Making Strikes Obsolete

THE ATLANTIC

BY A. H. RASKIN

SUDDENLY they all are gone — the pioneers who gave fresh direction to the American labor movement in the first feverish thrust of the New Deal. In the marble palaces they erected as monuments to labor’s newfound eminence sits a new breed of union civil servants. It is a corps of organization men, bland, faithful, uninspired, drifting into an era of limitless technological change with compass points set in the Great Depression. In a society confident of everything except what reason it has for being, no element is more serene, more complacent, more satisfied of the eternal rectitude of its ancestral policies and practices.

The retirement of David Dubinsky as president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union has removed from active leadership the last survivor of the insurrectionary band that met in the President Hotel in November, 1935, to create the original Committee for Industrial Organization. John L. Lewis, still majestic at eighty-six, watches lesser men struggle with the problems of degeneration that enshroud the wraith of his once indomitable United Mine Workers. Fourteen years dead is Philip Murray, the gentle Lewis lieutenant, who conquered the fortresses of the open shop in steel, then moved into the top spot in the CIO after his old chief had forfeited it in a vengeful bet against a Roosevelt third term. Gone, too, is Sidney Hillman, that unique blend of pragmatist, theoretician, and Talmudic scholar, whose legacy was an enduring mechanism for labor political action and a niche in history as the locus of FDR’s admonition to “clear it with Sidney.”

Now the twilight is descending on the “youngsters" in the second generation of New Deal unionbuilders, the men who led the picket crusades and the sit-down strikes in auto and rubber and textiles when the slogan was “President Roosevelt wants you to join the union" and millions rallied to the union cause. Only Walter P. Reuther, Joseph Curran, and Harry Bridges are left. Michael J. Quill, whose ideal soapbox was the television screen, played his last scene in the flamboyance of a transit strike that paralyzed New York. James B. Carey, labor’s perpetual schoolboy, engaging, energetic, and impossible, sputtered out in the humiliation of an election scandal.

They were a varied lot, these trailblazers, and most of them staved too long. They were often vain, and even the most tractable among them was capable of incredible ruthlessness. But they had drive and a sense of purpose — so much so that they tended to identify the union with themselves. They were convinced that no one could do their job as well as they. And that is the tragedy of today’s labor movement. Most of the pioneers fought as assiduously to stifle new leadership as they ever had against the bosses and their goons in the days when unions were on the march.

The accent has always been on one-party rule, with sycophants and yes-men more welcome than those with independent ideas, especially ideas that challenged the leadership. While corporations were combing the universities for bright young men and spending millions of dollars to foster originality in executive training programs, unions were contenting themselves with sporadic weekend institutes for business agents and shop stewards.

The scope of union activities keeps broadening. The head of a giant union must have some measure of charisma, but he needs even more an infinite range of specialized skills in personnel administration, the management of vast pension and welfare funds, industrial engineering, foreign trade, politics, community relations, law, and corporate structure. To all these have now been added the complexities presented by automation and the adjustments it entails for unions and workers. Yet the predominant union view remains that the most dependable leadership comes from the shop, with no need for formalized training. Reuthers United Automobile Workers stands almost alone in maintaining what amounts to a college for “graduate instruction” in unionism for all its organizers and secondary leaders. Its purpose is to stimulate them to bolder thinking about the total role of unions in industry and nation.

In general, however, labor seems thoroughly content with its old patterns; far from looking for fresh ideas, it abhors them. David J. McDonald lost his post as president of the million-member United Steelworkers of America last year chiefly because he had the temerity to update the creaky rituals of collective bargaining in steel. His fate will make other union presidents even more timorous about ever abandoning frozen practices.

McDonald took his cue from Arthur J. Goldberg, who served as the steel union’s general counsel before his hop, skip, and jump into the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, and the United Nations. The 116day steel strike of 1959, the sixth industry-wide shutdown since World War II, persuaded Goldberg that the old bargaining system had outlived its usefulness. He became the architect of a new approach based on year-round discussion of automation and other joint problems in an atmosphere tree of strike deadlines. McDonald and the steel companies gave somewhat hesitant acquiescence, and a Human Relations Committee made up of four top representatives of the industry and the union was born.

It worked so well that most analysts began pointing to steel as a model of civilized industrial relations — an industry in which the tactics of siege and squeeze had been set aside in favor of no-crisis bargaining that protected the community as well as the parties. But the virtues of voluntary disarmament also proved its Achilles’ heel. The committee worked in secrecy to allow its members freedom to exchange views without making eternal public obeisance to institutional shibboleths.

