Mother Union

By the considered diagnosis of Chicago's Dr. Robert N. McMurry, disputes between labor and management are not so much social or political problems as psychological conflicts. Psychologist McMurry, a Freud disciple with a Vienna Ph.D., gets $125 an hour for giving advice on labor relations to companies manufacturing everything from automobiles to candy bars. Last week, after ten years' work with 180,000 employees of 127 companies, he summed up his findings: "Management has failed to be the kindly protective father, so the union has become the caressing mother who gets things from that stinker of a father."

Dr. McMurry is convinced that U.S. industry generally gives its workers material benefits in such bounty as to leave little cause for complaint. Why, then, do so many workers turn against management and rush to join unions which often make punitive demands on management? Using the Freudian "psychodynamic" approach, Dr. McMurry holds that today's adult "is not nearly so far removed from childhood as people think ... In an increasingly complex socio-economy, we are dealing with selfish, dependent, hedonistic, wishful-thinking, amoral and quite immature individuals, emotionally like a child of four."

Symbolic Clock. In nearly all of the 127 plants studied, Dr. McMurry and his staff found that the worker was frustrated, made to feel like an "inferior creature, a number in a department." The indignities of the factory caste system, he declares, crush the worker's ego--"The time clock is a beautiful symbol of servitude." Workers are constantly galled by rules which assign them to dining rooms and toilets inferior to their bosses', and leave them, to scramble for space in the parking lot where stalls are reserved for executives.

Workers kept assuring Dr. McMurry & associates that they joined unions to win tangible benefits, e.g., higher pay and greater job security. After thousands of interviews, the psychologists concluded that the men's real, unconscious motive was a craving to improve the emotional situation surrounding their jobs.

About 5% of all workers, Dr. McMurry believes, are chronic malcontents and 1% are paranoids. He says that such workers join unions to vent their unresolved, aggressive impulses upon management. He believes that union leaders fall into three main groups: 1) sincere idealists; 2) emotionally immature neurotics who tend to be exhibitionists; 3) psychopathic personalities who regard labor as a racket.

Uphill Dribble. Psychologist McMurry thinks that management should have a personnel department which uses psychological techniques in hiring workers and keeping them happy. One important way: providing a channel for opinion to flow from workers to management. Opinion, says he, is like water--it flows easily downhill, but it takes a lot of pressure to pump it up. Modern workers get a cataract of managerial opinion in bulletins and house organs, but only a thin dribble of their opinion is forced up to management.

In telling management about its faults, Dr. McMurry admits that he has to pull his psychological punches. Otherwise, he says, "We would lose our jobs." For management is also emotionally immature, and when given bitter pills of truth, it suffers anxieties and guilt feelings which it is apt to take out on the bearer of the bad news.

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