The air of expectancy that has surrounded the beginnings of the Kennedy administration has a decided piquancy for organized labor. For eight years the unions have longed for a friend in the White House; harassed by the renewed recalcitrance of management and apprehensive over the economic downturn, they worked very hard to elect John F. Kennedy, whose bona fides as a friend of labor are exemplary. But the fruits of victory are not always of an unmixed sweetness. The alliance between organized labor and the new administration is an uneasy one indeed.
For the last four or five years, the unions have been floundering in a morass of self-pity and frustration. It was not possible, they argued, to increase their membership when the National Labor Relations Board was loaded against labor; when union resolutions welcoming the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation hampered their activities in the South; and when white collar workers were being scared off by the exposures of the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, headed by Senator John F. McClellan. But whatever the causes, the blunt fact was that the high expectations of great activity and even greater achievements raised by the merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1955 were never realized.
The blame, until now, could be lodged at President Eisenhower’s door. But the election of Kennedy has placed the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of labor itself. The new President is without question a friend of the unions, and he also knows more about labor—its strengths as well as its weaknesses—than any other current public official (except, perhaps, for his brother Robert) and certainly more than any previous President. Franklin D. Roosevelt was intuitively sympathetic to the workers and supported their efforts to organize, but he did not have Kennedy’s detailed knowledge about unions. Harry S. Truman received his labor education, so to speak, in office. Kennedy, by contrast, came to the Presidency after twelve years of intensive legislative experience in labor affairs—including an instructive term of service on the McClellan Committee.
This knowledgeability is what lay behind the caution which the new President exercised in his appointment of a Secretary of Labor. In December, AFL-CIO President George Meany had arrived at Kennedy’s Georgetown residence with the names of five elected union officials, all of whom had the federation’s approval as candidates for the cabinet post. Kennedy, however, in the light of his experience on the McClellan Committee, well knew that he could not appoint a labor executive to administer the reform provisions of the Landrum-Griffin Act; he chose, instead, a man who was from the unions but not of them. As special counsel to the AFL-CIO’s Ethical Practices Committee, Arthur J. Goldberg had won recognition and respect—both from the public and from the Kennedy brothers—for his independence of union-bossism. To be sure, many union officials would like to disown Goldberg altogether for his part in the cleaning up of corruption inside the labor movement and in the expulsion of the Teamsters from the AFL-CIO. But they dare not do so. Goldberg was the perfect appointee for an administration basically friendly to the unions but also only too aware of their failings and vices.
The uneasiness in the relations between organized labor and the Kennedy administration has been evident in another important appointment as well. While four key Labor Department posts went to unionists, Meany failed to put across the appointment of Joseph D. Keenan—an AFL-CIO vice-president and secretary-treasurer of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers—as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower. This job is of much greater interest to the unions qua unions than the Labor Department posts they managed to secure, and it is of special importance to the building trades, which have large dealings with defense agencies (both governmental and private) and which have been involved in jurisdictional strikes from time to time. But in the end, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara barred the selection of Keenan on the ground that he was too close to the building trades.
However unhappy the unions may be over these developments, they yet can confidently expect that the Kennedy administration will operate within the confines of existing law, to make it less burdensome to the unions—particularly such weaker unions as the Textile Workers—and so help organized labor rather than obstruct it. The Republican 3-2 majority on the National Labor Relations Board has now been upset. Intervention in crippling—or potentially crippling—strikes will be more imaginative, as the recent settlement of the New York harbor strike demonstrated. And since management much prefers the stand-off, wait-and-see approach of the Eisenhower era, such intervention, however impartial, may be counted a definite gain for the unions.
