Labor: The Personal Touch

(See Cover) The telephone was busy. First came a call from a Midwest Governor with a warning that labor trouble was brewing in his state—and a request that the U.S. Government step into the situation. Behind his big desk in a massive office building on Washington’s Constitution Avenue, Secretary of Labor Arthur J. Goldberg listened intently, scribbled down notes on a scratch pad, and then politely but firmly refused to intervene: “It’s my belief that it will be a lot better in the long run if we do not move in at this time.”

Minutes later, word came from an aide that about 100 workers had walked off their missile-site construction jobs near Denver’s Lowry Air Force Base. Goldberg called Lowry to find out what the trouble was—and learned that the men were protesting because a fence had been built by a nonunion contractor. He ordered tele grams sent to union officials, reminding them in no uncertain terms that they had made a no-strike pledge on missile-base construction projects. “They made a commitment,” he said, “and I expect them to keep it.”

Still later, a Labor Department mediator called to ask for a little top-level pressure to push a labor-management settlement. “Yes, I think I can help,” replied Goldberg. And without bothering to check with the White House, Arthur Goldberg began dictating a telegram: “The President has asked me to urge …”

In a daily dozen ways, Labor Secretary Goldberg, 53, last week was speaking in the name of President John F. Kennedy on matters of deepest concern to the nation’s 72.2 million-man labor force. When some locals of the United Auto Workers staged the toilet strike against General Motors just as an agreement seemed imminent (see BUSINESS), both U.A.W. President Walter Reuther and G.M. Negotiator Lou Seaton called Goldberg for advice. Patiently, Goldberg heard each man out, discovered areas of agreement, and eased them toward accord. Both sides were confident of an end to the walkouts this week.

Ready to Try. In dealing with the auto strike, Goldberg restricted himself to the Secretary of Labor’s traditional function as a counselor. But in other labor disputes during his nine months in office, Goldberg has intervened more directly and forcefully than all his predecessors lumped together in the 48 years since labor became a Cabinet post. Using all the Administration’s influence and all the experience gained during his years as labor’s top lawyer and strategist, Goldberg has personally negotiated and mediated in strikes that have crippled the nation’s maritime industry, grounded most of its commercial airplanes and critically delayed its missile-site construction. Again, he has made sure that the curtain will rise next month on the 77th season of New York’s Metropolitan Opera by agreeing to arbitrate a dispute between the Met’s management and its musicians.

Arthur Goldberg well recognizes that there are dangers involved in such direct governmental intervention. “It is not healthy,” he says, “for the economy or for the labor movement or for business to assume that the Government is going to step into every dispute and provide a method or a formula for settlement. If it were assumed in any given dispute that the parties could look to Washington, then the Government would be in every dispute.” Goldberg’s avowed policy is to take direct action only when labor and management remain widely split after exhausting all the established machinery of bargaining and mediation. Then, if he deems the dispute to be of “unique” national importance, he moves hard and fast. “All I can do is try,” Goldberg says. “If I fail, I fail. But I would rather be blamed for failing than for not trying.”

Close & Candid. So far, Goldberg has had few failures—and his successes have made him one of the most respected members of the New Frontier. Some management men distrust him because of his background as counsel for the A.F.L.C.I.O. and as a driving force behind nearly every major union gain in the past twelve years. Goldberg readily admits that he has not shed his sympathy for labor. “I’ll be honest about it,” he says. “It’s obvious that any man takes to any job an essential set of attitudes. I have not brainwashed myself.” But Arthur Goldberg, a supremely confident man who peers with owlish wisdom from behind horn-rimmed glasses, insists that he can still work with both management and labor with evenhanded justice: “Administrations are for all the people, and labor and management will both be making a mistake if they believe that the Kennedy Administration is going to be pro-labor.”

In formulating his policies, Goldberg has been given pretty much of a free hand by President Kennedy, who was something of a labor specialist himself while in Congress. The President places great emphasis on the fact that a strong U.S. economy is crucial in the cold war—and that reasonably cooperative labor-management relationships are vital to the economy. “We want to do anything we can to get settlements in the public interest,” the President said recently. “Our country’s economic strength is so important right now —so dependent upon a proper balance of labor and management—that I think this action is justified.”

