A Hard Look at Labor
The State of the Unions.
by Paul Jacobs.
Atheneum. 303 pp. $5.00.
Paul Jacobs is one of the handful of labor reporters who write with a sense of intimate knowledge. He was for many years a union organizer and official and remained in close touch with the labor movement after leaving it to become a journalist. Of late he has been in charge of the trade union project of the Fund for the Republic. Few men are better qualified to write a full-scale study of the “state of the unions” today.
But this book, unfortunately, is not such a study. It is instead a loosely sewn collection of unrevised articles which originally appeared in The Reporter, COMMENTARY, Dissent, Harper’s, and in booklets issued by the Fund for the Republic. Hence, those unions that happen to have been topical in recent years, like the Teamsters and the ILGWU, are treated quite fully. Others, such as the United Automobile Workers and the white-collar unions which seem to be at least as important for the future development of the labor movement, receive no attention at all.
Along with being lopsided, Jacobs’s coverage is also dated. “Dave Beck, president of the Teamsters,” writes Jacobs, “whose job Hoffa is sometimes charged with coveting . . .” Well, that was in 1957 and Hoffa has had the job for several years. You read that, “Jimmy Hoffa is forty-three years old,” and wonder whether he is really that young, before you realize that he is nearly fifty now. And so it goes through most of the book. When Jacobs speaks of “last summer,” he may be referring to any summer since 1956, and when he refers to someone “now awaiting trial,” the chances are good that the man has long since been either sentenced or acquitted. And if it is irritating to read that Hoffa is “ninth vice-president” of the Teamsters on page five, it is downright annoying to be given the same information fifteen pages later. But the main source of annoyance is the thought that a writer with Jacobs’s ability to provide us with a full and astute assessment of the current labor movement should offer instead such a hastily concocted one. It is precisely the incisiveness of observation and the sureness of touch displayed in a number of these essays which make one most deplore the sketchiness of the whole.
Jacobs is at his most incisive when he takes issue with the pious platitudes which pass for analysis among most liberal labor writers. He delights, for example, in showing that if “bad” union leaders, such as Hoffa, run their unions in a dictatorial manner, many “good” union leaders, such as David Dubinsky, do likewise. In his superbly irreverent essay on Dubinsky and the problems of the ILGWU, Jacobs charges that its aging elite of Jewish officials are unresponsive to the needs and desires of its Negro and Puerto Rican rank and file. Jacobs’s ability to draw blood is testified to by the fact that he was subsequently attacked by professional Jewish liberals and a variety of union “pork choppers” as an enemy of labor and, even, as an anti-Semite. Similarly, Jacobs’s unfashionable views on the breakdown of the traditional collective bargaining process caused Clark Kerr, who was acting as chairman of the advisory committee to the Fund for the Republic’s trade union project, to dissociate himself from Jacobs’s report. In it, Jacobs argues that government intervention in the bargaining process will inevitably increase in the future and that the old forms of labor-management relations can no longer cope with the problems posed by automation and structural unemployment. Jacobs has come a long way from his days as a young radical organizer in the 30’s, but he has not lost his impatience with the received pieties shared by the labor establishment, its liberal allies, and most academic “labor relations experts.”
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If much of Jacobs’s commentary on the labor movement is highly critical, it also is informed by a sympathetic attachment, if not always to the officers then to the members of the unions. His essay on restrictive practices, featherbedding, and makework in the newspaper and airlines industries not only illuminates highly technical issues such as the dispute over the “third and fourth man” in jet aircraft cockpits, but also makes one aware of the human concerns and issues which lie behind the union’s demands. Jacobs’s awareness of the problems of the underdog also distinguish his discussions of the migrant workers and of the Negro’s relations with the labor movement, and serves to redeem these otherwise rather dated studies; he is equally moving and effective when he writes about the denial of democratic rights to a handful of rank-and-file reformers within the International Association of Machinists.
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In this last essay, Jacobs also manages to raise a number of disturbing questions about internal union democracy and the rights of union members. These questions are further explored in a fine review-essay of Union Democracy, a study of the International Typographical Union, by S. M. Lipset et al. Jacobs criticizes the general tendency to regard this union as a kind of model because of its high degree of internal democracy. He notes that the Teamsters Union has probably improved the lot of its members to a greater degree than has the ITU. Could it be that the ITU has paid a high price for its internal democracy? Furthermore, the ITU functions as a highly conservative and even reactionary force in the community, while some of the unions that have been providing a strong progressive influence, such as the ILGWU, are run in a highly dictatorial manner. In other words, if the ITU furnishes one type of model, the ILGWU furnishes another. How, then, should one judge between them: is internal democracy necessarily preferable to overall impact and effectiveness?
Jacobs’s toughmindedness is particularly evident when he shows, in a manner reminiscent of Lincoln Steffens’s pioneering work on corruption in city politics, that it serves very little to wax indignant at the lawlessness of particular unions or union leaders and to ignore the fact that such practices usually reflect social and economic conditions prevailing within the industry. Steffens once wrote: “You cannot build or operate a railroad, or a street railway, gas, water, or power company . . . without corrupting or joining in the corruption of the government. You tell me privately that you must, and here I am telling you semi-publicly that you must.” Jacobs similarly suggests that much of the highfalutin moralizing of men like Robert Kennedy about racketeering in the Teamsters and elsewhere bypasses the real issue. The morals of many managers of trucking companies are by no means superior to the morals of many Teamster officials, and, in fact, the corruption that the moralizers attribute to the acts of particular individuals often turns out to be the result of the occupational. mores common to a whole industry. The exclusively moral emphasis quickly loses sight of the structural conditions which generate evil in the first place.
Though Jacobs’s repeated mention of his radical past can become a little awkward and tiresome, it remains true that this experience helped to shape his present concerns and methods. He owes to it at least part of his capacity to move from particular observations to informed generalizations; he also has preserved the radical’s concern for the victimized and his close attention to the mechanics of bureaucratic power. Above all, he has carried away from the 30’s a commitment to the cause of social justice, which moves him to question the ways in which Robert Kennedy has waged his vendetta against the Teamsters well beyond the limits of the legally permissible. Jacobs finds that Hoffa’s rights have been violated and ends his examination of the evidence with a plea of hard-headed and genuine eloquence: “Although I have nothing in common with Hoffa, the union leader, Hoffa, the citizen is me. His rights are the same as mine and require the same protection.”
This is Jacobs at his best, a man who writes about the unions and their leaders with a toughness, fairness, and sense of perspective which cut through the journalistic cant and academic expertise that make up so much of the current discussion of the labor movement. One hopes that the next time he will produce the more comprehensive and coherent study of the unions that is so badly needed today.
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