THE LAST WORD
Getlein, Frank
THE LAST WORD Pattitude Frank Getlein Back in the days when Polish jokes were Irish jokes, Pat and Mike were digging a ditch, which is what the Irish did a lot of in those days. Mike was swinging...
...Mike was swinging away with the pick when he suddenly noticed Pat wasn't with him any more: Pat was standing on the edge of the ditch, his shovel on the ground, puffing on his pipe, carefully scrutinizing Mike's efforts...
...Well, they struck, but it was a highly sophisticated strike: The teamsters said they would not mount an across-the-board, everywhere-all-the-time strike, as in the days of yore, but would strike selectively, shutting down a geographical area or a particular industry...
...The united front of management got even more united at the threat of selective bargaining, drew up the wagons in a circle, and announced a lockout...
...One man up here supervising is worth ten men down there digging...
...Curious...
...for almost any Government agency allegedly dealing with or allegedly concerned about the dread scourge of inflation...
...The two situations are identical, but the second sends no chills of terror down the spines of editorial writers and bureaucratic spokesfolks...
...As the negotiations faltered last spring and eventually broke down, there was much speculation in the press about whether the Carter Administration would invoke the Taft-Hartley Act to force the feckless teamsters to deliver those rare medicines and perhaps even food for potentially starving cities...
...No teamster member, anywhere, would be allowed to work so long as the union was striking against any trucking management...
...No, Mike," said Pat...
...In a paste-over price-sticker situation, ownership says, "Pay us more money or we won't sell you the succulent artichoke...
...On the other hand, if a food chain decides to raise prices, it simply directs the clerks to go about the aisles pasting new stickers over the old...
...The results can be and usually are horrendous inflationary jumps — 10 per cent is the rule — but nobody knows about it...
...There was, for example, the report that corporate profits for the last quarter of 1978 were keeping the Guinness Book of World Records peoFrank Getlein is a contributing editor of The Progressive...
...The truck owners announced their lockout and nobody in the Government or the press showed the least interest in invoking Taft-Hartley to break the lockout and keep those precious medicines rolling to those widows and orphans...
...In fact, the Pat attitude — Pattitude...
...Begorrah," said Mike, pulling himself up from the ditch and grounding the pick, "we'll be through in no time, now we're as good as twenty down there...
...If a union strikes for, say, higher wages, and closes down the services and sales normally available to the public at large, it's a public event, reported in the papers, interviewed about and punditted about on the tube...
...Yet, when you think about it, the food chains' unilateral paste-job on articles already on the shelves is a kind of strike...
...Mike shouted...
...If the union hit Utah, no driver could work in New Jersey...
...With inflation hitting double digits again, one might have thought someone would suggest that conceivably, if the corporations hadn't taken all that money in profits, prices might have been lower...
...In the event, the teamsters didn't really strike...
...There has been a lot of Pat's attitude discernible in the national struggle, if that's the word, against inflation, and a certain amount of resentment at any hint of what may be called the Mike response on the part of the nation's ditch diggers and other workers...
...No such thing...
...pie working nights...
...Apparently, the widows and orphans fade and die when their rare medicines are kept from them by labor, but flourish and flower when the doses are denied them by management...
...Or, on the other hand, if prices hadn't been raised at the ruinous rate every grocery shopper knows so well, those corporate profits might not have been so spectacular...
...Come back in the ditch and lend a hand...
...Next came the feared teamsters' strike, certain to imperil the nation and jeopardize its cherished national security, to push inflation even higher and endanger the lives of widows and orphans in hospitals needing rare medicines only available by truck delivery...
...But what a shock and surprise awaited us partisans of even-handed justice...
...The basic problem here is partly semantic, and it's too bad the country's leading semanticist, S.I...
...Don't you realize the value of management...
...seems to prevail on the editorial pages of our newspapers and among spokespersons — can't we say spokespeople...
...In a strike situation the union says, "Pay us more money or we won't work," and the nation trembles...
...Hayakawa, is asleep in the Senate...
...Since there is no drama, the press ignores it, in sharp contrast to the frontpage news made by the unions' vain efforts to keep up with ever-rising prices and profits...
...The hope was that pressure selectively applied would crumble the united front of management...
...You would have to read a lot of respectable newspapers before you ran into that view on the editorial page...
Vol. 43 • September 1979 • No. 9