In their own relationships, Kennedy and Goldberg are on close and candid terms. “In Cabinet meetings,” says a ranking Administration colleague, “Arthur is one of the frankest men in speaking to the President. He simply says, ‘Mr. President, if you go and do this or that, why here’s what people will say about it.'” Says Jack Kennedy of his Secretary of Labor: “He’s very able, very objective. He’s a totally public-minded fellow. He’s knowledgeable about labor and he’s got plenty of guts.”

Goldberg will need all the knowledge and guts he can muster—for organized labor is in trouble. The great labor surge of the 1930s and ’40s and ’50s has slowed to a standstill. Although the total U.S. work force has risen by 5,000,000 since 1955-A.F.L.-C.I.O. membership (excluding expelled unions) has dropped from 13,500,000 to 13,300,000. Such statistics tell only a small part of the story. With the basic rights of labor firmly secured by law, and after major postwar breakthroughs in the field of pensions, cost-of-living escalators, supplemental unemployment benefits, medical and life insurance, the labor movement seems surfeited by success. It is torn from within by jurisdictional disputes and corruption, and it has been baffled by the problems arising from technological progress.

A Matter of Spirit. In its broadest terms, labor’s trouble stems from a flagging of spirit. Of the fire-breathing militants who led labor to the top, most are now either dead or senescent, and only the Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther remains as a towering national figure. A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany, a onetime apprentice plumber, acts as a caretaker instead of a crusader. In a significant interview last week, Meany shrugged off the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s declining membership as a matter of interest only to individual unions. “We have no plans for any membership drive,” he said. “The responsibility is not ours.” Similarly, he recognized the serious difficulties that arise from industrial automation—but washed his hands of any attempt to find an answer: “As a national organization, we will not put forward any solution. Each union and each industry will have to work out its own problems.”

In their general complacency, many union leaders take great pride in the fact that their occasional conventions at, say, Miami Beach are as fancily expensive as anything staged by General Motors. Says Chicago Labor Consultant Saul Alinsky: “I’ve heard European union officials say they were damned if they could tell the difference between American labor lead ers and businessmen—except that the labor leaders drive bigger cars and dress better.”

Labor’s diminished spirit extends throughout the rank and file. Fewer and fewer young workers join unions because they want to or because they think they ought to; they join because, under company-union contracts, they have to in order to get jobs. In last week’s U.A.W. walkouts, bored pickets paced perfunctorily, showing little of the zealot enthusiasm of the 1930s. In the past 20 years, the average hourly wage of a steelworker has zoomed from 90½¢ to $3.82, and the pattern has been followed in other major industries. But with the zoom, the zip has gone. Says an Electrical Workers’ official in Colorado: “Our members used to ride to work on a bicycle and eat cabbage for lunch. Now they own a home, two automobiles, and eat a decent lunch. They don’t have to care so much about the union. And this is where our big problem lies—in apathy.”

Meetings in the Woods. That apathy causes lost opportunities. For evample, organized labor has long talked hopefully of capturing the U.S. South, the greatest remaining stronghold of nonunion workers. But the record remains dismal. The Textile Workers Union, the dominant union in the South’s biggest industry, has actually declined from 125,000 to 60,000 over the past 14 years. To thwart labor organizers, many Southern companies carefully keep their wages just higher than union scale. In addition, Southern foes of labor play up the pro-civil rights stands of national unions, cite the integrationist views of Walter Reuther, and distribute pictures of United Electrical Workers’ President Jim Carey dancing with a Negro girl.

Fought by Southern pulpit, press and public, most union-organizing drives are downright surreptitious. Says Atlanta’s Textile Workers’ Leader Michael Botelho: “When we go into a little town to organize, we generally hold our first meetings in the woods.” But the fact remains that truly determined organizing efforts can pay off even in the South—and the outfit that has proved it is none other than Jimmy Hoffa’s International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who have increased their Southern membership from 60,000 to 80,000 since 1957. Whatever else may be said about Hoffa, he works at recruiting with a dedication displayed by few other labor leaders. Says a Florida-based official of the National Labor Relations Board: “The thing with the Teamsters is that they will keep trying. They’ll tackle a plant year after year.”

