(2 of 8)
That way was not the traditional way of A.F.L., to which Dubinsky's I.L.G.W.U. belongs. Like A.F.L. Founder Samuel Gompers, its old-line craft unionists cling to the dying faith that wages and hours are labor's only proper concern. If Hutcheson's carpenters or Moreschi's hod carriers got their pork chops, the rest of the world could go hang. Dubinsky insists that pork chops are not enough. He believes that what affects working men anywhere affects working men everywhere.
The Maverick. Last week David Dubinsky climbed on a train and headed for the A.F.L. Executive Council meeting in Toronto. As usual, A.F.L. elders received him warily. At 57, Dubinsky is a brash youth and a maverick among the chieftains of the council, who clung to isolationism as long as they dared, who had backed reluctantly into political action and who once regarded unemployment insurance as dangerously socialistic.
Dubinsky had his heart set on a pet project. Since the World Federation of Trade Unions fell to the Communists, the world's non-Communist labor has had no international voice and no mechanism for united action. Dubinsky wanted an outfit to speak for the legitimate gripes of world labor. "If you don't, the Communists will," says Dubinsky. "They can say, 'why even your leaders fail you.'"
Four days later, the eleven aging paladins emerged from the council rooms with something of the look of driven elephants. Beaming at their heels came Dave Dubinsky. The A.F.L., President William Green announced, would send five delegates to a London meeting in the fall to establish a new world federation of free labor. For Dubinsky and his friends, it was a full victory after a determined four-year fight.
Order out of Chaos. Such far-flung notions of its job are basic to the nation's most remarkable union. Once dominated by Communists itself, the I.L.G.W.U. is now the pillar of the anti-Communist Left. Despite the heaviest hand in management in all U.S. industry, no other union is so popular with its employers.
From conditions that gave the word "sweat shop" to the language, it has won the most complete welfare program in the U.S. From a snarl of crafts and nationalities, from a rank & file in which women (considered unreliable by organized labor) outnumber men three to one, it has built one of the nation's strongest industrial unions. From chaotic conditions, where there was a strike with every season, it has brought order. It has had no major strike in 15 years.
Whims & Fig Leaves. This has been achieved in spite of rather than because of the industry, which is skittery and as subject to sudden sinking spells as any industry that lives to satisfy woman's whim. Its 11,000 employers are mostly small businessmen who must move rapidly and warily in a trade that is bitterly competitive, determinedly rapacious. A man with a design idea and a batch of orders can have a Cadillac and an establishment on Riverside Drive in six months. Then, like a gust of wind in a wheat field, women's minds change and a hundred employers find themselves back at the cutting table.