What Revolution?
Karson, Marc
What Revolution? The Labor Revolution, by Gus Tyler. Viking. 279 pp. $6.50. Reviewed by Marc Karson Gus Tyler, assistant president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU),...
...Reviewed by Marc Karson Gus Tyler, assistant president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), contends that American labor is on the verge of a "new era of unionism" which will be a successful "response to a changing society...
...Tyler upholds labor's political policy of working "through the established political patterns" as being "productive...
...The "revolution" that is taking place in America is not a "labor revolution" but is one taking place among the Negroes, students, churches, academia, and progressive segments of the Democratic Party...
...He is confident that "the number and percentage of Negroes in unions will continue to rise" and just as other ethnic groups gained entry and finally '"top posts" in the unions, the Negro, too, will follow this pattern...
...One vital fact is that since 1956 union membership has declined almost one million from a 16.6 million membership, although non-farm employment since 1950 has grown from fifty-two million to more than sixty-six million today...
...He does not comment on the tremendous criticism of labor's racial practices contained in reports of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, city and state human relations commissions, the writings of NAACP Labor Secretary, Herbert Hill, Harlem CORE's press release on the ILGWU, or the statements of Walter Reuther...
...In this revolution "legions of new members wearing white collars and working for salaries will pour in" led by a "younger generation" of leadership who "impatiently awaits its cue" to inaugurate "a vigorous resurgence of collective bargaining" for the protection of the worker in an "era of rapidly revising technology...
...In his chapter on "The New Negro" Tyler writes that Samuel Gompers "was filled with moral fervor" in his desire "to integrate the Negro into the American labor movement...
...With few exceptions, organized labor has become a counterrevolutionary group allied with the military-industrial-political establishment...
...Voluminous evidence contradicting Tyler's optimism exists in the writings of A. H. Raskin, Sidney Lens, Dick Bruner, Richard Lester, George Brooks, Paul Jacobs, Sumner Slichter, B. J. Widdick, Daniel Bell, Harvey Swados, Ben Seligman, Tom Brooks, and others...
...As an historian of the Gompers period, I find this statement incomprehensible...
...Tyler writes that labor seeks to coalesce "with internationalists crusading for a world of peace," but its support of Jay Lovestone's policies and the Vietnam war, as well as its rejection of a Democratic peace candidate to oppose Johnson's candidacy, are deeds that do not match his words...
...As for today, Tyler says the AFL-CIO's policy is to admit "Negroes into every last corner of the labor movement...
...In the political area, labor "shows greater strength and expertise than ever and remains the mass base of a liberal-labor coalition...
...The large number of intellectuals who have left staff positions in labor in recent years (and the youngsters who have not replaced them but entered the civil rights and peace organizations) are the living rejoinder to Tyler's version of the vitality of the labor movement...
...The historical record, however, is that since the helpful Wagner Labor Act of 1935, the unions have suffered a string of political reverses—the War Disputes Act of 1943, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1958, and right-to-work laws in about twenty states...
Vol. 32 • March 1968 • No. 3