THE RUGGED OUSTS THE URBANE

The new technique produced agreements substantially more moderate than the rank and file had grown accustomed to in the years when every wage increase provided the springboard for an even bigger price increase. A side effect was to relegate to a role of total ineffectuality the 165-member Wage Policy Committee, which theoretically represented the membership in all contract talks with the steel companies. The reality of this change was not great since the steel union had taken over from its foster parent, the United Mine Workers, a tradition of centralized leadership so complete that the Wage Policy Committee was never anything but a rubber stamp.

Nevertheless, the failure to go through the Kabuki routine of stylized consultation, coupled with the conspiratorial flavor of the top-level discussions and the relatively modest settlements, made the Human Relations Committee a sitting duck in the union’s quadrennial elections a year ago. A group of anti-McDonald district directors engineered a palace revolution designed to “give the union back to the membership.” They made the new bargaining setup and the increased authority it vested in the union’s technical staff their prime target, and the members responded by throwing out McDonald and installing in his place the union’s secretarytreasurer, I. W. Abel, a homespun man of the people, as rugged as his predecessor was urbane.

The new union administration promptly abolished the Human Relations Committee, although a subsidiary network of joint committees will be kept going to study such problems as apprenticeship, job classification, and medical care on a continuing basis. The first effect of the return to collective bludgeoning as a means of negotiating industrywide wage agreements was that last year’s contract talks wound up in the White House, the usual end of the road in precommittee days.

The degree to which the insurgent slate built its victorious campaign on the argument that the technicians had too much power sent a shudder through the professional staff of every major union in a period when there already was an insistent drift of intellectuals out of union posts. There is, of course, nothing new about the general disenchantment of intellectuals with a movement they once regarded as champion of the downtrodden and battler for individual liberty. But labor has retained inside its own house a dwindling company of brilliant staff people who continue to hope it will fulfill its proclaimed role as “the conscience of America.”

Each year sees a few of the brightest stars in this collection disappear. They go into government, foundations, university faculties, and in an extremely limited number of cases, into industry. With them goes a little more of the chance that labor ever will pull out of its downhill slide and begin evolving imaginative new answers for its kaleidoscopic problems. The chief loss since the steel union election has been the decision of the most creative of all its technicians, Marvin J. Miller, to leave the union. He will take over a newly established post as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, and his salary of $50,000 a year will be more than triple the $16,000 he got from the union. Few believe that the man who did most on the union side to assure the effectiveness of the Human Relations Committee could have been tempted away if he had felt the union’s door was still open to experimentation and social inventiveness. In fairness to Abel, he did nothing to push Miller out.; the question is whether anything could have made him stay after the knownothing tone of the union campaign.

STANDSTILL IN NEW YORK

Front the standpoint of the total community, however, the essential question is not who leads unions or whether unions can end their organizational torpor, but whether collective bargaining is an adequate instrument for protecting the public interest, not just the interests of labor and management.

The constant turmoil in railroads, shipping, newspapers, and other key industries, where stoppages often inflict greater punishment on the public than on the warring parties, provides one disturbing answer. But perhaps the most worrisome answer of all emerges from an evaluation of the strike that halted New York’s subways and buses for the first twelve days of this year. It has particular significance, both because of its cruel consequences for millions of people in the largest of American cities and because of the menacing implications it holds for all cities now that the organization of teachers and other municipal employees ranks almost alone as an area of intense union concentration.

New York City, with its traditionally close ties between labor and politics, was probably the earliest and most fervent enunciator of the doctrine that the road to greater efficiency and harmony in the civil service lay in unionization and the establishment of comprehensive machinery for settling disputes without recourse to illegal strikes. Nowhere did these precepts find fuller implementation than in the municipally owned transit system.

The Transport Workers Union, under the rollicking leadership of Mike Quill, could be counted on to provide funds, votes, and campaign TV spots for the Democratic mayoralty candidates. And the Transit Authority, with the mayor’s blessing, could be counted on to give the union a degree of security beyond any that existed in private industry. In 1957, when skilled craftsmen were rebelling against the leveling effect of across-the-board wage increases, the Authority came to Quill’s rescue by ordering a winner-take-all election.

The motormen quit work in protest, and the TWU called on the city to use every resource of law and municipal power to smash their strike and break their splinter organization. Spies were planted in the motormen’s meetings; their headquarters were “bugged”; the end result was a solidification of the TWU as exclusive bargaining agent. Yet with all the city’s help in wiping out organized opposition, only 10,000 of the 30,000 transit employees cast their votes for the Quill union.