Merged Mixups. In their present state of mind, few of labor’s leaders seem to possess either the will or the power to get together in a concerted drive against the problems that afflict their movement. Hoffa’s racketeer-ridden Teamsters are a national disgrace. But beyond kicking the Teamsters out of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., labor’s responsible leaders have done little or nothing to combat the Teamsters’ power. A.F.L.-C.I.O. locals have continued to play ball with the Teamsters, and at least one member of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s Ethical Practices Committee, the National Maritime Union’s horny-fisted Joe Curran, is an open Hoffa ally.

Aside from the external problem of Hoffa, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. has plenty of internal problems of its own. The long-awaited, highly touted 1955 merger of the A.F.L. and the C.I.O. has been far from successful. Today the A.F.L.’s craft unions and the C.I.O.’s industrial unions devote almost as much energy to jurisdictional brawls as they do to bargaining with management. George Meany, who was the A.F.L.’s president before the merger, is either unwilling or unable to bring an end to the internecine warfare. Walter Reuther, who was the C.I.O.’s president until, as part of the merger agreement, he became an A.F.L.-C.I.O. vice president, fumes at Meany’s inaction. Reuther would dearly love to unseat Meany, but he simply does not have the votes—his C.I.O. contributed only 5,414,000 members to the merger, as against the 10,613,000 of Meany’s A.F.L.

The Perplexity of Progress. Yet, even if they were working smoothly together, and even if they were inspired by the enthusiasm of yore, labor’s leaders would still have to face up to a perplexity of progress: industrial automation.

Beyond argument, automation increases productivity. In theory, that increased productivity should create more than enough new jobs to make up for those lost by men to machines. And that, in turn, should keep the union rosters filled. But it has not worked out like that. Between them, for example, the U.A.W. and the Steelworkers have lost more than 400,000 members, mostly to automation, in the past five years. Organized labor has made few compensatory gains. Most of the new jobs are held by white-collar workers, who have composed a majority of the labor force since 1955. These white-collar workers are notably reluctant to join unions, particularly since management is willing to give them most of the benefits that the old lunch-bucket unionists had to fight for.

At the same time, thousands of the union members displaced by automation have been forced to take any sort of job they can get, whether it be dishwasher or ditchdigger. This trend, too, has decreased union membership. Explains an A.F.L.-C.I.O. officer: “These men are hard to organize because of the gut competition for that sort of job. If a man is hungry enough, he’ll take what he can get and undercut the next fellow by a nickel an hour just to get the job. It’s dog eat dog.”

In meeting labor’s dilemma, the driving force must come from labor itself. All the governmental paternalism in the world cannot solve labor’s basic problems—but the Government can certainly urge and encourage, and Arthur Goldberg seems ready, willing and able. Goldberg is far from being the handsomest man on the New Frontier, yet he is compellingly attractive when he talks—and he loves to talk. (“He can,” says an admiring Labor Department aide, “talk for two hours on one hour’s briefing.”) Goldberg’s energy seems inexhaustible, and his personal qualifications are beyond question. Says Arizona’s Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, an outspoken critic of labor who could hardly be farther removed from Goldberg both politically and philosophically: “Goldberg is a very decent fellow, a very capable man and a brilliant lawyer. He’s been a good Secretary of Labor up to now.”

A strong case could be made for the idea that Goldberg’s entire life has been spent in following the path that has taken him to the big desk in the Department of Labor. His father, Joseph Goldberg, fled czarist Russia in the 1880s and wound up in Chicago, where he acquired a horse and wagon, hauled produce to downtown restaurants, and by 1892 had saved enough money to bring his wife and daughter to the U.S. Arthur was the family’s seventh and last child.

As a boy, Arthur worked. He got his first job at twelve, running errands at a shoe factory for $3 a week. Says he: “They were not very particular about child-labor laws then.” While in high school, he learned some harsher facts of labor life. Working for $6 a week as a suit packer in a clothing store (“I can still pack a suit pretty well”), Goldberg and some fellow employees protested at being forced to work extra hours at no extra pay. The result was decisive: “We were fired.”