For all this, however, the present crisis in the labor movement can only be dealt with by the unions themselves, and unless they act, they cannot avoid a serious and continuing decline in power and prestige. Unions, like any other social institution, must either grow or atrophy—and this means expanding their membership while also adjusting to the new conditions which economic development has inevitably brought about. The character of the American labor movement in the 1960’s is bound to change—as a result of automation, the growth of white collar employment both within manufacturing and outside it, the increasing importance of skilled workmen, and the decline of the unskilled and semi-skilled. Whether or not organized labor can meet the challenges inherent in these developments depends to a large extent on its capacity to take drastic action in a number of vital areas.
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The labor movement entered the 1950’s in the full flush of power. Despite the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947—immediately denounced by unionists as “a slave labor law”—the unions scored some of their most impressive gains in the decade that followed. They negotiated pensions, annual productivity factors, cost-of-living increases, health and welfare benefits, and the guaranteed annual wage. The merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations was to have capped this performance with still more daring efforts and greater achievements by the unified house of labor. Actually, however, as John L. Lewis was quick to point out, the new federation was tied together by “a rope of sand.” Many unions were against the merger, while others (especially in the AFL), went along reluctantly, insisting on the continuation of the old AFL tradition of autonomy. Even the CIO carved out an area of autonomy for itself in the newly constituted Industrial Union Department. What kept the merger from breaking down, ironically enough, were the McClellan revelations which enabled George Meany and his supporters to convert what might have been a splintering off into a casting out of devils—a very different kind of operation, as Lenin well knew. Once the AFL-CIO had been officially stamped “clean” by the McClellan Committee, the unions expelled for corruption could not conceivably have formed still another federation of labor.
The disciplinary actions taken by the AFL-CIO executive council to eliminate corruption had the further effect of virtually destroying the principle of autonomy for individual unions within the federation. Until the Teamsters were ousted, many unions still hoped to protect their right to run their own affairs without interference from the federation. “I can remember,” says George M. Harrison, president of the Railway Clerks and the oldest ranking member of the AFL-CIO executive council, “when if you were to say something on the convention floor about another affiliate, the head of that union would get up and say, ‘Look, you run your union and I’ll run mine.’ And that was the end of that.” But under the harsh light of the McClellan Committee’s probing, the AFL-CIO drew up its own Ethical Practices Code, providing standards against which the conduct of any individual union or union official could be measured. Violations of the code meant that the federation’s officers would invoke the constitutional provisions against racketeering. Armed with these powers, Meany and the executive council picked off some of the most powerful proponents of autonomy within the federation, the mighty Teamsters among them. Indeed, every action taken against corruption within the federation since the merger has been aimed at an AFL union which had insisted on the preservation of autonomy. Thus Meany has skillfully used the corruption issue as a tool for strengthening the powers of the AFL-CIO executive. This is not to belittle his very real achievement in weeding out corruption, but simply to note that a by-product of the anti-racketeering drive has been to set a precedent for intervention by the AFL-CIO executive in the internal affairs of affiliates.
It is true, of course, that Meany has hesitated to use this new power on issues other than racketeering. He has not cracked down on the building trades-industrial unions jurisdictional fight, nor has he pushed the struggle against discriminatory practices within the unions as hard as some observers believe he should. Partly this is a question of priorities and partly it is the absence of an equivalent public pressure to that engendered by the McClellan exposures. Nonetheless, the powers and precedents are there for Meany or any subsequent president of the AFL-CIO to use.
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The AFL-CIO, then, is in fairly good condition for facing the 1960’s. The McClellan era is at an end, despite the resumption of hearings,1 and there are signs that the federation intends to put its newly developed strength as a national labor organization to active use. It has set up a central investment policy agency to advise its constituents on investing their vast reserves (pension funds and the like). It has shown a renewed interest in recruiting untapped groups, in particular the white collar workers and California’s 250,000 farm workers. The immediate goal of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee—into which organized labor has sunk roughly $500,000—is some 50,-000 dues-payers, enough to start a new international union and to provide the impetus for starting organizing drives elsewhere.