Thus awarded monopoly rights, the TWU proceeded to institutionalize a bargaining charade that came to be known as “the script.” Every two years Quill would come in with stratospheric demands, which he would refuse to cut significantly until the strike deadline was a few hours away. Usually Mayor Robert F. Wagner would designate a panel of distinguished mediators to assist in assuring peace; just as regularly they were relegated to the role of stage furniture.

In the last act Quill would let the mayor know his rock-bottom price, the lump sum he considered necessary to “sell” the contract to His rank and file. Getting his figure from the mayor was the easy part. Then the real negotiations would start — between the union head and the spokesmen for the various segments within the TWU membership. The city was happy enough with the arrangement; the settlement each time was only a little more costly than the mayor or the Transit Authority had anticipated; and in between contracts, the union was cooperative in squeezing out unneeded jobs.

The end of the line came with the election of John V. Lindsay to succeed Wagner as mayor. His term was to begin on New Year’s Day, five hours before the Quill contract ran out. Lindsay asked for a thirty-day extension of the old contract so that he could assume responsibility for negotiating the new one after he took office. The union informed him that its tradition of “no contract, no work” forbade such a move, even though it had just authorized a month-long extension for its members on New York’s private bus lines so that their strike date would coincide with the city-wide shutdown.

Lindsay proposed arbitration or fact-finding as an alternative to a strike; again the union’s answer was no. More puzzling, the mayor encountered intense resistance from his own three-man mediation board to all suggestions that it make settlement recommendations without the TWU’s explicit advance consent. Professor Nathan P. Feinsinger of the University of Wisconsin Law School threatened repeatedly to pack his bags if the mayor insisted on making him a fact-finder. Equally stout objections were registered by his colleagues — Sylvester Garrett, permanent arbitrator for United States Steel, and Theodore W. Kheel, impartial chairman of the transit system, whose involvement in the panel was so important to Quill that it almost became a strike issue all by itself.

Unquestionably, the absence of any estimate by neutral experts of what a fair settlement should contain was significant in bringing about the strike, in prolonging it, and in forcing up the cost to the city of the eventual settlement. When the TWU cut off the transportation lifeline, it still had on the negotiating table as its only formal position a demand for a package pay increase twenty times as large as the largest it had ever got before. This ludicrous demand would have provided an average increase of $7800 a year for each subway worker, more than doubling his annual earnings. Recommendations by the Lindsay mediation team would have provided the community with the kind of yardstick that was needed to convert hand-wringing and aimless expressions of outrage into a push for ending the tieup on clear-cut and equitable terms. At last, with municipal suffering acute after a week and a half without subways, Lindsay overrode the reluctance of both union and mediators and demanded that his board make proposals for settling all the issues still unresolved. The trains were running again a few hours after it submitted its suggestions.

DODGING THE LAW

The legal aspects of the controversy were a horror story that began unfolding almost a year before the strike and kept spinning for weeks after the return to work. The Condon-Wadlin Act, which New York adopted in 1947 to abolish strikes by public employees, prescribes penalties so drastic that few administrators dare enforce them, even though the law allows no discretion. It makes strikers subject to mandatory dismissal, with a three-year ban on pay increases if they are rehired afterward.

An experimental modification of the law to make it less draconian was passed in 1963; when that expired last year, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and the Democratic-controlled legislature fell out over what to put in its place. The governor vetoed a bill that would have made fact-finding recommendations a regular part of the settlement procedure. The windup was that even the experimental modification went down the drain, and the unrealistically harsh penalties of the original law were put back in force. Lindsay thus came to office with a state antistrike law that was all punishment and no peace. Quill, bereft of all his old City Hall cronies, found himself enmeshed in internal union problems that could only be solved by getting a much bigger chunk of municipal money than ever before.

The ideal out was arbitration or fact-finding, but Quill had no appetite for either. He was convinced that even the most sympathetic tribunal would give him less than he could extort through a strike. And he knew that Lindsay, heir to a half-billion-dollar city budget deficit, was in no mood to outbid Wagner at his most generous. That made a strike the only answer, law or no law.

Then came the oddest wrinkle of all. Quill decided an aura of martyrdom would help fatten the purse. He began tearing up court injunctions and subpoenas like confetti whenever he got within range of a TV camera, which was practically all the time. He told his friends at the Transit Authority that they had to put him in jail if they wanted the strike to end. When the AFL-CIO Central Labor Council organized a campaign to get Quill and his fellow strike leaders released from jail, the council heads were bluntly advised to “stop meddling.”

