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FINDING YOUNG LEADERS
Why Labor Can't Find Its Young Leaders—
The Unions Faded Image and
Limited Hopes for Advancement
Deter the Idealistic and Ambitious
Business Week (October 31, 1970)
Labor is facing a leadership shortage at a basic and
critical level--among the men who organize and serve members locally.
They go by the title of organizer, delegate, business agent,
international representative. Whatever the name, these are the men who
determine the relations of the members to the union and form the
foundation on which all other union leadership rests. But few dynamic
young men want to do these jobs today.
Success has drained labor's labor supply. The unions'
own success in improving working conditions and the economy's success in
producing years of prosperity removed the worker from his 1930s niche as
an economic victim requiring the help of right-minded outsiders. Bright
young people from outside labor no longer gravitate to the union
movement. Today's idealistic college graduate joins the Peace Corps or
teaches in a black ghetto school.
At the same time, the liberal community's success in
promoting educational opportunity decimated the unions' internal sources
of leadership. The intelligent, aggressive young mechanic who bucked for
a union job 30 years ago rarely sees the inside of a factory today; he
goes to college instead. The good, gray union steward who replaced him
seldom wants a full-time staff post even if he is up to it. Why get up
at dawn to hand out leaflets or stay up past midnight to run meetings
for a salary only mildly better than the wages he earns on an 8-to-4
job?
Originally--which, in terms of modern unionism, means
the 1930s--labor drew its leadership from some of the most overqualified
production workers in history. The "first generation" of
leaders were an extraordinary lot. Some were workers of exceptional
ability, responding to an exceptional situation. Others were men who in
normal times might have argued the nation's laws, run the nation's
corporations, or--in the case of Emil Mazey, now secretary-treasurer of
the United Auto Workers--played the violin before the nation's
audiences. The first successful sitdown strike was directed by a master
of arts from Harvard University.
Clearly strike leader George Edwards had not expected
to go from Harvard to the work force at Kelsey-Hayes Wheel Corp. In
Detroit. The Depression that put him and others like him on production
lines also motivated them bitterly to use their skills to help relieve
the hardships they shared with other workers. Beside them worked
radicals of various stripes, eager to forge a labor movement capable of
remaking society. Together, workers, ideologues, and displaced potential
executives and professionals created the big industrial unions and, in
some case, rejuvenated the old-line craft unions.
The generation that followed these men into
first-rung and middle-level jobs after World war II was a less
spectacular but solidly competent group. It was composed of union
members who rose to the top of a labor force that was normal for normal
times. Some of the brightest youngsters went to college, but college was
still beyond the financial reach and social aspirations of most working
class families. And although labor was no longer the prime social cause,
a steady trickle of college graduates entered the training institute of
the International Ladies' garment Workers' Union, emerging as fledgling
organizers and potential leaders.
Today, ILGWU institute alumni are studded through the
middle reaches of the labor movement. Pete Huegel runs the Puerto Rican
division of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters. Patricia Eames heads the legal
department of the Textile Brotherhood of Teamsters school in Florida.
"The ILGWU closed its institute in 1961--partly
because its graduates' zeal in organizing an organizers' union
frightened and affronted the ILGWU's top leadership, but mostly because
the school was having trouble attracting promising students. The long
drought had begun.
Young, idealistic outsiders continue to work for a
few unions that organize conspicuously low-paid workers, usually from
ethnic minorities, such as farm and hospital employees. These unions
also generate their own leadership; for depressed workers with few other
opportunities, a union job is both an honor and an opportunity. Leaders
emerge, too, from the booming white-collar and public employee unions,
now experiencing their own kind of first generation. For most other
unions, a good man is hard to find.
It would be amazing if it were otherwise. By money or
career standards, a union job cannot compete with other high-tension
posts requiring equal ability and effort. An experienced international
representative does well to earn $10,000 a year. A regional director or
other middle-level official does even better to earn $20,000-about half
the sum most companies pay men with comparable duties. These scales seem
inevitable as long as union wages come from dues. Members resist raising
dues, and elected officials press for increases as their own peril.
At the same time, the psychological satisfactions of
a union job have all but vanished with the fervent unionist of
yesteryear. And without the rewards of appreciation and respect, the job
can become a nerve-wracking round of wrangles, complaints, and
small-scale wheeling and dealing.
For the ambitious, a union post represents galloping
frustration. Once he moves out of the lower ranks, a union official can
rise only in his own union. A company executive passed over for
promotion can switch to another company, but a union official will get
no offers from other unions. His sparse options lie outside the labor
movement: an industrial relations job with management (usually beyond
the pale even to fed-up union officials) or, for the few with the
necessary credentials, a government or academic post.
Unless he has strong ideological motives or a highly
specialized temperament, what youngster with the ability to go elsewhere
would choose this path?
The result, for the harried union official seeking a
good organizer, is that probably he will not find one. He will settle
for someone he will describe, with a sigh, as "adequate." And
this not-quite-good-enough may begin an ascent that could ultimately put
him across the bargaining table from the high-powered executives of a
far-flung conglomerate, enable him to shape labor policies on a
multitude of issues, or give him leverage in local or national politics.
It is a chilling prospect for a union movement that
will need all the talent it can find in the complex years ahead.
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 |
Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
* * * * *
|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
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Black World
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update
17 December 2011
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