The real testing ground of trade union survival and strength in the 1960’s, however, is likely to lie in the area of lobbying and political action rather than the traditional areas of organizing and collective bargaining. Though the unions have worked here and there for appropriate social legislation during the past fifteen years, they have concentrated most of their energy not on politics but on collective bargaining. Instead of seeking improved pensions through the social security system, they have secured supplementary pension benefits under contracts with private firms. Instead of seeking medical care benefits through some variant of socialized medicine, they have secured coverage through negotiated insurance plans. Instead of seeking higher unemployment compensation through the federal-state system, they have gone all out for supplementary unemployment benefits (SUB) paid by industry. The result—as Daniel Bell demonstrated in his article “The Subversion of Collective Bargaining”2—has been a heavy imbalance favoring workers in the larger, better organized industries. The giant unions worked out a quid pro quo with their industrial counterparts: collective bargaining became a means of justifying price increases, and in return, industry granted major wage gains and substantial improvements in fringe benefits. But it was usually difficult to extend similar gains to the weaker unions, whose members, moreover, had to bear the additional burden of higher prices without corresponding increases in income.
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This is only one of the many indications that collective bargaining of the traditional kind is no longer an effective instrument for achieving the major social goals of the labor movement. Thus the system of supplementary unemployment benefits, which has been proudly described by Arthur J. Goldberg3 as “a method, developed in the collective bargaining process, of meeting the social need for which a [guaranteed] annual wage is suggested,” now seems to have reached its limit even in the giant industries. On January 24, U. S. Steel announced that it had cut SUB payments by 7½ per cent for the month, making a total reduction so far of 40 per cent. In February, 65,000 retired soft-coal miners will have their pensions reduced from $100 a month to $75. The cut was attributed by Miss Josephine Roche, the union’s welfare and retirement fund director, to “economic conditions” that have “severely affected the coal industry and have caused a large decline in the revenues of the trust fund.”
In addition to all this, the economic downturn has given management the weapons it needed to hold down labor costs and to retain control over the allocation of returns on recent investment in automation. To secure these goals, management is willing to “invest”—the words are General Electric’s—in strikes. Strike action has thus become a method by which management can dispose of inventories and fight for the upper hand in running factories. For today, strikes are not really over wages or even fringe benefits; they have to do with the question of job rights—the question of whether the employer has the right to abolish a job without the specific consent of the workers involved. Or, to put it another way: does the worker have the right to a specific job, regardless of technological change, because he has invested N years of his life in it?
This question—brought dramatically to the fore by automation—has aroused greater passion than any issue in labor-management struggles since the sit-down strikes of the 1930’s. The sit-downs established the bare essential fact of a job right; the employer could no longer fire a worker because of his interest in organizing a union. Once having won recognition, the unions turned from the issue of the worker’s property right in his job to the benefits surrounding the job—higher wages, vacations, adjudication of grievances, and so on. Today, the fundamental job right is being challenged anew as a result of automation; management now sees an opportunity to reassert old prerogatives.
Union howls of anguish to the contrary notwithstanding, management has no desire to destroy the unions; it finds them much too useful as a disciplinary force. It does, however, wish to win back the power to determine the new conditions of work in automated plants, and to do this, it must challenge the definition of job rights that is embodied in the extensive grievance procedures, seniority rules, work practices, etc., which have developed in the prosperous postwar years. It should be recognized that despite what management now argues, work practices (which of course includes featherbedding) did not spring up in a wholly arbitrary or irrational fashion. Some did, but many more came into being as a result of union victories in countless subterranean battles fought out from day to day in the shop. Management lost these battles in part because it did not pay to push employees to the striking point during periods of prosperity.
The recession, however, has provided management with an opportunity to reopen the struggle. This has served to aggravate the strains caused by automation, and if the techniques of collective bargaining can be applied to resolving the issue, they will have found a new and vitally useful function.
