Hard Times

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In his seventh-floor office on Manhattan's West Side, a glacially handsome man spoke coldly about his situation. Said Bertram Anthony Powers, 40, president of Local No. 6 ("Big Six") of the International Typographical Union: "All this pressure and complaint was expected. Management is always right and we're always wrong. That's the way strikes are. I'm not bothered."

Three days later, the President of the U.S. went out of his way at a press conference to rap Powers by name, declare that the Powers-led New York newspaper strike, now eleven weeks old, had "long since passed the point of public toleration," and to urge that some sort of "third party" be brought in to settle it.

Powers remained unbothered. "President Kennedy," he said with tight-lipped calm, "has been illadvised. Nobody can tell me that there is anything in our demands that is unreasonable." All Powers wanted was his own kind of contract. "A man must believe in unions to do this. You can't rely on management. Employers won't give you a dime. The public's desire is a settlement. Our desire is a contract." And the strike went on.

At the same time in Miami Beach, the feudal, feuding barons of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Executive Council (average age: 62) met at the gaudy Americana Hotel. As if aware of possible criticism, they avoided the Americana's pools, eschewed Dionysian pleasures, spent most of their time in worried huddles. At one point a reporter cornered A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany in a corridor, asked him if he thought the A.F.L.-C.I.O. had a responsibility to end national strikes. Meany's face flushed with anger; his fist closed tightly around the cane that he now carries. "We have a responsibility to our membership," rumbled Meany. "And if we think it's in our interest to start a national strike, we'll start a national strike." Meany clomped away.

In Philadelphia, where he had gone to try to settle a dispute with local truckers, Teamsters' Boss Jimmy Hoffa munched a lettuce salad and talked about U.S. labor's troubles. Whatever Bobby Kennedy or anyone else may think about Hoffa's moral character, he possesses one of the shrewdest minds, and is one of the best organizers, in U.S. unionism today. Said Hoffa: "Everybody's running scared, that's what's wrong. The trouble is we're in an age of labor leaders. They're looking toward retirement and they want to be labor statesmen. I saw George Meany on Meet the Press and I felt sorry for the poor bastard. He's pathetic."

There are a lot of miles between New York, Philadelphia and Miami Beach. And there is a lot of difference between Bert Powers, George Meany and Jimmy Hoffa. Yet those three scenes tell much about the U.S. labor movement--and its present state of disrepair.

Organized labor still has great strength. It holds a vast and vital place, bloodily won, in the American system. Yet for an abundance of reasons--aging leadership, corruption, and inability to keep pace with technological progress, above all the fact that it has often subordinated public welfare to private gain--labor is doing what it can least afford. It is losing public support to a critical degree.

On that single fact, there is remarkable agreement. It was recently expressed by Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz, who told the National Academy of Arbitrators that "if collective bargaining can't produce peaceful settlements of these controversies, the public will." It was put another way by Labor Pundit Paul Jacobs, a long-time union representative, who is now at the University of California's Institute of Industrial Relations. Said Jacobs: "The community at large became disenchanted with Big Labor right after the war. It was disenchanted at the time of the McClellan hearings. And it is disenchanted now. But what is new is that the liberal and social-welfare groups are also disenchanted."

Part of the Public. One thing that has happened is that the laboring man has, as never before, become part of the general public. Like the salaried worker, he owns his own home, a car and a television set; like the salaried man, he is a victim of the inflation set off by wage-price spirals. No longer battling for survival, he now seeks security. In a period of general prosperity, he feels less real need for a union. The result can be easily gauged: at a time of record employment, union membership is faltering. In 1956 unions claimed 18.5 million members out of a work force of 67.5 million. Today, with a work force of 71.4 million, there remain just about 18.5 million union members.

Moreover, as one result of automation--the world's biggest bogy word to most union leaders--the so-called white-collar workers have for the first time passed in number the lunch pail-carrying blue-collar men, who are the backbone of unionism (see chart). Since white-collar workers historically identify themselves with management, they are hard to organize--and the unions have made only the smallest dent in their ranks.

Part of the Past. The oldsters who met last week in Miami Beach offered small hope for labor's future. They were too much a part of its past. Most of them had come up through labor's ranks during the '20s and '30s, conquering hard times with a crusading zeal. Most of them won badges of labor honor in the form of busted heads and bloodied noses during the days of labor's surge to power.

