Richard Reeves on Political Books
Richard Reeves on Political Books A couple of years ago I read an interview with Walter Cronkite in an airline magazine. He was joking about the mail he got and said that one guy even wrote to...
...They could make one that sounded like Cronkite and looked like Mary Tyler Moore...
...But I have also been a reporter for the aggressively non-union Newark Evening News, raising a family on $90 a week...
...The bottom line, said the president of RCA the other day, is that NBC has lower profits than CBS-that was the other day that NBC, despite record profits, laid off 300 non-union executives...
...The clunks who run television would love it-an anchorman who didn’t want a new contract, who could be programmed not to cause trouble with things like opinions, and who wouldn’t age...
...Would you have done those things if there was no union threat...
...The bosses gradually eliminated operators and got the machine they wanted-the automated Bell system processes 99.9 per cent of American phone calls without the touch of paid human hands...
...So, the goals have been met, the struggle is over...
...It is a mistaken idea to suppose that, in the daily work of the operator, there are periods of relaxation which compensate for the high pressure hours,’ Miss Curry stated...
...And not only because they’re so much less interesting...
...And if all else fails, they shift the profit center to Taiwan...
...My bottom line is that if Walter Cronkite isn’t safe, none of us is...
...Relief periods were rigidly confined to five, ten or, at best, 15 minutes for each shift and were granted ‘not as a matter of right but as a privilege,’ by the supervisors...
...Only a fool would choose the accountants and Wharton graduates as America is to be reminded of quo like these: class to kill the other half...
...Brooks ends with a quote from the late Philip Murray, the president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, describing the goals of unionism as, simply, “A rug on the floor, a picture on the wall, music in the home, food on the table, clothes and education for the children...
...Walter, I thought, don’t tell them...
...I have belonged to two and been on strike three times-stupid strikes led by narrow men who thought the internal politics of the union was the real world...
...I asked a friend, the chief executive of a company with 150 employees, how he had beaten a recent union organization drive...
...He raised salaries a bit, instituted a rather generous profit-sharing plan, and, in his words, “fed them a lot of bullshit about being a team, a family...
...But management was more successful, as I would argue that it has been across the board in American labor relations...
...Leaving aside the question of whether some anchormen around the country aren’t actually plastic-covered computer circuitry, I was reminded of Cronkite’s indiscretion while reading a book called Communications Workers of America-The Story of a Union by Thomas R. Brooks, published by Mason/Charter...
...Supervisors constantly stalked behind the operators to see that no Richard Reeves is the author of Convention His column is a regular feature of The Washington Monthly...
...That last appears to be true...
...I don’t particularly like unions or the people who run them...
...Or, so it seems...
...Union membership has been steadily dropping for more than 20 years, and now stands at something like 20 per cent of the American work force, as compared with 26 per cent in 1954...
...The union was successful and management was successful...
...Imagine being replaced by a robot, Cronkite said...
...Potential members see themselves as somehow better than working class, labor leadership is a bunch of old men, often silly old men, and-this was cited to me as the main reason by the president of an opinion research company that monitors social attitudespeople believe they can get the financial benefits of union struggle without paying dues...
...Ironically, part of the managerial triumph is linked forever to union gains...
...Over the next 70 years, the operators and management went their own ways...
...The management expects you to be just a machine,’ a Los Angeles operator told Miss Curry...
...It was surprisingly easy, he said...
...There are just too many younger folks willing to be newspaper reporters for less money when your legs go-and almost as many managements anxious to hire them for less than you’re making...
...and gradually won tolerable working conditions-there was once a standard procedure for removing hysterical operators-and a reasonable wage...
...I am terrified of today’s managers...
...Operators maintained a rate of 250 to 350 calls an hour,” Brooks writes of Bell telephone operators in 1907...
...The employees organized into the C.W.A...
...Well, the new managers axe hardly robber barons...
...I can hire half of the working “The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for, not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country...
...I’ll keep paying my damn AFTRA dues...
...They’re worse...
...Because they don’t have to get their hands dirty any more...
...one lagged...
...He was joking about the mail he got and said that one guy even wrote to say that he had developed the technology for a bionic anchorman...
...Come to think of it NBC might not have had to do that if they knew about the bionic anchorman...
...They may be more frightening than the old paternalism-or maternalism in the case of “Ma Bell” and the C.W.A...
...Of course not.,’ I should state my bias here...
...They just shift numbers and words around-words like “productivity,” “cost-control,” “maximization...
...I often think that I’d still be making about that if it were not for the American Newspaper Guild...
Vol. 9 • February 1978 • No. 12
