Cocktails for Two

If an employer wants to avoid labor trouble, he should invite the president of the local union to join his luncheon club. If he really hankers for industrial peace, he should get the union leader's daughter enrolled in a fashionable dancing school.

Does that sound silly? It isn't, argues A. (for Abraham) A. (for Abby) Imberman, a Chicago public-relations man, in the January issue of the Harvard Business Review. Imberman, who has had several unions as clients, maintains that labor leaders' more violent anti-company feelings are often prompted by the failure of their communities to accept them and their families socially.

A powerful union leader, Imberman found, frequently expects that he will get the same social recognition generally accorded successful businessmen. "It is a bleak morning indeed," says Imberman, "when the labor leader has the first dim realization that he has ... no prestige in the eyes of his community.

"Those who want to fight [their social stigma] do it in the only way they know how--shaking down the employer in one of 500 different ways," e.g., work stoppages, slowdowns, shakedowns. Imberman tells of a Detroit union head who went through weeks of nerve-snapping contract negotiations with the sour knowledge that his daughter had just been forced out of her sorority because her father was a labor leader. Says Imberman: "The impotence of the father to deal with such a situation is not unrelated to the fury with which he pursues his strike ends."

What to do about it? The businessman, says Imberman, should ask the labor leader over for a Saturday night's bridge game, nominate him for the local country club, invite him to work in the Red Cross and Community Chest drives. The employer's wife can help by shepherding the union man's wife into upper-crust women's clubs. But Imberman leaves one big question unanswered: Will a union leader still have the loyalty of his unionists when they see him drinking cocktails with the boss?

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