Now much of that old zeal seems gone. Still among the fieriest--and certainly among the brightest--of them all is the United Auto Workers' Walter Reuther. But like many of the others, even Reuther can be criticized for having grown away from his membership. Says a U.A.W. official: "Walter doesn't have time for us any more. He's too busy trying to decide if we should recognize Red China." Says American Motors Vice President Edward Cushman, a onetime professor of public administration and Labor Department specialist, who helped design his company's bold new profit-sharing program: "The zealous leaders of the '30s and '40s have grown old, become like the fat cats of industry. That is too bad, because much of the unions' value stemmed from their being unacceptable and somewhat suspect. But when you find someone like the Steelworkers' Dave McDonald being angered and upset over being turned down for membership in the Pittsburgh Athletic Association, that's a commentary on union leaders today." The Newspaper Guild's former President Joseph Collis agrees: "There was a time when we organized in cellars and back rooms. We have come a long way since then, to fruit juice flowing over ice at a fancy hotel. But somewhere along the way, the principles on which the American trade movement was founded have been lost."

While labor's senior citizens are suffering from hardening of the arteries, its younger leaders are for the most part an unpromising lot. One of the real tragedies of the labor movement, says Chicago Labor Lawyer Lester Asher, "is the lack of young intellectuals. Where are the lawyers, the economists, who were with us? In the New Deal days, when I said I represented labor unions I was someone. I was fighting for the working stiff. Now these young men are going elsewhere for better money, security and prestige."

Of labor's younger leaders, the Big Six's Bert Powers is neither better nor worse than most. And the New York newspaper strike he has brought about can stand as a symptom of labor's ills and a symbol of the impasse to which collective bargaining has come.

On the wall of Powers' modest office hangs a picture of the old New York Tribune's editor Horace Greeley, who, besides sending many a young man West, was the first president of the New York Printers Union. The I.T.U. has a long and honorable history, but Powers is not much interested in such things. "History," he says, "can be a handicap. We can get too set in our ways and be too self-satisfied. Don't rock the boat, they say. We're the oldest in the city. Yet we don't get the money from the publishers. Too much history." Neither is Powers interested in newfangled notions. "I don't believe in all this social jazz in unions. Folk dances . . . community action. I guess housing projects are all right, but I'm not even sure about them. We should concern ourselves with negotiations."

Yet it is precisely in the field of negotiations that Powers has failed. And in his failure he has helped bring about a disgraceful strike. So far, that strike has cost about $33 million in wages, $55 million in advertising and circulation revenues, incalculable millions to retailers unable to advertise. It has put 20,000 newspaper employees out of work (only 3,000 of them from Powers' own union) and further imperiled the continued existence of at least two financially shaky papers, the morning Mirror and the afternoon Post.

What About the Times? Most of all, the strike has attracted worldwide attention and wonderment, and called into question the usefulness of collective bargaining in America's free society. Other nations have long since come to depend on the New York press as a mirror of U.S. opinion. Brazil's President Joao Goulart, having won a smashing plebiscite, had been counting on the influential New York Times and Herald Tribune to tell the U.S. about his new administration. On the day after the election, he asked an aide: "What did the U.S. press say?" The aide dug up some press agency reports of reaction from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "Yes," said Goulart impatiently. "But what did the Times say?" Reminded of the strike, Goulart's face fell. Says the aide: "What the Post-Dispatch says is important in St. Louis. But what the Times says is repeated throughout the whole country and the world."

From Hong Kong to Halifax, the talk about the newspaper strike resolves into one question: How could it have come to happen?

The answer is not easy. For one thing, the New York publishers themselves share the blame with Powers and the Big Six. Long before the strike began, it was apparent that the papers were going to have trouble with Powers; yet the publishers dillydallied around, waited almost until the strike deadline before they laid down their own terms--from which they have barely budged since. From the beginning, the publishers made clear their suspicion that Powers was not bargaining in good faith, that he was really wielding his strike monkey wrench to enhance his power in the I.T.U. and catapult himself into the union's international presidency. (Powers himself bitterly denies that charge; he points out that he makes $15,000 a year as Big Six president, would earn only $17,000 as head of the international, and would have to move his wife and four children from their small house in Massapequa, L.I., to international headquarters in Colorado Springs.)