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But before collective bargaining can become effective in this area, the unions will have to face another question posed by automation—the same question that confronted John L. Lewis at the end of the war. Lewis had to decide whether to compel the ailing coal industry to spread what little work there was among all, or most, of the United Mine Workers membership, or to cooperate with the industry in sharply cutting down the number of mine workers. He opted for a small but highly paid work force. Today, a similar choice exists for unions not only in ailing industries like coal and the railroads, but also—because of the long-run decline in factory employment that will inevitably be brought about by automation—in nearly all of manufacturing. Some unions, of course, may seek to evade the issue—as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers have done—by demanding tariffs to protect a weak industry. But others by the logic of automation will almost certainly come to take the John L. Lewis turn in the decade ahead. The change, in fact, has already been signaled. The United Auto Workers, for example, two years ago granted a virtual veto power over contracts to its skilled trades department, a move that makes very little sense unless one assumes that that department is in future to become the major force within the union. The same union’s interest in placing wages on a salary basis, rather than on an hourly or piecework basis, is another indication, for such an arrangement would ease relations between white collar workers in the industry—who are growing in number and are a target of union organization—and the highly skilled, numerically small blue collar work-force of the future.
A turn by the unions in the direction of the John L. Lewis policy could presage a return of collective bargaining collusion at the expense of the rest of the nation. A framework for such collusion already exists in the joint conferences of labor and management that seem to be developing in the steel industry. But unhappily for industrial syndicalism, the Lewis turn will not be as easily accomplished by Walter P. Reuther or, for that matter, David J. McDonald, as it was by the autocratic head of the mine union. Indeed, McDonald and Reuther are faced with greater pressures in the other direction—toward the shorter work week as a means of spreading available employment. This pressure will not ease until they have won higher unemployment benefits and some sort of automation compensation that will enable affected workers to increase their mobility both geographically and educationally. Given employer resistance to increased costs, such benefits are unlikely to be won by way of collective bargaining, which means that the unions will have to look to the federal government for relief. This, in turn, means an intensification of political activity by the AFL-CIO.
One must, however, be cautious in predicting any great swing toward politics on the part of the unions. For one thing, the weight of tradition is against it. Secondly, the reshaping of the giant industrial unions—the most political of our unions—-into more compact, craftlike unions may very well bring enough satisfaction through collective bargaining to ease their need for political action. And finally, any success the labor movement may have among white collar workers is likely to be achieved by winning the same gains and protections for them which have already been won by blue collar workers—and these are collective bargaining gains, not political ones.
Nevertheless, these factors are offset by others—among them, the ideological irascibility of management, the job losses now being suffered by union members, and the need to improve the federal government’s antiquated welfare structure—which all push labor toward intensified political activity. Nor would this be a thoroughgoing departure from tradition; for, historically, when the unions have been confronted by stiffening employer resistance to bargaining demands, they have sought relief in legislative and political action. The AFL-CIO legislative program is already to the left of President Kennedy’s (this is another source of the uneasiness in the alliance between the new administration and the unions). Moreover, the method that the Kennedy administration will probably use in order to bring about a change in the collective bargaining climate—labor-management summitry—is unlikely to work, since the balance is tipped in management’s favor to begin with. It pays management to boycott such conferences or to participate merely for the sake of public relations. A substantial increase in federal welfare benefits would take the pressure off the unions, enable them to make the John L. Lewis decision with the least dissatisfaction among their members, and free both labor and management to work out the real issue of job control through collective bargaining. It is for these reasons that a new emphasis on political activity by organized labor would serve not only its own interests but those of the nation as a whole.
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1 The present hearings are only a continuation of the efforts to crush James Hoffa. If they should succeed—or if the new Attorney General manages to prosecute Hoffa—they will have paved the way for the powerful Teamsters union to return to the federation, a move that would not only be welcomed by most trade unionists but one that would further strengthen the AFL-CIO.
2 COMMENTARY, March 1960.
3 See his reply in the July 1960 COMMENTARY to the article by Daniel Bell cited above.—Ed.
