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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."