Labor in Retreat: The AFL-CIO Tragedy

...Simultaneously "The National Right to Work Committee" could legitimately boast that in every contest where repeal of 14—b—the Taft-Hartley provision permitting states to perpetuate the open shops—was a major subject, the candidate who supported repeal was beaten...

...only in a new, large alliance with the multitudes of those most oppressed can it hope to regain its soul...

...Whatever the reason, Reuther was the man who wasn't there when the AFL-CIO chiefs met...

...One of the byproducts of that war has been palpable inequality of sacrifice...

...No labor movement in the free world is unaffected by these anxieties and surely no union membership in America is utterly untroubled...

...yet that must have been apparent to him last summer when he called for the confrontation...

...By and large the AFL-CIO leadership has permitted itself to be pictured as a collection of venerable men protecting a special interest at home and embracing a "holy war" abroad in a spirit of fanaticism rejected by men as diverse as Pope Paul, U Thant, and United Nations Ambassador Goldberg...

...Why...

...Certainly there are newspapers guilty of systematic antiunion bias...

...What is sadly lacking in the top councils is any climate of creativity or initiative, any disposition to ask hard questions, any stimulus to lively debate...

...But he did not make a big thing of it...

...For many years Reuther, perhaps the most skilled brain (if not the most politic figure) the modern labor movement has produced, was subjected to the indignity of serving as deputy to the UAW's bumbling R. J. Thomas...

...It has been unwilling to tell the country—or its own members —that the cost of a steadily expanding American war effort must almost surely be the imposition of at least selective wage-price controls...

...In fact the repeal campaign, despite all the money and manpower invested in it, was a curiously desultory affair...

...The answer to the first part of the question was as clear as it was discomforting...

...One may burlesque the event...

...Obviously Vietnam is only a fragment of the story...

...In any case, in his absence, the Council "unanimously re-endorsed" its previous foreign-policy positions...

...His absence was especially conspicuous because, during the previous summer at a comparable conclave, Reuther had sharply challenged some aspects of the Council's foreign-policy positions and demanded a full airing of such policies...

...And few men in recent years have believed that Reuther could fight his way to the top of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy...

...It is probably true that the defection in labor's vote can be ascribed in important measure in some areas to the same "backlash" pressures that swept some of middle-class suburbia...

...Apparently there hasn't even been an attempt to educate their members and their potential members...

...he was disturbed by the Council's intransigence on Communist China...

...The news was a large letdown, especially to those second-echelon union figures who had aligned themselves with the Trade Union Division of the Sane Nuclear Policy Committee and had been making quiet progress in crystallizing labor dissent in significant areas of foreign policy, including Vietnam...

...I am hardly suggesting that labor's losses at the polls can be neatly traced solely to disenchantment with its uninspired foreign policy declaration...

...I do not see how he can justify his abdication, which inevitably had the surface aspect of flight...

...The New York Liberal Party's Alex Rose has time and again exhibited a gift for the politics of progres-sivism rarely matched by any labor tactician—and done so in the face of the hostility of much of New York's labor officialdom...

...Another was that he had been jarred by the Democratic political defeat in Michigan and did not relish the notion of another public rejection...

...But there is clearly a wide segment of America torn by both moral doubt and strategic misgivings—about the bombings of the North, about the cynical caprices of the Ky regime, about the perils of Asian power plays that may blow up all bridges toward a Russian detente, about the credibility gap in Washington as each new cheerful "body-count" of the enemy seemingly fails to be reflected in any real change in the stalemate...

...But perhaps the underlying cause of the failure was that unionists and non-unionists alike had lost any passionate attachment to what used to be called "labor's cause...

...The war touches more and more homes—and union men and their sons have no immunity from the toll of war...

...yet labor has remained on the defensive, as if reluctant to rock the boat of "national unity...

...but the prospect was that there would at last be serious debate, without the inevitable monolithic manifestations...

...Perhaps there was a more far-reaching dilemma that Reuther found himself unable to resolve...

...One was that he knew he would lose many crucial test votes...

