NEW PROBLEM FOR UNIONS: The Rise of the White-Collar Worker

AFTER organized labor’s smashing victories in the November elections, much of management is looking across the ruins of right-to-work proposals into the new labor-leaning Congress and expecting the worst. At close range, unions appear to be moving into a more powerful position than ever. But some labor leaders are looking at an entirely different side of the picture. Says A.F.L.-C.I.O. Industrial Union Research Director Everett M. Kassalow: Unions face “a crisis of truly historic proportions.”

The crisis lies in the fact that automation and technological breakthroughs have sharply reduced the ranks of blue-collar (i.e., usually hourly paid) workers, who make up 85% of the U.S. union membership. But in the total U.S. working force, the blue-collars were outnumbered by white-collar workers (25 million to 25.5 million) by 1957, and the trend was accelerated by the recession. Unions have had comparatively little success in recruiting the new army of technical and service workers. If it does not recruit them, says Kassalow, “organized labor would be lucky to maintain its present membership of 17 or 18 million over the next decade. It would then become a very diminished minority in the U.S.”

Fast-developing changes in markets and technology in the U.S. have brought some surprising changes in unions. John L. Lewis, who once could stir up a national crisis with a strike threat from his mighty, 600,000-strong Mine Workers union, is now the boss of a union shrunk to 200,000, and seldom gives cause for alarm. In steel the white-collar percentage in the working force has doubled since 1942 to 18% or 20%, will go up to 33% by 1970. In chemicals it rose from 24% in 1947 to 36% in 1957, will hit 50% by 1968. In all U.S. manufacturing, it has climbed from 16% to 25% within the past decade.

The new force of technical and service workers appears to feel little need for unions. Organizers for the United Auto Workers have landed only 8,000 of Chrysler’s 30,000 white-collar workers, have been unable to crack Ford or General Motors. The United Steelworkers union has enlisted less than 30% of the estimated 160,000 white collars in the nation’s basic industry. One reason is that management has learned to combat union organizers by granting white-collar workers the increases given to unions; e.g., General Motors, Ford and Chrysler handed about the same increase to office workers in May that the U.A.W. finally got in the fall. Another is that the white collar worker often feels little kinship with the man in the shop. Since he works more with his head than his hands, he tends to identify himself with management. Still another problem for unions is the growing number of women workers, who often work only part time to supplement family incomes, are more interested in their homes than in their jobs or union affairs. Of the 19 million women in non-farm jobs, only 18% are organized, v. 38% of the men.

Modern working conditions are also an important factor. Union strength builds largely on discontent; today’s worker, with his high wages and fringe benefits, finds less and less to be discontented about. He works, says A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s Kassalow, “in one of these clean, modern, well-run factories [that] do not strike with the same force that hit the young farmer who came up to the dirty tire plants of Akron or the hot, badly ventilated assembly lines of Detroit, 15, 20, 25 years ago.” Union leaders realize that they have come a long way since then. Says Jerry Holleman, president of the Texas A.F.L.-C.I.O. council: “We have made substantial gains in the past few years and are at a point where we do not push as hard as we did.”

Mass production unions have been deeply affected by the fact that the unskilled worker, once the core of their power, has become the vanishing American. Highly mechanized plants have forced workers to develop new skills; the new class of skilled labor has fractured the monolithic front that the mass-production unions once presented to management. To hold the allegiance of skilled workers, unions are revising their organization. The U.A.W. recently amended its constitution to allow skilled workers to veto contract clauses that affect them, took great pains in last summer’s contract negotiations to win an extra 8¢ an hour for them. All of these trends, says the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s Economic Review, “are producing a virtual revolution in industrial life. These changes are bound to place unions in a less friendly environment.” If their membership continues to drop in relation to the total work force, unions may well find that they can count on less public sympathy for strikes, less power at the polls, and more demands for laws to prevent fewer and fewer workers from throwing more and more out of work.