It was all very sad, and the saddest part was that it worked very much the way the union hoped it would. The TWU did not get everything it wanted. It fell just enough short to keep from making a mockery of the mayor’s vow never to “capitulate before the lawless demands of a single power group.” But it got enough to encourage other civil service unions in New York and elsewhere to believe that muscle is the way to get swollen settlements from the community.

That disruptive precept received further encouragement when Governor Rockefeller and the legislature granted the transit strikers retroactive absolution for their violation of the Gondon-Wadlin Act. This bizarre maneuver was designed to guard against the probability of another subway shutdown after a State Supreme Court justice had ruled that the 15 percent wage increase the settlement calls for over the next two years could not be put into pay envelopes because of the law. To top it all, a contempt action under which the union was to have been fined $322,000 for each of the strike’s twelve days was canceled as part of a general amnesty accompanying the back-to-work decision.

MORE STRIKES AHEAD

In the general economy the advent of a period of gathering labor shortages after seven years of manpower surplus is likely to cause an upsurge of strikes. So is labor’s coolness toward enforcement of the White House wage-price guideposts. To the extent that employers try to hold wages inside the 3.2 percent productivity fence, unions may call strikes for more, or find their members taking wildcat action on their own.

I roublesome as such strikes will prove in the months immediately ahead, the more fundamental long-range problem lies in the type of walkout that bedeviled General Motors and Ford when they negotiated their last national agreements two years ago. Thousands of local plant issues overwhelmed the bargainers and eclipsed in membership interest the impressive gains the UAW made on wages, pensions, and other major items. These local issues, ranging from rules governing smoking to holes in the paving on the employee parking lot, represent a back-to-the-womb development in mass unionism. They reflect the irritations and frustrations that caused workers to turn to unions in the thirties, and they stem from the worker’s sense of obliteration in a society of union and corporate bigness.

The range of strike problems and the differing solutions that will be necessary to cope with them indicate the desirability of more priority for the search for answers. President Johnson gave assurance in his State of the Union message that he would recommend new measures to deal with emergency strikes. Governor Rockefeller and Mayor Lindsay are at work on plans for more dependable safeguards against civil service walkouts. Walter Reuther has put forward some ideas of his own for guaranteeing equity to public employees without muscle-flexing. But from most of labor’s new leaders, just as was, traditionally, the answer from the old, comes the response: “Leave it all to collective bargaining. The less government does, the better.” That response is not good enough—for unions, employers, or the country.

The first need is for less ritual and more inventiveness in the bargaining process itself. The idea of crisis-free negotiations on a continuing basis is not ripe for discard simply because of the abortive end of its initial application in steel. The important task is to piece out the elements of strength and weakness in the experience of the steel industry’s Human Relations Committee so that future invocations of the same technique will not be vulnerable to demagogic attack.

THE KAISER PROFIT-SHARING PLAN

The best proof that this is no impossible undertaking exists in the record of a parallel experiment in the same industry, the long-range sharing committee that operates at the Kaiser Steel Corporation plant in Fontana, California. The committee also grew out of the long and costly 1959 strike, but it differed in two important respects from the Human Relations Committee. Instead of confining its membership to top leaders of the steel industry and the union, the Kaiser committee added to these three distinguished neutrals — Professor George W. Taylor of the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor John T. Dunlop of Harvard, and David L. Cole, former director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.

The second significant difference was that the Kaiser panel addressed itself to the development of a pioneering plan for giving the union members a tangible cash stake in greater industrial efficiency. The starting point was a guarantee that no worker would lose his job because of automation, but this was supplemented by an assurance that one third of all the savings resulting from increased productivity would be divided among the work force.

The plan, now in its fourth year, has had some rough spots, especially in periods when the cash bonuses have run low. But both the company and the union have demonstrated ingenuity in adapting the ground rules to changed conditions, and the three public members have served as an invaluable catalyst. Still another help has been a continuing educational drive to let the rank and file know everything there is to know about the plan. Most observers feel that this foundation of membership knowledge and support was even more influential than the financial dividends in protecting the Kaiser plan against the kind of assault that wrecked the Human Relations Committee. Its popularity was demonstrated when 1000 Kaiser fabricating employees clamored for a similar plan — and got it — at a time when the cash return under the original program in basic steel was disappointing workers by dropping to its lowest level. It has since turned upward again.