...Speaking for himself and his colleagues, AFL-CIO President George Meany expressed the view that there was "no question" that the organization's Committee on Political Education (COPE) had done "a better job than ever before" in "getting out" the vote of labor...

...It is obviously easier to state questions than to blueprint answers, for there are contradictions inherent in any attempt to find common ground along these lines...

...and the difference between steel's Abel and his matinee-idol predecessor, David MacDon-ald, is not one of years but of conviction...

...Labor is a big boy now, and its leadership is neither lean nor hungry...

...There is, of course, also the possibility that Reuther was finally fed up with his subordinate role in the AFL-CIO...

...There is no plea offered here for some nostalgic reenactment of the CIO story...

...Nowhere was there conveyed any sensitivity to the complexity and agony that even the least tutored citizen senses in the Vietnam conflict...

...Even more fundamentally, it was the extension of a continuing, behind-the-scenes conflict between Jay Lovestone, the architect of the AFL-CIO's "hardline" stance in foreign affairs, and Victor Reuther, a consistent advocate of a kind of pragmatic Stevensonian flexibility and sobriety...

...It was rarely effectively dramatized...

...George Meany came out of one of the most provincial, hidebound citadels of labor —the building trades—and there is a certain irony in my reproach to him for his earnest absorption in foreign policy...

...but he has long needed a new secretary of state to replace Mr...

...By its own scorecard, the AFL-CIO found that forty Congressmen who had consistently voted the labor line had lost their seats...

...Meany indicated that a large-scale exploration into the causes of labor's political ineffectuality would be promptly undertaken...

...But neither do they receive much—if any—notice in most of the gazettes that are labor's official house-organs...

...Many thousands of contemporary unionists are now proud property owners, absorbing the prejudices of their communities...

...But the non-emergence of many new, promising young men in labor's higher echelons is a serious matter, and it cannot be simply attributed to the affluence of our society...

...Asked whether the resolution meant that the Council felt it had made "no mistakes whatever" in the last eleven years, he responded: "Yep...

...It would entail a large alteration in approach to the unorganized consumer who views himself as the victim of a management-labor squeeze...

...if there is any place where it should be a subject of continued, concerted discussion, it is in the councils of labor...

...But such a prospect would require perhaps implausible revolutions in attitudes...

...It can only be charitably observed that the capacity to detect a wound when one has been beaten over the head is a minimal sign of survival...

...Many of these remarks will no doubt be construed by the Union League Clubs of Labor as a form of aid and comfort to the enemies of the workingman...

...We believe they have stood the test of time and therefore re-endorse them individually and collectively," the statement said...

...Nowhere was there exhibited any semblance of sophistication about the discords dividing the Communist world —to which men of labor should be most keenly alert...

...The question we must ask ourselves," he wrote, "is what have the unions been doing for the past fifteen years...

...He was Walter Reuther, who for many years has occupied an uneasy and ambiguous role as The Second Man in the hierarchy of what is called the unified labor movement...

...But the gains are scattered...

...There are positive developments, too, in the emergence of I. W. Abel's Steelworkers Union leadership, a throwback in some ways to the idealism of Philip Murray and further graced by a congeniality to fresh ideas...

...In many respects the problems modern labor confronts, as in the vast, beginning business of automation, call for more scholarship than showmanship, for inventiveness rather than picket lines...

...There is little residue of feeling that organized labor is seriously engaged in battles for justice...

...Yet the AFL-CIO Council proclaimed a self-righteous unanimity and indeed asserted a confidence in the wisdom and virtue of all its past judgments that rendered Dean Rusk, by comparison, a model of humility...

...that is where the clause is a major roadblock...

...This performance, I suggest, is one of many reasons why the AFL-CIO's political exercises are no longer taken seriously by large numbers of their members or much of the American public...

...Neither Meany nor many of his colleagues can be unmindful of the age-gap that has developed...

...Every poll reveals deep division and anxiety within the country over our escalation in Vietnam, and the seemingly dead-end nature of this brutalizing war...

