UNION LABOR: Less Militant, More Affluent

IN Los Angeles' splendid new Music Center, 1,500 members of the Retail Clerks Union sat in red-plush comfort beneath crystal chandeliers. Before getting down to the business of a union meeting, they heard a concert climaxed by a specialized composition called The Shopping Center Blues. They chuckled appreciatively when Local Leader Joe Silva explained that his hoarseness was caused by "executive flu " De Silva noted that a minority of the Music Center's board had protested that a union meeting was not the sort of "cultural" activity for which the $32.2 million center (including $25,000 contributed by the Retail Clerks) had been created. Said De Silva: "I looked up 'cultural' in the dictionary and it covers a lot more than just music. If a union isn't part of American culture today, I don't know what is.

De Silva's point was unarguable. Unionism is woven throughout the fabric of present American life, both social and economic. "The labor movement," says Chicago's Sidney Lens longtime labor leader and writer, "is really a carbon copy of capitalism." It is more than that: it is capitalism. Its relations with management remain adverse to a degree; but the action is that of cogwheels moving in opposite directions to operate the whole free-enterprise machine.

The threat of breakdowns in the machine can never be discounted; there is no guarantee that the old wage-price spiral with excessive labor demands resulting in inflationary prices, will not reappear. But the steel settlement just concluded is a typical example of labor's present condition and its relations with industry. A strike, while the threat was real enough did not materialize; increasingly, labor gets its results not through strikes but through other pressures, including the psychological. Steel negotiations were relatively relaxed; the big issue was not pay but fringe benefits. Labor has won the wage battles and is increasingly concerned with vacations, pensions, job security. Finally, a reasonably satisfactory settlement came about through the intervention of the President. This dilutes free collective-bargaining, but nobody is very indignant because no one doubts that management's and labor's business are in fact the nation's business. Says A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany, without apologies to industry's late "Engine Charlie" Wilson: "What is good for America is good for the A.F.L.-C.I.O."

Turning that coin, what's bad about organized labor is bad for the U.S. And organized labor today is afflicted by a multitude of problems, some glaring, some subtle, and virtually all springing from failures to keep pace with change. For one thing, the labor movement is middle-aged and increasingly middleclass, powerful and sometimes arrogant, but without the lean, hungry and imaginative leaders of the past. For another, unions are faced with a new industrial revolution in automation, which promises to alter the very role and function of human labor.

Leadership Lag

Since 1957 U.S. employment has risen from 65 million to 75 million--while union membership has actually dropped a bit from the 1957 mark of 18,430,000. Such statistics are slightly deceptive. They do not include members of the growing professional and semiprofessional organizations like the National Education Association; these look like unions, act like unions and often sound more militant than unions, but call themselves "associations" to avoid the union label that their membership considers a bit demeaning.

Many unions have been content to consolidate their gains and have neglected organization drives, failing to go after workers in those areas that are growing fastest, such as the service industries. Others have demonstrated that aggressive (and often expensive) organizing can still win members. Since being kicked out of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. in 1957 for Jimmy Hoffa's happy hooliganism, the Teamsters have actually grown from 1,600,000 to 1,760,000. Hoffa's creed is simple: if it breathes, organize it. The Teamsters include hairdressers in Newark, employees at an animal cemetery in Illinois, stewardesses for the Flying Tiger airline and attendants at the San Diego Zoo.

"Have you looked at the A.F.L.-C.I.O. executive committee?" says Hoffa. "If you cut all the decay out of that committee, there'd be no one left standing up. They're a bunch of tired old men. They couldn't plan nothing." Jimmy may not be the most respectable witness, but he has a point. At 71, George Meany grows more curmudgeonly by the day. The average age of Meany's eight-member executive committee is 66, against 62 for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Spiritual Sag

Union bosses wield personal power far beyond most politicians and businessmen. Huge national headquarters staffs are answerable only to the national leader, and until fairly recently, it was as rare for a major union chief to be voted out of office as it is for a baseball player to thumb an umpire from the ballpark. The effects of the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959 are changing some of that. Among other things, the law required that unions overhaul their constitutions so as to give rank-and-file members more protection against fraud and coercion in voting on their leadership. Thanks in part to more democratic procedures, six major national union heads have been voted out within the last year. Most notable were the International Union of Electrical Workers' James B. Carey, 54, whose nasty disposition finally caught up with him, and the Steelworkers' David J. McDonald, 62, whose image in the locals was that of the soft-living "labor statesman" negotiating at the 19th hole in management's country clubs. Their successors, Paul Jennings, 47; and I. W. Abel, 57, are men of ability, but not likely to furnish imaginative new leadership.