In New York Times Vice President Amory Bradford, a Massachusetts-born Brahmin, the publishers selected a negotiator who did not even speak the same language as Powers, a Boston Irishman. Sighed a weary federal mediator after negotiations had stalled for perhaps the dozenth time: "One side is talking Chinese and the other French."

Yet. culpable as the publishers may be. the key to the newspaper strike remains Bert Powers and his Big Six local. The son of a Massachusetts civil servant, Powers was brought up during the period of "relief money, dried fruit, surplus food stamps, and using the public library for entertainment." He got his first taste of unionism when, at 17, he went to work for a Boston printer for $16 a week. At an I.T.U. local meeting one day, says Powers, a man who was campaigning for union office "told the membership to go easy on contract demands because he knew a new plant was going to open in the area. I believed him, and I guess the others did too, because they voted for him. The printing plant never came. I was young and I saw through it." The lesson, as Powers saw it: "Don't take it easy on management."

Not Coffee, Muscle. Powers never forgot that lesson. He moved to New York in 1947, worked his way through the union ranks, became president of Big Six in 1961. As such, he entered the hierarchy of an international union noted for its internal democracy. I.T.U. tradition provides for two contending parties, which have come to be known as the Independents and the Progressives. Powers is a Progressive. Says he of the opposition: "They believe benefits will trickle down, like coffee in a percolator, from management to workers. They believe it. I don't." And what does Powers believe? Says he: "The only thing that counts is muscle. If disputes were settled by reason or justice, there wouldn't be unions."

Powers uses the word muscle in the sense of union strength, not of physical violence. But it is that intransigence of attitude that has, despite the pleas of President Kennedy and Labor Secretary Wirtz, despite the mediation attempts of New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Mayor Robert Wagner, caused the breakdown of negotiations on issues that should be negotiable. The main issues:

. CONTRACT EXPIRATION : Powers demands that the expiration date of the Big Six be changed from Dec. 7 to Oct. 31. "This," he says, "is the most important issue of all right now." As it happens, Oct. 31 is the expiration date for the contract now held by the Newspaper Guild, biggest (8,500 New York members) but weakest of the ten newspaper unions. That date is one of the Guild's few real power levers: it comes just a few days before national, state and local elections, when readership interest is at a peak; moreover, it marks the beginning of the Christmas advertising season, when publishers earn a hefty 25% of their yearly income. In trying to move in on the Guild's date, Powers is plainly trying to undercut his fellow union. And it speaks for the haplessness of the Guild that it has, however reluctantly, gone right along with Powers' strike in the vague name of union solidarity.

. WAGES & BENEFITS : Powers demands a wage increase of $19 a week over the present $145 (New York printers average about $7,500 yearly), extra vacation time (estimated cost to publishers: $3.15 a week), five-day annual sick leave ($2.50 a week), reduction of the work week from 36 1/4 hours to 35 ($8.16 a week), new night differential pay ($1.90 a week). Taken together, the Powers wage-benefit requirements would cost the publishers an extra $37 a week per printer for two years. In return, the publishers have offered Powers a $10 package.

. JOB SECURITY: Powers demands union jurisdiction over any automated typesetting machines the publishers may install. "Some day," says Powers, "--and it isn't far off--type for box scores, presidential speeches, racing results, stock closings, will all be set by tape. We want jurisdiction over those machines." He also insists on maintaining the longstanding provision for setting "reproduction"--advertising copy that is never used or intended to be. "Reproduction" is better known as "bogus," or "dead horse"--and by any name it is the worst sort of featherbedding. Powers and the publishers are at an absolute impasse on the bogus issue. Says Publishers' Negotiator Bradford: "This is one issue we must have progress on." Says Powers: "This is one thing we just won't bargain on."

In these issues lie not only the clues to public reaction against Powers and his printers, but the growing national dissatisfaction with Big Labor itself. For "job security" has become labor's watchword. In 1961 (the last year on which statistics are available), there were 250 strikes in which job security was a central issue. It is a crucial issue in the aerospace industry. The argument over the size of work gangs brought on the recent East Coast dock strike. The job-security issue last year caused flight engineers to strike against the airlines, and job security is a cause of continuing controversy in the railroad industry.

