High Cost of Solidarity

Just a fortnight after the Miss America Pageant, glamorous David J. McDonald dramatically swept into the coral-colored convention hall at Atlantic City, N.J. last week to open the biennial convention of his 1,250,000-man United Steelworkers of America. The curly-haired union president, fanfared by both organ and orchestra, strode to the stage and delivered his urgent message. "I say to you delegates," he said, "if you want your union to be clean and strong, don't leave it up to the Great White Father, as I am now being called in the South. Rip this cancer out of your bowels through your own doing and don't leave it up to me."

All 3,522 delegates knew what he wanted them to rip out: Furnace-Charger Donald Rarick, 39, McKeesport, Pa. local union president who in 1957 capitalized on member unrest to slash McDonald's re-election majority to a no-confidence 64%. McDonald, carefully stage-managing the big union's 750 employees (called "porkchoppers" in unionese), deftly set up each convention event as a demonstration of his absolute command over the organization he inherited in 1952 from the late Philip Murray. McDonald men infiltrated gossip groups in each hotel lobby, cocked ears to caucus rooms in the Sheraton-Ritz Carlton, where Rarick and his haunted dissidents clung together. At midweek President McDonald summoned Delegate Rarick to the podium, ostentatiously kept down catcalls while the surprised foe stumbled through an unprepared attack and was promptly sliced down in a McDonald rebuttal. After key men who might threaten McDonald control had sycophantically proclaimed their loyalty ("His record speaks for itself," bellowed Chicago's Steelworker Chieftain Joe Germano), the convention voted solidly (nay votes: two) for purge trials of the Rarick "traitors."

Having demonstrated his power in his own house, McDonald showed that he knew how to keep it. He started talk of demands for "substantial" improvements in wages, hours and fringes when his present three-year contract expires next July --even though steel wages average about 30-c- above the auto workers and about one-third of the Steelworkers are working short weeks or none at all. "You cannot be weak and divided," he told delegates, "if you want to enjoy fewer hours of work per day and per week."

Secretary of Labor James Mitchell, who proudly carries the Eisenhower Administration's banner among Democratic labor leaders, last week was booed for the first time at a labor convention as he followed a reception committee of Steelworker officers down the aisle at Atlantic City. Embarrassed, friendly District Director Joe Molony said. "A thick-skinned Irishman like you shouldn't be bothered by that."

"I am not," responded Mitchell to the entire convention. "I am devoted to the promotion of the welfare of the workers of this country, and I don't care if a few people, because of a political bias, question that, because I know what I believe in, and I know that so long as I am in office, this union and every other legitimate free trade union in America can depend upon my support, and you have it." The Steelworkers stood for a long ovation.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.