowhere in this useful investigation could I find any factual justification in the experience of other countries which would support Galenson's suggestion for a governmental policy in the United States to foster union rivalry...

...Slichter and his colleagues lay out the details of an extraordinary achievement in the evolution of democratic industrial government...

...John Wiley...

...Since the labor movement's antiquity is in point of time close to its present, the contrast with "only yesterday" is striking...

...Father Purcell makes too much of the dual allegiance concept...

...This contour of events comes to life in Brody's engrossing, objective, and scholarly performance...

...The insight which emerges constitutes indispensable raw material for an understanding of trade unionism in the life of a plant community...

...He is particularly concerned with the effects of union rivalry on the quality of union democracy...

...The use of the term "allegiance" upgrades this fact into a rather more significant concept than, I think, is warranted...

...from the bitter struggle for survival to full-fledged participation in industrial society...

...The present collection of works is an outgrowth of the Harvard-California research axis...

...7), and in specific in the steel industry in David Brody's Steelworkers in America, The Non-union Era (Harvard University Press...

...Harvard University Press...

...6) investigate two widely different case situations from rather different perspectives...

...In an earlier generation of labor studies the University of Wisconsin, Johns Hopkins, and Columbia were the prime movers...

...There is a tragic quality in this chapter of American labor history...

...Harvard University Press...

...In varying degrees and in varying combinations of allegiances Father Purcell seeks to demonstrate that across-the-board class struggle is not and need not be an intrinsic part of the employer-employee relationship...

...6.50...

...Father Purcell is a sociologist and his angle of vision is the extent of "dual allegiance" by the worker— that is, the worker's capacity to demonstrate degrees of attachment both to the management which employs him and to the union of which he is a part...

...This monumental enterprise in size and conception undertakes with considerable success, I think, to lay out the collective bargaining basis for the union exercise of power in industry as that power relates to the job rights of workers and management...

...8.75) by a trio of authors...

...Some of these books are more important for their valuable fact content than they are for the conclusions and inferences which are drawn from the facts...

...Irving Bernstein concerns himself with the plight of the American as worker and as unionist from the early Twenties to the Great Depression...

...The most important is The Impact of Collective Bargaining on Management (Brookings Institution...

...More important than the "dual allegiance" concept in Blue Collar Man is Father Purcell's sensitive ear and human feeling...

...Galenson (Trade Union Democracy in Western Europe) also rides a hobby horse...

...that its role is limited to defense against absolute power, and that in general the collective bargaining relationship has worked to the advantage of all relevant interests, including the public interest...

...Morris Horowitz (The New York Hotel Industry-—A Labor Relations Study...

...The method of comparative labor movement analysis is the perspective utilized by Walter Galenson (Trade Union Democracy in Western Europe...

...To be sure, he advances it gingerly, but I cannot discover in reading his work why he has any hope for it at all...

...The collection incidentally is interesting for what it suggests about the study of labor as an academic interest...

...University of California Press...

...The facts relating to apprenticeship, hiring, seniority, work rules, health, welfare, and pensions, work standards, methods of payment, discipline, grievances, and arbitration all convey something of the complexity and ingenuity of the network of rules by which the relationship of the worker to management is governed...

...What is involved here is that a worker can like both his employer and his union...

...The economist is still the most numerous of the investigators, but his place in the study of labor is being challenged by the historian (Brody), by the sociologist (Purcell), and by the economic historian (Bernstein...

...The interaction of economics and people produces the same hostility to an effective labor movement: the strikes of desperation, the labor injunction, the insensitivity of laissez-faire ideology to human suffering, the bumbling efforts of a labor movement cowed by circumstances which it did not understand into a posture of supplication...

...Nor were the forces destructive to permanent unions to be found only in the external environment...

...Ross and Hartman seek to document the trend toward the "withering away of the strike" in modern industrial society, whether the industry is of the advanced kind as in Northern Europe and in the United States and Canada, or of the underdeveloped kind or notsodeveloped kind in Asia and in the Mediterranean...

...This time the background is provided by an economy on the brink of collapse...

...Father Purcell studies the attitudes of workers and management in three packinghouse situations involving three separate unions: the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, the United Packinghouse Workers, and the unaffiliated Brotherhood of Packinghouse Workers...

...Ross and Hartman (Changing Patterns of Industrial Conflict) strain a little too hard for my taste in developing the "withering away of the strike" in the United States...

...Somewhere I recall John R. Commons observing that all of the elements in the American environment seemed to be engaged in a conspiracy to frustrate the emergence of effective unionism...

...The legal protection of labor's right to organize provided the leverage for the revolutionary transformation which industrial relations have undergone since the initiation of the New Deal...

...The capacity of human beings to work out creative concepts and mechanisms in the interest of civilized order is fully revealed here...

...Both in the steel story and in "the lean years" it is likely that even a braver and bolder labor movement would have come to the same end...