YEAR-ROUND TALKS

In its monumental report, “Technology and the American Economy,” last February, President Johnson’s tripartite automation commission called for wider use of the year-round discussion technique to take the countdown element out of collective bargaining. “Basic issues such as adjustment to technological change cannot be resolved by a small team of negotiators working themselves into a state of physical and mental exhaustion for a few months every two or three years,” the commission warned. “ These issues must be dealt with patiently, carefully and, above all, continuously until satisfactory solutions emerge.”

The substance of bargaining also needs review in most industries so that every negotiation does not degenerate into another sterile “battle for the buck” without concern for the larger interests of either workers or society.

Among the most depressing indications of the inertia now general on both sides of the bargaining table is the survival of hourly wages as the basic measure of income for blue-collar workers. Obviously, mechanics have the same need for the dignity and stability of a weekly salary as whitecollar employees, engineers, and technicians. A broad variety of income stabilizers has been introduced over the years to mitigate this form of discrimination.

Yet the only large-scale factory enterprise that pays its workers a regular weekly wage is IBM, which has no unions at all. If organized labor is to move ahead again, it will have to reorient its bargaining priorities to get away from the rollercoaster effect of the hourly wage. The progress the New Economists in Washington have made toward ironing out the worst bumps of the business cycle provides strong evidence that many industries could put all their workers on salary without major financial hazard. As technological innovation erases the line between mechanic and technician, the use of collar color to determine the pay system becomes as senseless as it is demeaning.

NO STRIKES AGAINST THE PUBLIC

How much governmental intervention will be required to protect the public interest will depend, of course, on how effectively labor and management discharge their own bargaining responsibilities in fields where strikes or uneconomic contracts inflict their primary damage on the community.

The most apparent deficiencies, as the New York subway tie-up demonstrated, affect relations in the civil service. The number of public employees now exceeds 10 million, and it is expected to rise by 5 million in the next decade, with virtually all the growth in state, county, and municipal agencies. Plainly, what is essential to make the no-strike policy something more than a legal fiction for this vast army of civil servants is a negotiating structure that has some counterpart of arbitration as its terminal point. The subway strike ended when Mayor Lindsay’s panel got around to making its peace recommendations; it need never have started if the law had required such recommendations before the old contract ran out.

However, one important caveat goes with the idea of mandatory procedures for an impartial determination of fairness in disputes involving public employees. The citizens must be prepared to pay the price of economic justice for their state and municipal employees and not expect them to subsidize the agencies for which they work by taking less. No city has anything like enough money to do all the things that need doing these days in education, urban renewal, health, and a thousand other fields. But no ban on civil service strikes is going to work for long if fact-finders go below the point of fairness to fit the public purse or if the community reneges on the contract inprovements the fact-finders declare just.

In private industry the yardstick for government action must be the extent to which any cutoff in service imperils the national interest. When all the people have to suffer through the willfulness or ineptitude of economic power blocs, it is an affirmation, not a denial, of democracy to provide effective government machinery for breaking deadlocks.

The weakness of the national emergency provisions now in the Taft-Hartley Act is that they delay strikes for eighty days but provide no instrument for putting peace proposals before the economic warriors. The least that is needed, by way of change, is a fact-finding procedure that would assure a third-party judgment on all the issues in dispute. The experience in atomic energy and missile-sites construction disputes, where such settlement machinery has worked well for several years, encourages hope that most controversies would be amicably adjusted on the basis of the fact-finders’ recommendations. Compulsory arbitration or government seizure would have to be the instrument of last resort where this hope proved vain.

No formula or law is going to bring an end to all labor-management conflict. Australia has had a system of labor courts dating back to the formation of the Commonwealth in 1901. It still has strikes; but in general, the system has proved beneficial, and it has certainly not put the Australian economy into a totalitarian straitjacket — the bugaboo which foes of compulsory arbitration invariably conjure up.

In some industries the issue of federal intervention has been rendered academic. Automation has already made these industries so strike-proof that all the unionized employees could quit work without any resulting interruption of service. Electric utilities, telephone, and oil refining are cases in point. The list will grow as push buttons replace men in a broader spectrum of industry. The challenge to the nation is to demonstrate that it has enough social imagination to develop equitable and democratic instruments for guarding against strike emergencies without waiting for technology to make all strikes obsolete. That machinery will be equally needed as a safeguard for industrial democracy when labor’s economic weapons have lost their potency. Union statesmanship today will be the surest guarantee of union survival in the technocratic tomorrow of industrial disarmament.