Make-Work & Unwork. As it happens, the corollary of "job security" is all too often featherbedding, make-work and unwork. In the nation's $80 billion construction industry, some painters will not use spray guns, some carpenters will not use certain power tools, others do not permit ladders to be brought to a job (they must be hammered together on the site). Railroad diesel locomotives still carry a useless "fireman." Says an International Harvester engineer in Milwaukee: "If you want to repair a machine, an electrician has to come and shut off the switch, a millwright loosens the nuts and bolts, a machine repairman will remove the pulley, the millwright removes the motor. Many times they won't work without a helper, even though there is nothing for him to do. WTe had to close many shops. Some men who weren't even skilled work ers were making $5.50 an hour."

In Hollywood, producers of horse operas are required to hire one wrangler to care for each "principal" horse (the ones ridden by the stars), plus one additional wrangler for each five supporting horses. The wranglers are Teamsters; they get $4.50 an hour. If a scene calls for an old-fashioned oil lamp, a prop man provides the lamp, an effects man rigs it, and a second effects man lights it. Musicians and stagehands often get paid for nothing. When Comic-Pianist Victor Borge gives a one-man show on Broadway (no scenery, no other performers, no props save the piano), he has to pay stagehands to sit backstage.

The Realists. At the root of the job-security conflict is, of course, the unions' fear of automation--the dread that machines will replace men. Says an A.F.L.-C.I.O. official: "For every $5,000 worth of investment, you can get rid of one worker. The machine has no vacations, no pensions, no fringe benefits." Years ago, the U.A.W.'s Reuther expressed labor's instinctive reaction to automation. Shown around an automated auto plant whose work force had been reduced from some 800 men to fewer than 15, Reuther agreed that it was great for production. "But," he snapped, "are those machines going to buy the cars?"

Yet Reuther himself has come to accept automation--and seen his union prosper mightily thereby. And there is much other evidence that labor, with boldness and imagination, can thrive in the automated world so necessary to U.S. industry if it is to compete in the world market.

Among the labor leaders who have faced up effectively to automation is, of all people, Harry Bridges, boss of the West Coast longshoremen. In 1960 Bridges agreed to let the money-losing shipping employers automate the loading and dock procedures to their hearts' content--in return for a stipulated schedule of payments into a special pension fund for workers displaced by machines. It has worked fine so far; in fact, there are more jobs than there are dock workers. Bridges' happy complaint: "We're short of men, both in Los Angeles and San Francisco, for days on end." He regrets that "it's a narrow, selfish approach. It doesn't really help any of the new people coming in. But we feel that the best place to start is with the members of the union who are already in the industry. The rest of it is a social problem that cannot be solved through collective bargaining."

In several other areas, there are labor leaders sophisticated enough to answer the questions posed by the era of the automatic hammer and the automated factory or office. Among these is Joseph Beirne, 52, president of the Communications Workers of America. Beirne's union has accepted automation. In later years, with Beirne encouraging the trend, the telephone industry has become the nation's most completely automated. Since 1920, the number of telephone company employees has grown from 200,000 to 600,000. "The fact is," Beirne says, "that to handle the present volume of telephone traffic with operators would require the employment of every woman in the entire labor force, plus an additional 20%." Another friend to automation is James A. Suffridge, 53, president of the Retail Clerks International Association. Suffridge has had more success than anyone else in organizing the hard-to-get white-collar workers, has built his union since 1944 from 60,000 to 400,000.

If automation v. job security were the only dilemma confronting labor today, then the unions would not have fallen so far from public esteem. But the union appetite is often voracious--to hold their well-paid jobs, many labor leaders think they must continue to get more, more, more for their workers. But it is painful even to members of other unions to consider that the San Francisco plumbers' newest contract calls for $7.55 an hour in wages and fringes, or that New York electrical workers, now on a 25-hour week, get $4.96 an hour for five hours, $7.44 for an hour of overtime.

Nothing. Beyond that, there is the matter of union corruption--and it is an unhappy fact that clean unions do not make headlines. Astute though he is, Jimmy Hoffa refuses to take action against hoodlums in positions of Teamster leadership. The International Longshoremen's Association in New York is notorious for corruption, pilfering and nepotism. The dock boss is Teddy Gleason. One of his sons handles the legal work for Dad's 40,000-member Atlantic Coast district; another is the insurance broker for the I.L.A.'s multimillion-dollar welfare fund.

