Labor Pains
The Labor Revolution.
by Gus Tyler.
Viking. 279 pp. $6.50.
In this book, Gus Tyler—the assistant president of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union and the director of its Department of Politics, Education, and Training—replies to the critical attacks on the complacency, stodginess, and decline of vision of the labor movement which have in recent years been launched by such men as Paul Jacobs, Harvey Swados, and Solomon Barkin. The author’s heart is in the right place, and one may well sympathize with his effort, but the result, it must be said, is far from convincing.
Throughout these pages, the term “revolution” appears with a kind of obsessive repetitiveness. It almost seems as though Mr. Tyler were attempting to revive the flagging spirit of the unions by the stimulant of word magic. In fact, however, there is no new, let alone revolutionary, thought in the house of labor—or in this book. We are merely served up all the old clichés, spiced with a sauce compounded of unwarranted optimism and pious hopes.
Tyler suggests that the 1950’s and 1960’s were a period of “consolidation” for the labor movement, but that the coming decades “will be an era of expansion; hence, an era of aspiration.” As vast new white-collar strata are organized, as professional and women workers flock to the unions, as the newly organized South becomes a source of union strength, as an aging leadership is replaced by dynamic new men, the union movement, according to Tyler, will experience a reenactment on a higher level of the heroic decade of the 30’s, a “new burst of idealism.”
But where is the evidence for all this? There have, to be sure, been some recent successes in the organization of teachers and government employees, but the fact is that the vast majority of white-collar workers remains unorganized. As Tyler himself notes, even the American Federation of Teachers, the fastest-growing of the new white-collar unions, includes only five per cent of America’s two million teachers. Moreover, the various organizational drives in the South over a number of years have all failed disastrously. Thus, it seems preposterous to assume that the union movement, as presently constituted, has a realistic chance of organizing the new professionals of the suburbs.
Meanwhile, the nature of the American labor force is changing rapidly, as manufacturing industries lose in relative weight while service trades, as well as government employment, increase. Having traditionally been concentrated in manufacturing, and having failed to make up its losses from that sector, the labor movement has declined steadily in recent years, notwithstanding Tyler’s Pollyannish claims. The percentage of organized workers in the labor force was smaller in 1965 than in 1957, and I have not yet seen any evidence that would suggest a reversal of this trend in the near future.
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No one, of course, will deny that there exists a new type of white-collar labor force that might possibly be organized, but the question is whether the AFL-CIO will be able to do so. For between the idea and the reality falls the shadow of Meany’s minions. There is no reason to believe that the hierarchy of over-aged labor statesmen who periodically meet in Florida to have a good time and release the usual platitudes to thoroughly bored reporters, have the capacity to restructure their movement so as to make it capable of a serious appeal to the unorganized part of the labor force. Hiding their satisfied acceptance of the status quo under a thin veneer of liberal rhetoric, these union leaders seem to be concerned only with preserving their vested interests in the old order.
Mr. Tyler would probably be willing to agree with parts of this diagnosis. In his sweet reasonableness, he is quite prepared to concede that all is not well in the house of labor, but he consoles himself (and presumably his readers) by suggesting that things are bound to change once a new wave of young, idealistic militants enters the scene and transforms the labor movement in its image. But will such new militants really flock to the labor movement? And why should they?
The analogy Tyler draws between the 30’s and the 60’s is a thoroughly misleading one. In the 30’s, labor created a new movement and thus released the well-springs of idealism in the young, who came to play a decisive role in its ranks. In the 60’s, however, labor is, by and large, a huge and bureaucratically organized institution that is manned by organization men. In recent years, I have had many students who dedicated themselves to the civil-rights movement, the peace movement, and various other causes, but I cannot recall a single student who expressed the desire to join the unions for idealistic reasons. To be sure, some chose to become union lawyers, labor economists, and the like; but they were making expediential decisions not basically different from the decision to work on the other side of the fence.
Tyler admits that today’s young militants are not “ideologically prepared for the coming era of American labor,” but he puts the blame for this state of affairs on progressive intellectuals, who “have taught negatively. They have not prepared their students for life.” Nonsense. The young do not ignore the labor movement because—as Tyler claims—“leftist critics . . . have turned their alienation into a way of thought which they have passed on to a younger generation,” but because there is precious little that is appealing in the present state of the unions. In those rare recent instances where a non-bureaucratic and idealistic union leadership has engaged in a worthwhile battle for simple justice, and appealed for help—as was the case in the organizing movements among California grape pickers and other agricultural workers—the response from the young has been instantaneous.
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Mr. Tyler refrains from talking about foreign policy; there is only one entry under Vietnam in the index. Yet it is impossible to bypass the plain fact that the young militants of today are deeply concerned about the imperialist drift of American foreign policy, in marked contrast to labor’s statesmen (with the partial exception of Walter Reuther). The leadership of the AFL-CIO has unanimously endorsed every move of Johnson, Rusk, and McNamara on the foreign scene. Mr. Tyler must understand that with such leadership, all appeals from labor to idealistic youth are bound to remain nothing but whistling in the dark. So long as labor’s statesmen trade their acceptance of the administration’s Vietnam policies for an increase in minimum wages, so long as they betray the traditional autonomy of the union movement by going all the way with LBJ, they will fail to tap the hidden reservoirs of devotion and idealism among the young.
The New York Times recently reported that George Meany, while spending a month in Florida, “dropped in” at a cocktail party given for some labor leaders by the First National City Bank of New York. This was at the very time that his associate, A. Philip Randolph, the Negro union leader, was trying to get union organizations to remove their deposits from this bank, which is helping to finance South African apartheid. It is incidents of this kind, rather than a conspiracy of their teachers, which have alienated the young from the house of labor.
Mr. Tyler is clearly a good man, and I share many of his hopes and desires. But if he really wishes to reach the young, as well as older professionals and intellectuals, he had better discard his rose-colored spectacles and his apologetic stance and recognize that the unions to which he has dedicated his life are in a very bad way indeed.
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