Organized labor lacks a new generation of prospective leaders; in the vast majority of major unions, the heir apparent to the incumbent is of the same generation. Examples: International Machinists' President Al Hayes, 65, was succeeded by Vice President Roy Siemiller, 60; the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers' Gordon Freeman, 68, is likely to be followed by Joe Keenan, also 68; waiting in line behind the United Mine Workers' Tony Boyle, 60, is old John L.'s youngest brother, Ray Lewis, 64.

It is a measure of labor's past success that the cause no longer seems to cry out for crusaders. Says Harry Van Arsdale, president of the New York City Central Labor Council: "How far can a young college graduate go in a union? Compare his opportunities there with those at General Motors. We all know that a young man's future in organized labor is limited." For those motivated by idealism the real excitement is elsewhere, as in civil rights, on which organized labor's attitude is ambiguous. While the national leadership has constantly backed Negro rights, many locals are tightly and nastily exclusive.

Says New York Printers' boss Bert Powers: "Somebody has convinced the membership that a union is like a tollgate and that all it does is collect dues. There isn't the feeling there used to be for the whole labor movement. Our own printers aren't interested in how the cab Drivers are being organized. A picket line is an annoyance."

There is agreement from Carroll R. Daugherty, professor of labor economics at Northwestern University and a nationally known labor-management arbitrator: "We've ceased having a labor movement as the term 'movement' used to be known. The people in a movement act with an almost religious fervor. A movement has martyrs, priests, hymns, slogans, symbols. That's not what we have today." The International Ladies' Garment Workers' elderly president Dave

Dubinsky reluctantly admits that the old pizazz is missing, but points out that in places where the going gets tough, the "spirit of 1900 comes back to us. In the South and in Puerto Rico, we have good militant strikes, just like old times."

Up to a point, the unions try to observe the old fraternal forms. Members still call one another "brother" and "sister" --but mostly in formal correspondence, not in face-to-face conversation. The interior walls of many a meeting hall in many a fancy local headquarters are of unadorned cinder blocks to recall unionism's hard-knocks days; chances are that more money has been put into the locals' recreation rooms, with air conditioning, paneled walls, billiard and ping-pong tables and bars (the staple still is beer).

"Lord," says an A.F.L.-C.I.O. official in Washington, "I haven't heard Joe Hill sung at a meeting in 15 years--or anything else, for that matter." The typical local meeting is deadly dull and poorly attended. Members generally wear slacks and sport shirts, including bowling-and softball-league shirts for many who can hardly wait to get out of the hall and on to an avocation that is as often as not company-sponsored. (Another style note: for reasons that might require the services of a mass psychologist, the old white cotton sock has given way in Pittsburgh to one of cardinal red.) No local leader will schedule a meeting in conflict with a really popular TV program unless he deliberately wants to keep attendance down. Observes Sidney Lens: "The members still have a loyalty to the union. It's the loyalty of a man who no longer loves his wife but hasn't enough friction in his life to want a divorce."

Technological Drag

At least as significant as the leadership lag and the spiritual sag is what some union men consider the technological drag. Too many of organized labor's leaders have set their skulls squarely against the technological revolution. Printers' Powers, for instance, made it eminently evident that he would rather let the New York Post go bankrupt than agree to permit the paper to install a computerized system. As Powers, who is far from being the blindest or the dumbest of union leaders, says: "We'll make all the wheels go the wrong way." Jimmy Hoffa has his own devilishly clever idea: "If we can find out where the components of these computers are made, we can stop the shipment of the components, and we can shut the automated plant down."

The naive, Luddite dreams of stopping progress are obviously nonsense, but labor's worries are understandable. Automation decreases the demand for employees who work with their hands and increases the need for those who use their minds. At General Electric less than half of the total employees are now on regular hourly wage scales. Thus, the blue-collar worker is falling more and more out of style. The white-collar worker, historically hard to organize, is the man of the moment. Organized labor's best chance in the future may well lie with the "grey-collar" or "faded blue-collar" worker, the one who used to wield a screw driver but has learned how to work with automated equipment.

