Card-Carrying Capitalists

By CHARLES CURRAN

ADESPOT, according to the dictionary, is 'a ruler or ruling body exercising or invested with absolute power in a State, irrespective of the wishes of the subject.' This definition comes very close to describing the position now occu- pied by the leaders of trade unions in the United States. It sums up the disclosures that are being made at the Congressional inquiry, headed by Senator McLellan, into the workings of trade unionism. The disclosures are startling. Their effect on public opinion is profound. For they have initiated in the minds of Americans a radical re-, valuation of trade unionism and of its place in a free society.

What does the McLellan evidence reveal? It shows, firstly, that several union leaders have used their authority in order to make themselves rich through systematic embezzlement, corrup- tion, bribe-taking and extortion. Television sets throughout America have displayed some of them giving evidence, lurching from admission to equivocation, or taking refuge in silence behind the Fifth Amendment for fear of self-incrimina- tion. The immediate result is that an image has been broken to pieces amid a national gale of laughter.

This image was the most valuable asset of the American labour movement. For seventy years the movement has guarded it as jealously as the Trojans did the Palladium. It was the image of a union leader as a dedicated crusader, kept alive by the pence of the toilers, defying in their name the bludgeons and bullets of capitalist tyrants. It was,Eugene Debs leading the pickets against the bayonets in Pullman's company town; Bill Haywood, of the Industrial Workers of the World, rallying the millhands in the Lawrence textile strike battle; John McLuckie amid Carnegie's. steelworkers as they faced the volleys in the burn-, ing streets of Homestead. Around this image were the heaps of incense deposited by two generations

of literary acolytes such as Jack London, Ida Tarbell, Gustavus Myers and Upton Sinclair.

Now it is has gone, and a .new image replaces it : the natty figure of Mr. Dave Beck, barbered and valeted, who ,gets 50,000 dollars a year for lead-

ing the Teamsters' Union, and who finds this sum insufficient to pay his income tax. The McLellan Committee, in fact, has done to trade- union prestige very .much what the Senate Bank-: ing Committee of 1933 did to the prestige of Wall Street. It has changed the climate of public opinion as completely as the 1933 disclosures about the doings on stock exchanges.

But the McLellan disclosures do not stop at the fact of dishonesty among some union leaders. If they came to no more than that, they might. be dismissed as a mere adolescent outbreak on

the fair face of labour—an eruption to be cleared up by disciplinary doses of brimstone and treacle. They go much further. For they illuminate not only the blemishes but the bony structure be- neath. They show that trade unionism has grown into predatory big business.

The men who control the unions are now seen to be monopolists. They resemble those robber

barons of old-time American capitalism long since swept away by legislation. But instead of cornering wheat or steel, as the barons tried to do, the modern monopolists corner supplies of labour. They set up their monopoly in producers, not products. They make it watertight by means of compulsory membership, imposed if necessary by strong-arm methods. They dragoon em- ployers to deduct union subscriptions from every pay packet and hand over the money in bulk (this convenient device is called the check-off; it, gives the monopoly a guarantee income and it makes shop stewards, in the British sense, superfluous). Union subscriptions now total an estimated 200 million dollars a year. But they are only a small part of the monopolies' resources from rent, in- terest and profits on investments. One union alone can boast of assets aggregating 250 million dollars. Many of them have created welfare, in- surance and pension funds which are financed

by the employers but controlled by the mon- opolies; these funds are estimated to total no fewer than 3,000 million dollars, approximately £1,000 million.

Both in the disposal of these funds and in many other respects, a labour monopoly enjoys all sorts of privileges denied to any other group of citizens. It pays virtually no taxes. It is free to invest where it pleases (with hone of the legal restrictions imposed, for example, on insurance companies). It is outside the reach of anti-trust laws; consequently it can behave, both as a union and as an investor, in ways that would ex- pose any capitalist corporation acting similarly to prosecution and heavy penalties. It can brandish its strike weapon in order to force a company to buy the products of another company in which the union has invested money. It can acquire shares in a brewery, and then forbid a rival brewery to sell in competition—by threaten- ing to withdraw labour from the rival. It can buy control of a bank, coerce some of the deposi- tors by calling in loans and favour others by ex- tended credit'. It can manipulate Stock Exchange prices, using its investments and its labour-power so as to drive one concern into bankruptcy, lift another to affluence, or make capital gains for its officials. Lord Acton's maxim was not enunci- ated with labour monopolies ih mind; but it is abundantly applicable to them. The McLellan Comniittee evidence is one long amplification on the theme that absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.

The monopolists may be personally honest; some of them are. But to say that is merely to say that some are content with power, -vhilf

the others want to be millionaires as well. Per- sonal merits are irrelevant to the question whether any group of men should be entrusted with authority, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, on so vast a scale. (No Socialist muckraker a genera- tion ago refrained from attacking Carnegie be- cause he was a teetotaller, or Carnegie's partner Frick because his favourite song was 'Little Grey Home in the West.') Equally irrelevant is the queer plea by Socialist casuists that virtue is somehow correlated with economic function; that if you live by selling labour-power you are morally superior to the persons who buy it, and that practices reprehensible in them are permis- sible for you. Mr. Beck, to do him justice, makes a more honest defence. In his recent apologia' called 1, Dave Beck, he argues, in effect, that , if he has risen from rags to riches so have his followers. During his presidency of the teamsters. the union assets have grown from 28 to 39 million dollars; members' wages have been lifted to unprecedented heights; pensions, insurance, sickness and accident benefits have been extracted from employers with a lavishness that makes the wildest dreams of Mr. Dick Crossman _resemble an orphan's nightmare.

All this, no doubt, is perfectly true. Every labour monopolist can, and does, defend himself in the same. way. It is the argument of the bene- volent despot. But it is not compatible with a free society—any more than the structure of these mammoths. With few exceptions, an Ameri- can trade union is a one-party State, ruled by an oligarchy that perpetuates itself, where control by the members is a mere fiction. The ruling oligarchs appoint the subordinate officials, who owe their posts and their salaries to patronage The oligarchs control the union's machinery, its newspapers, its channels of communications, its constitution and its elections. Even if there is opposition, there is no way in which it can make itself effective, and no independent tribunal to which it can appeal. The oligarchs are judge, jury and executioner. In some unions elections are manipulated on the principle that what matter*, is not who- does the voting but who does the counting. In others the oligarchy gives itself a permanent majority by creating bogus branches and conferring plural votes on them. Sometimes branches are bought and sold like rotten boroughs. One witness told the McLellan Coln- mittee how Mr. X bought a union branch for cash from its secretary Mr. Y, in order to stop criticism of the union's vice-president. (Mr. Y. it was added, used the money in order to buy himself a branch in another union, where he could reimburse himself by levying tribute on employers.)

The full impact of the McLellan disclosures on American public opinion cannot be measured yet. But a recent Gallup Poll shows a clear

majority, throughout the United States in favour of a right-to-work law that would make com- pulsory membership of a union illegal. Right-to- work Bills are now pending in eight States-- Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas,

Maryland, Ohio and West Virginia. Increasingly' the question is being asked (as it is in this country) whether the legal privileges conferred on trade unions in the era that preceded welfare capitalism are either necessary or defensible now that the conditions of that era have vanished.