Somewhere, somehow, much of the labor movement seems to have lost its original purpose. Locals trying to clean out corruption often get little or no support from their national officers. Says Robert Barbour, reform-minded president of the Detroit Sheet Metal Workers' local, long known as racket-ridden: "Tell me what this union has to offer anyone? Nothing. All we have here is a right to pay dues, and that isn't much. If I lose this fight to clean up this local, I'll spend the rest of my life fighting unionism--there's just too much corruption and rottenness, rottenness, rottenness."

As for the national leaders, many of the old crusaders have become affluent in terms of both money and power--and they mean to keep that affluence, even at the expense of unionism and the public interest. The manner in which David Dubinsky, longtime head of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, last week explained why he and his fellow A.F.L.-C.I.O. leaders were entitled to luxuriate at the Americana is perhaps significant. "I want what the rich man has," said Dubinsky. "That's why I'm in the labor movement."

Adding to labor's woes is the fact that much of management, whether through self-interested wisdom or generous enlightenment, often beats labor to the punch by offering wages, benefits and working conditions equal to or surpassing the union capacity to achieve through bargaining. Complains Frank Murphy, assistant A.F.L.-C.I.O. director for New England: "You can barely start an organization drive before management comes through with a wage jump or some other new benefits."

Hanging Out the Shingle. Management has also helped labor meet the automation problem. Kaiser Industries recently signed a contract with its employees guaranteeing that no jobs would be lost through automation. Kaiser has gone on with a program to bring in work-saving machinery, while maintaining a continuing dialogue with its union leaders on all aspects of employment. Another approach was worked out by U.S. Industries, Inc., New York manufacturers of automated machinery. The company and the International Association of Machinists have established the American Foundation on Automation and Employment Inc. Its purpose is to further automation even while easing the impact on workers. U.S. Industries supports the program by contributing up to $1,000 to the foundation for each piece of machinery it sells.

What can be done to ease labor's dif ficulties, to prevent such affronts to the public interest as the strike being conducted by Powers and his Big Six? To some, the answer lies in increased Government intervention. The Kennedy Administration tried that during the regime of Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg, a veteran labor lawyer and an artist at mediation. Bustling about the nation, Goldberg helped settle several strikes, including even the one at the Metropolitan Opera. But Goldberg failed in the last dispute he tried to mediate, and there is some speculation that the whole roof was about to cave in on his head when he departed for the Supreme Court.

The present Labor Secretary, Willard Wirtz, has shown little inclination to follow Goldberg's example. And there is good cause for believing that Government intervention, over the long haul, can do more harm than good. Explains George P. Shultz, dean of the University of Chicago's Business School: "The Government should be a reluctant intervener, not a delighted intervener. Sometimes, before a strike even happens, the Administration speculates on just what a reasonable settlement might be. Now if I'm a bargainer and I hear this kind of talk, that takes the wraps off me. I know there's going to be intervention, so I can make a lot of noise, ask for things I might not consider if I were negotiating responsibly. Someone's said, 'If the President hangs out his shingle, he's going to get all the business.' "

This leads of course to the spectre of compulsory arbitration. And Jimmy Hoffa, for one, has a pungent opinion of that: "Bull. You don't have no unions with compulsory arbitration. The arbitrator don't know nothing about your union or the business or what's wrong. He throws one side a crumb and the other a piece of bread, or maybe the other way around. The truth don't lie in the middle of anything. The truth is the truth."

A Little More Tolerance. Another suggested solution is that Congress pass legislation placing restrictions on the right to strike. This, too, could be dangerous. For effective unionism is vital to the U.S. free enterprise system, and the strike is labor's ultimate weapon. "The public," says Chicago's Shultz, "needs a little more tolerance for strikes, for the abrasive aspects of the situation. Some strikes are necessary for a healthy economic system."

True enough. But as the New York newspaper battle demonstrates, the strike weapon should not be used as a monkey wrench. With public toleration at the breaking point, trade unionism is going to have to find and employ more intelligent weapons if it hopes to regain its own health and the favor of the people.

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