For organized labor, another alarming effect of automation is that it blunts the strike weapon. One leader who has learned this is the Communications Workers' president Joe Beirne. Two years ago his people struck against California's General Telephone Co., which, like the rest of the industry, is overwhelmingly automated. Unorganized supervisory types easily kept the equipment working, and after more than 100 days, the union gave up without winning a single significant benefit. Beirne now says: "There will still be strikes, but they will not be the same kind of tool. The picket line will be a 'promotional' line"--meaning that the unions will have to sell their case to the community at large.

In the long run, labor, like the whole U.S. economy, is bound to win enormous benefits through the increased productivity and profits made possible by automation. The Communications Workers, despite their futile strike, were already making their peace with that fact. Because automation has helped the industry expand its services by about 170%, the union, even though fewer plug-pullers and pole-climbers are required, has also increased its membership.

Moreover, automation has already brought workers more leisure. The trend is to reduce the time that men work through longer vacations, sabbaticals, earlier retirement. Such benefits constituted nearly half of last fortnight's steel settlement. The United Auto Workers operate under a contract granting them bereavement pay, funeral leave and Christmas bonuses. Their "supplemental allowance" scheme is known to members as the Honeydew Project--because the men can retire earlier, go home, and hear their wives say, "Honey, do this--Honey, do that." Senior auto and steelworkers get 13 weeks' annual vacation. The United Brewery Workers are contractually given the right to drink as much of the plant product as they want--without charge.

Job protection in the face of automation remains one of labor's chief concerns. Five years ago, San Francisco's Longshoreman Leader Harry Bridges signed a contract permitting shippers to automate to their heart's desire--while guaranteeing Bridges' boys an annual wage, no matter how many hours they actually worked. The agreement has turned out well for both management and longshoremen.

More reasonable and less wasteful is the contract between California's Kaiser Steel Corp. and the United Steelworkers. Under it, any worker displaced by automation goes into an employment "reserve," receives his average wage of the past while being retrained and waiting for reassignment. Kaiser also offers vacation time based on productivity gains. Variations of the Kaiser-Steelworkers' arrangement are being tried out elsewhere with success. The Electrical Workers, for instance, are organizing training courses to teach members to work in atomic energy and other advanced fields. But organized labor as a whole has hardly begun to face up to the problem--and the opportunity--of automation.

Public Relations Snag

Forward-looking labor leaders are sure that they will have to find "new markets," branching out from old-line industries, and that is not always easy. Some complain that the electronics industry, for one, is mobile to the point of being nomadic and therefore hard to organize. When one union was contemplating organizing insurance company employees, the union paper struck a note of comic despair: "Can you imagine the national reaction to a strike of insurance salesmen?" Some labor leaders expect to develop new forms of cooperation with management, such as the industry-wide boards that already function in steel and coal.

Above all, organized labor will have to become more attractive to the public. One experiment in that line, tried by the Retail Clerks, used low-keyed, soft-sell TV spots. But some of labor's public relations snags will take more than TV to solve. Union leaders have used their tremendous influence to fight Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, which permits states to enact right-of-work laws (its repeal was passed by the House, is now before the Senate). No doubt, union membership has been held down by 14(b), particularly in the South. But the gains made, when and if it is repealed, may well be offset by adverse public sentiment; many Americans, whether or not they are accurately informed on the issue, still feel that a man should have a right to hold a job without belonging to a union.

Organized labor is less than ever a monolithic segment of a fragmented national society. No more can it afford to make purely demagogic demands of industry, and to an unprece dented degree, labor and management are forced to work together. In this sense, Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz is fond of quoting Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark:

But the valley grew narrow and narrower still,

And the evening got darker and colder

Till (merely from nervousness, not from good will)

They marched along shoulder to shoulder.

What is actually keeping them marching along together is not nervousness, though there is still some of that, or just good will, though there is a lot more of that. It is above all a common share in America's vast affluence, a common stake in a country, as nearly classless as any in the world, that gives the worker a better life than he has known since the wheels of the industrial revolution first started to turn.

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