Crossing the Picket Line
By RICHARD AFEW weeks back I participated in a tele- vision panel discussion on 'Orthodoxy and the Liberal Mind.' We were four on the panel, and we were pretty much of an age, early to late forties, which meant that our political attitudes had mostly been formed in the 1930s. We had all been liberals then, and I guess we all quali- fied as liberals in May, 1959. But certain things had changed. To reach our round table, it was necessary to cross a picket line manned by mem- bers or hirelings of one of the technicians' unions. The union had struck the network because a taped interview with Brigitte Bardot had been made in Paris, a week or two earlier, by some French technicians who had neglected to join the American union. Not one of the four of us declined to cross the picket line. We regarded this as a frivolous, irresponsible strike; we suffered no pangs of conscience on entering the studio and sensed only lightly the irony of crossing a picket line in order to be able to sound of about liberalism. Twenty years ago if one of us had crossed a picket line he would have found himself picketed by other liberals. The New Republic would probably have revoked his right to read the magazine, and he would have ended up in psychoanalysis—provided an analyst could be found who would allow such a wretch to soil his couch.
Almost no one in this country feels about or- ganised labour today as he did a couple of decades back. Those who despised it then—employers and the bulk of the middle class—accept it now and in many cases are grateful to it and admiring of it. Today in this country the term 'anti-labour' has very little meaning, except as applied to em- ployers in certain areas where the unions are as weak as they were in the Thirties. Only a visionary of some sort, a utopian, could be 'against' labour in the sense of thinking it ought to be eliminated from American life; it is a product of industrial society and is no more likely to disappear than-the automobile. Nor is it more 'reasonable to be 'pro-labour' in the old sense; the opposition has been vanquished, no politician or important political interest fails to profess 'pro-labour' sentiments, and there are no useful outlets for the hopeful and protective feelings some of us had about labour before the war.
The problem the country is grappling with now is the social management and control of labour's power, and it is a problem as great as the manage- ment and control of capital, which took, roughly speaking, a half-century to accomplish. Labour today has a capacity for denying the public interest almost as great as capital's fifty years ago, and scarcely a month passes without some vivid demonstration of this. At the moment several New York hospitals are being staffed by volun- teers because 'of an irresponsible strike of service employees organised by a local of the Retail Drug Employees Union, which has no business repre- senting the cooks, elevator operators and main- tenance people in hospitals. A while back, the newspapers of New York had to suspend publica- tion because a distributors' union, run by grafters and racketeers and having no support from any of the other unions, refused to make deliveries; it was plain that the strike had not been called in order to improve pay or working conditions but in order to advance a power struggle on the part of racketeers who had, in the past, been getting tinge sums from employers to prevent strikes.
The most powerful of our unions, the Inter- national Brotherhood of Teamsters, constantly threatens to bring our whole economic life to a standstill—something it could go a long way towards doing—if its demands in some narrow sector are not satisfied. James Hoffa, the Team- sters' leader, a man who greatly resembles the late Senator McCarthy in manner and method and arrogance, has managed to grow in power as he has revealed his contempt for the Govern- ment, for public opinion and the money and property of other people. A Congressional com-
mittee has revealed that Hoffa has grown immensely rich by playing fast and loose with union funds; that large numbers of his aides have drawn on treasuries as if they were private bank accounts; that a criminal record featuring larceny and violence is almost a condition of success in the union. All of this had been drawn to the attention of the rank and file of the Teamsters, and in the months they have had to ponder the revelations Mr. Hoffa has, according to the best labour reporters, consolidated a power that wag rather shaky when these facts had not been established.
In some ways the labour problem lacks the dimensions of the capital problem earlier in the century. Capital as a whole once seemed to stand with Commodore Vanderbilt in saying, 'The public be damned.' The Teamsters to one side, the body of labour today has an adequate sense of social responsibility—adequate enough to have led the AFL-CIO to expel the Teamsters and a few other transparently corrupt unions. George Meany, the president of the central body, is an earnest and honest man; Walter Reuther. the vice-president, is a highly intelligent and imagina- tive one. But the inescapable fact is that labour today exercises a vast and largely uncontrolled power and that it must somehow be controlled. An attempt at control, the Taft-Hartley Act. was made eleven years ago, but it got at only a few aspects of the problem—and in some respects was unjust to the unions. The need for further legis- lation—particularly in dealing with frivolous strikes in areas of public interest and in subjecting union funds to some adequate system of inspec- tion and control—is apparent to almost everyone, and in time such legislation will come. (A wide- ranging Bill, drawn up mainly by Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts, passed the Senate this year, but it seems likely never to be brought to a vote in the House of Representatives.) The American record for dealing with concentrated power is not, on the whole, a bad one.
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