National Affairs: Unity House, 1958

On a mountaintop in Pennsylvania’s green Pocono range, 85 miles from Manhattan’s garment district, sprawls a 700-acre resort named Unity House, where garment workers can enjoy vacation comforts at proletarian prices. There, last week, gathered two dozen members of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s Executive Council, finding time between business sessions for golf, gin rummy and fishing in the resort’s three-mile-long lake. But for all the resort pleasures, the labor leaders wore solemn faces. They had come to discuss the state of U.S. organized labor as Labor Day 1958 approached—and there was plenty to be solemn about.

Damning the Deficits. There was unemployment, still close to 5,000,000. “There may be prosperity again on Wall Street,” the Executive Council declared, “but for the millions who are unemployed, the recession remains a continuing stark reality.” The council’s damn-the-deficits prescription: wage boosts, lower taxes, more government spending.

There was also the threat of an auto strike. The labor leaders were glumly aware that the U.S. public, annoyed by rising prices, would take a dark view of a pacemaking U.A.W. strike for new wage boosts. The Executive Council went ahead anyhow, named a seven-man strike committee to “give practical support, organizationally and financially,” if Walter Reuther’s Auto Workers go on strike.

But the most corrosive problem at Unity House—and one of the worst in labor’s history—was union corruption, especially in Jimmy Hoffa’s racket-ridden Teamsters Brotherhood. Exposures by the Senate’s McClellan Committee had tarnished organized labor’s repute, slowed recruitment of union members, and forced upon A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany the painful job of expelling the Teamsters, the Bakery Workers and the Laundry Workers, thereby reducing the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s membership by 1,500,000.

Cleaning the House. Last week, working busily at cleaning labor’s house, the Executive Council:

> Ordered all A.F.L.-C.I.O. unions to cancel “any alliance, agreement, formal or informal,” with Hoffa’s Teamsters.

> Voted to investigate corruption in the 40,000-member Jewelry Workers Union.

> Called upon the scandal-spotted Operating Engineers to reform.

> Demanded from the Hotel and Restaurant Workers and the Meat Cutters full reports on corruption exposed by the McClellan Committee.

> Directed Carpenters Union President Maurice Hutcheson, who inherited the 800,000-member union from his late father, “Big Bill,” as a sort of family property, to explain by next November why he refused to answer McClellan Committee questions. Under indictment in Indiana for conspiracy to bribe a state highway official, Hutcheson and other Carpenter officials turned a fast 200% profit by buying right-of-way land for $40,000, selling it to the state a few weeks later for $120,000. Also, in memory of his father, Hutcheson paid a hack writer $310,000 from union funds to write an official biography of Big Bill.

But not even the most optimistic of the Unity House conferees could really believe that such measures, alone, would do the job. Obviously needed to help the honest, bona fide leaders of big labor was corrective labor legislation—and that, in the most dismal failure of 1958, was precisely what the Congress of the U.S. had refused to approve.