...In too many cases the reverse is true...

...A meaningful challenge to the truculent foreign-policy rigidities of the Council, no matter how balanced his own phrases, would have been widely portrayed as a conflict between "pro" and "anti" Johnson forces...

...He was said to have been particularly aroused by a passage declaring: "While a minority has the right to dissent from the majority, disruption by even a well-meaning minority can only pollute and poison the bloodstream of our democracy...

...Yet, as Harry Golden recently pointed out in a New Republic essay called "Jim Crow and 14-b," too many AFL-CIO battalions in the South (and some in the North) have refused to recognize that Jim Crow is an ally of the open shop...

...The clash was a sequel to rumblings at the previous AFL-CIO national convention at which, as one of those present told me later, "the only issue was whether we should go all-out for Johnson's Vietnam position or take a tougher line than LBJ...

...Too often the preoccupation seems to be with "taking care" of those long ago recruited rather than with aggressively seeking out those who need help...

...Admittedly a substantial body of opinion favors more massive military measures in the desperate hope that we can "get it over with...

...only rarely—as in the California agricultural workers struggle—does the AFL-CIO seem genuinely concerned with the fate of those who have not already achieved the dividends of unionism...

...in the unconventional words of Edward Swayduck of the Lithographers...

...It would mean a vast, crusading educational effort among unionists susceptible to old bigotries...

...One notable labor figure was significantly missing from the post-election meeting at which the leaders of labor engaged in their morose meditations...

...Only Jack Potofsky of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers was reported to have expressed any reservations...

...Numerous theories have been offered concerning Reuther's decision to abstain...

...In many areas the result of the success in reminding union men of their responsibility to exercise their franchise was to help defeat Congressmen traditionally known as "friends of labor"—or at least to afford them inadequate protection...

...I fear they were never spoken...

...It might be added parenthetically that the unions in the newspaper industry have for the most part shown too little alarm over the trend toward monopoly journalism or offered any visible incentive to those who might be tempted to produce new, competitive, independent dailies, especially in the one-paper cities...

...And Reuther, who might have become the symbol of intelligent opposition—or at least quiet skepticism— seems almost to have entered into a phase of voluntary exile...

...he did not suggest that any clear clues were unfolded at the AFL-CIO Council meeting...

...But I know of few historic pronouncements uttered by labor's statesmen in recent times that were concealed from the public...

...But the inescapable fact is that, in the achievement of bigness, labor finds itself in the trap of political aloneness demonstrated last November—separated not only from much of the public but from much of its own constituency, treated with increasing disdain by political "pros," wondering why in union there seems to be so little strength on election days...

...There are no simple actuarial answers to the questions raised here...

...I have no way of knowing what a secret ballot of AFL-CIO members would reveal about their attitudes toward the war...

...The SANE unionists have attempted to initiate such a dialogue and so far, it must be said for Meany, he has shown no tendency to obstruct their efforts...

...Reuther had taken exception to the Council's pronouncements on the war in Vietnam, describing them as intemperate, jingoistic, and intolerant...

...He has been closely identified with the Johnson Administration and plainly values his association with the President...

...too often it sounded like a parochial labor affair, dedicated to the pursuit of more dues-payers...

...In these pages last month I argued that the future of the civil rights cause hinged on the evolution of a strategy of coalition, as urged by Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and others...

...That is why a young, spirited union like Local 1199 of the Hospital Workers in New York stirs so much excitement among those who watch it, and why the birth of a cab-drivers union—after thirty years of rebuff—was at least a momentary drama for which Harry Van Arsdale deserves^ honorable mention...

...the International Ladies Garment Union has hardly profited from the abdication of fiery, spirited Dave Dubinsky (whatever his views on Vietnam) in favor of a bland wheel horse...

...In Reuther's view such language would have been more appropriate to an American Legion manifesto than an AFL-CIO resolution...

...All the stale, sterile cliches of another era in the cold war were reintroduced, with old flags waved...

...dissenters, after receiving ritualistic assurance of their rights, were sternly reminded of their duties...