Boy Wonder. Goldberg graduated from high school at 15 and entered upon a triple-time existence. Mornings he went to a junior college, afternoons he attended De Paul University, and nights he held down a post office job. As a tired-eyed 18-year-old, he was admitted to law school at Northwestern University—but only after proving, with some difficulty, that his two college transcripts represented the work of only one person.

While in law school, Goldberg worked part time as a clerk in a Chicago law office. Summers, he signed on as a construction laborer, once stepped on a rusty nail and had to wait out the then manda tory period of a week before he could collect workmen’s compensation. He could not afford the loss of pay. “Ever since,” he recalls, “I have not been friendly to the idea of waiting periods. Family needs don’t wait.”

Room at the Top. At 20, Goldberg graduated from Northwestern’s law school with an A record marred only by a single B. There was never the slightest doubt that he would become a successful lawyer. In his very first case he pleaded an inheritance suit before the Illinois Supreme Court, and lost. But he lost few others over the next nine years, while building up a substantial reputation as a lawyer skilled in handling equity and corporate issues. Then, in 1938, two of Chicago’s C.I.O. leaders—Van Bittner, a director of the Steelworkers’ Organizing Committee, and Sam Levin of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers—asked Goldberg to represent the C.I.O.’s American Newspaper Guild, then on strike and in savage dispute with Hearst’s Chicago Herald and Examiner. At that time both the C.I.O. and the Guild had Communists in high positions. “There was real trouble with the ideological conflict within the C.I.O.,” recalls Goldberg, “and they needed a lawyer who was not only non-Communist but anti-Communist.” Goldberg took on the dispute, helped bring about a settlement, and won the respect of both sides. That case, says Goldberg, started “my whole career in labor law.”

The career was interrupted by World War II. Goldberg joined the Office of Strategic Services, spent the war in liaison with European labor unions, including those in Nazi-occupied territory, performing sabotage and espionage functions. Goldberg was discharged as a major in 1944, and the details of his work remain classified. All he will say is that published stories about his cloak-and-dagger operations behind enemy lines are false. He once wandered into German-held territory in France, but only because he had lost his way—and he quickly discovered the mistake and left the premises.

At war’s end, Goldberg returned to Chicago and turned full time to being a labor lawyer. Those years are fondly remembered by his two children, Barbara, now 25, and married to a Boston intern, and Robert, now a 20-year-old junior at Amherst. During the summers, Goldberg installed his children and his wife Dorothy, a former social worker and an abstractionist painter, in a two-room cabin on the shores of Lake Michigan; he showed up on Friday nights laden with cartons of Chinese food. Goldberg appointed himself sole arbitrator of family disputes, once ruled that Barbara could not wear lipstick until she was 14. Such decisions were not always popular—and on at least one occasion, the kids picketed the house with signs that read DADDY UNFAIR.

In 1948 Goldberg moved to Washington as general counsel for both the Steelworkers and the C.I.O. When he went to Washington, labor’s political and moral standing was jeopardized by the existence of eleven Communist-controlled unions within the C.I.O. Goldberg directed the meticulous, scrupulously legal C.I.O. trials that ended with the banishment of all eleven. In 1949 he devised the pension and insurance plans for the Steelworkers that were finally accepted by industry in a labor breakthrough that was followed up by the U.A.W. and other mass-production unions. “This really transformed American life.” Goldberg says unabashedly. “In all this, I take great personal satisfaction.”

“Sorry Mess.” When the C.I.O. and the A.F.L. wanted to merge but remained suspicious of each other’s motives, Goldberg drew up a “no-raiding” clause that was agreeable to both sides, then worked out the complex details of the merger itself in 1955. Two years later, he was a prime mover in the expulsion of the Teamsters from the A.F.L.-C.I.O. And in 1959 he was labor’s legal strategist during a no-holds-barred Steelworkers’ strike that lasted 116 days. When the Government invoked the Taft-Hartley Act to stop the strike for a cooling-off period, Goldberg fought the case to the Supreme Court—where he lost, even though the Justices concurred in public praise of his legal performance. The strike left Goldberg with a suspected gastric ulcer (an exploratory operation found nothing) and the firm conviction that labor and management had to find some better means of resolving their differences than by striking. Says Goldberg: “The whole thing was a sorry mess. I criticized the Government then, and I criticize it now, for letting the strike go on much too long. The recession we have just been through was in large part set off by the length of the steel strike.”

