Labor on Trial

With fascination and with deep concern the U.S. watched Senate investigators unfolding an ever-spreading picture of corruption and abuse in the powerful International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Not since the investigation of the finagling tycoons of the '20s and '30s had so many serious questions been raised against men in a position to wield great influence on the U.S. economy.

The focus last week was on a pink-pated labor boss named Dave Beck, president of the 1,400,000-man Teamsters Union, who arrogantly refused to answer a Senate committee's questions about misconduct and misuse of union funds that overlay much more serious implications of abuse of power. As Beck ducked behind the Fifth Amendment, the Americans who writhed most were the other leaders of organized labor, who feared that what was going on and what was disclosed might give all of labor a bad name. "We are in Gethsemane," said one A.F.L.-C.I.O leader. "We can't do a thing until this mess is cleared up."

"A Terrible Price." Wearing worried frowns, the top brass of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Executive Council--speaking for 15 million organized workers--gathered around their huge, elliptical conference table in Washington to survey the damage and see what they could do. "There are too many people," said the Auto Workers' Walter Reuther, "who will use this current expose of Teamsters' corruption to exploit their own purposes--to try to restrict the entire labor movement." The Electrical Workers' Jim Carey added: "It is absolutely necessary that we denounce and renounce such characters or we will pay a terrible price for permitting ourselves to be associated in the public eye with these phonies and criminals." Summed up George Meany, A.F.L.-C.I.O. president: "A shocking story."

In this climate the leaders of labor quickly agreed to: 1) file intramural charges against Beck in his capacity as a vice president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. for "bringing the labor movement into disrepute"; 2) suspend Beck as an A.F.L.-C.I.O. vice president pending a verdict; 3) direct the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Ethical Practices Committee to investigate whether Beck's Teamsters Union is "substantially dominated or controlled by corrupt influences."

Within Beck's own union, there were uneasy stirrings. "They ought to hang Beck," said one Irish-American teamster in Local 682 in St. Louis. In Local 524 in Yakima, Wash., the teamsters did just that, stringing up an effigy of Beck and setting it afire with cigarette lighters. "Beck's been talking about us paying for his defense fund," growled a Seattle taxi driver. "We been hanging around the cab stands all day trying to figure out how to slip some dough to the prosecution." Said a truck driver in Portland, Ore.: "It's high time that somebody finds out what's happening to the $5.50 a month I shell out in dues." As Dave Beck headed back home to Seattle, he proclaimed that he would raise $1,000,000 to tell "the facts," but his own secretary-treasurer said he would oppose any such use of union funds.

A Growing Opinion. What really bothered labor was what the public might be thinking, and what Congress and state legislatures might do. One day last week the House Education and Labor Committee announced that it would soon start up a new probe into the administration of union welfare funds. Labor Secretary James P. Mitchell let it be known that his department was studying several different types of possible legislation. Beyond that, there was talk of tougher measures that labor experts ranging up to Secretary Mitchell deem restrictive, e.g., amendment of the Clayton Act so as to make labor unions subject, along with business, to monopoly laws. Said a high-ranking Government economist: "In the hands of one man there is the power to withhold all labor from an industry. That's a terrific amount of power."

Perhaps the labor leaders' greatest fear was the possibility of a move for a federal "right-to-work law," or of new and strong support for the sort of right-to-work laws, banning the union shop, that are already on the books in 18 states and are pending in others (e.g., Delaware and Illinois). Their concern was not without cause. Clearly, there was a growing opinion in the U.S. that, regardless of the good intentions of most union leaders, some sort of machinery ought to be set up to check and balance the power of big labor.

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