...yet this was in fact an extraordinary scene, and it has direct bearing on the point at which we began—the deteriorating political prestige and influence of organized labor...

...In short, the setback the AFL-CIO had suffered in Congress on this issue was appallingly ratified at the polls...

...Indeed, there have been too many moments when labor's national leaders were prepared to compromise or soft-pedal their support for civil rights measures in the illusory hope that this would gain them conservative Congressional converts to the 14-b repeal drive...

...But I also have a sentimental affection for many of those at whom these remarks may appear to be directed, and I would hardly devote so many words to this report if I shared the view now fashionable among some intellectuals that the AFL-CIO is irrelevant to the national future...

...The troublesome question, Meany conceded, was "where the vote went"—and why...

...In many respects, the same test confronts labor...

...It seemed hardly likely that the brothers Reuther could overnight alter the frozen attitudes of the Council...

...Then, a few days before the meeting, it became known that Walter Reuther would not attend, on the frail excuse that the pressure of UAW business prevented his presence...

...For whatever one's view of our course, Vietnam shadows the American landscape...

...Lovestone, the onetime Communist leader who has long and skillfully provided the rhetorical rationalization for Meany's instinctive anti-Communist simplicitudes, appeared finally to be facing a real challenge...

...It would risk the alienation of some new "aristocrats of labor" who have found their way to lily-white suburbias...

...It might well merely disclose the same degrees of division existing in other sectors of the populace...

...Lovestone...

...in the capacities for growth shown by the International Typographical Union's Bert Powers, whom too many publishers damned for too long as the original printer's devil...

...Its own paralysis on Vietnam invites unhappy analogy...

...Labor in Retreat: The AFL-CIO Tragedy by JAMES A. WECHSLER Tn the aftermath of last November's elections, the high command of the AFL-CIO gathered in Washington to contemplate the returns— among other things—and apparently found itself confronted by a vexing phenomenon...

...It is no longer an adequate answer to accuse the "capitalist press" of distorting events...

...It is too late in the day—and the century—for such nonsense...

...others live in neighborhoods where racial tensions have sharpened in recent months...

...But, with a few exceptions, it would be hard to find any general evidence of a major, long-run AFL-CIO educational campaign to combat backwardness and bigotry in its own ranks...

...I describe this only as one aspect of the lifelessness and mindlessness that pervades so much of the labor movement...

...I know of all the pro forma statements that have been made, of some progress made in curbing discrimination within unions, of some isolated endeavors in enlightenment staged by some unions in some territories...

...Norman Thomas still makes more sense than most of his youngsters...

...Individual unions have clung to business as usual, unresponsive to the widespread public tendency to fix the primary blame for inflation on labor's demands...

...perhaps he could no longer contemplate indefinite subordination in the AFL-CIO to Meany or whomever the latter might designate as his heir...

...Corporate profits are swollen...

...The doctrine of the infallibility of Jay Loyestone had been affirmed in a fashion worthy of an old-fashioned Communist Party convention...

...Basically the fight for repeal of 14-b is the battle to unionize the South...

...It is to an important degree the product of the isolation into which the labor movement has maneuvered itself and which, as I suggested at the start, is illustrated by its monotonous war cries on Vietnam...

...Meany elaborated at a press conference that the Council had reviewed nineteen major stands on world issues it had taken since the labor merger of 1955...

...But I do not view this as a generational war...

...It has made its case poorly and sporadically...

...The AFL-CIO has long viewed with derision the submissiveness of so-called labor bodies in totalitarian countries...

...that he had abandoned hope of emerging as Meany's successor and was preparing to strike out on a new course in which the United Auto Workers would cease to view the merged federation as an important phase of its life...

...Even the appearance of such independence would have been inconsistent with the posture Reuther has taken in the Johnson era...

...Sadly, even its defense of its "special interest"—the economic status of its members—has been singularly inept amid its intemperate investment in the Vietnam conflict...

...Somewhat grudgingly, Meany and his colleagues agreed to place these muted matters on the agenda of the November session...