Brief Sputter. Goldberg had met Jack Kennedy while testifying before the House Education and Labor Committee. The two men became friends with a common interest. Says Goldberg: “We would sit around discussing the philosophy of various aspects of labor for hours.” When President-elect Kennedy tapped him for Labor Secretary, Goldberg told him to discuss the choice with other people. Kennedy did, got an affirmative consensus, although George Meany sputtered briefly before agreeing. (Because Goldberg has never carried a union membership card, Meany has never really considered him an honest-to-overalls labor man.)

To make clear that he was no longer an employee of organized labor, Goldberg renounced all rights to a Steelworkers’ pension, which would have paid him $25,000 a year beginning at the age of 60, and said he would never again practice labor law, which had provided him with an income of $100,000 a year.

No Strike, No Lockout. Even before he was installed in office, Goldberg had begun gathering facts about a tugboat and railroad strike that was tying up New York and was threatening to spread south and west. Right after his swearing-in ceremony, he got Kennedy’s permission to intervene. He was at the bargaining table the next afternoon, and by 6 o’clock the following morning, after 14 straight hours of negotiation, he had stopped the strike by guaranteeing to both parties that the key issue of job security would be kept open and resolved in a year on the basis of a federal study already under way.

One month later, Goldberg intervened in the most costly airline strike in U.S. history, brought about settlement of a wildcat walkout of flight engineers by setting up a reviewing board of three professors. In May, Goldberg scored his most substantive single triumph. Hard on the heels of a Senate investigation into the scandalous work stoppages in missile-site construction, he got a no-strike, no-lockout commitment from labor and management, set up an arbitration committee to decide on differences while work went on. In 1960, walkouts cost the U.S. 86,000 man-days of work on its missile sites. Goldberg’s formula has slashed the rate to around 200 man-days a month. Just as he did last week at Lowry A.F.B., Goldberg ruthlessly holds labor as well as management to its no-strike, no-lockout agreement. Says he: “We are not going to have shutdowns in missile-site construction.”

Last month, at the request of President Kennedy, Goldberg intervened in the complex, personality-ridden battle between the musicians and management of the Metropolitan Opera that had led General Manager Rudolf Bing to throw up his hands and cancel the 1961-62 season. Both sides agreed to go on with the season and leave their differences up to an arbitrator—but only if the arbitrator was Goldberg.

If he is to continue participating in such personal ways in the nation’s labor-management disputes, Goldberg is going to be a terribly busy man. That prospect is one that he faces with pleasure. He is an activist who rises at 6:30 each morning, takes a walk around his fashionable Northwest Washington neighborhood, breakfasts with Wife Dorothy, and is at his Labor Department desk by at least 9 o’clock. He still gets a real kick out of the prestige and privileges of his office. Says a Cabinet colleague: “Arthur is just as thrilled as he can be about being Secretary of Labor. This has not become old stuff to him.”

But Goldberg also recognizes the immensity of labor’s problems. He makes no bones about the fact that Jimmy Hoffa is a menace to the labor movement. But he is “confident that Hoffa will eventually be repudiated by his own members.” Goldberg insists that unions must accept automation as a fact of life, but he also insists that management must help retrain workers who have been displaced by automation so that they can become useful members of the new la bor force.

Most of all, Goldberg worries about what he calls “the hardening of attitudes” between management and labor. Says he: “Both sides should recognize the fact that they are not back in the ’30s, when the union was struggling for recognition and management was struggling not to give it. But listen to any of the speeches at a labor union convention and you’ll think you’re back in the old days. You hear the same sort of thing from the other side at a meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers. They are talking in an atmosphere of distrust which their members simply do not recognize in their day-to-day relationships.”

In appraising his own governmental record to date, Goldberg admits to qualms. He has been so occupied with settling day-by-day disputes that he has not yet had much time to attack labor’s long-term problems. “Obviously,” he says, “we have got to do better than we have done. We have to preserve the right to strike, but we don’t want this right to be exercised. I admit this will be pretty hard to do—to create machinery which would not impose controls, but which would prevent stoppages.”