Eroding Respectability

The U.S. intellectual is swinging away from his traditional friendly feeling toward labor and unions. So warned Professor George S. Odiorne of the University of Michigan's Bureau of Industrial Relations last week. To labor's leadership, said he, this may mean that during the 19603, unions will find themselves under increasing attack from their onetime friends.

"During the '30s," said Odiorne, "the unions as advocates of 'more' for the underdog could attract the support of independent opinion-makers in pulpit and college classroom. This independent thinker today finds himself far less challenged by the plight of the simple workman, who is often much better paid than he is for teaching college English." The loss of support means the erosion of the "intellectual respectability" of the union movement. It is a loss that labor can ill afford, for then the "union movement becomes a grand association of experts in propaganda and in lobbying for a special interest group."

This, in fact, is what has happened. The U.S. intellectual has lost his sympathy for unions because today's rich and powerful unions have lost sympathy for the underdog. The real people in economic need today are not the union members, says Odiorne, but the "farm laborer, the service employee, the lower level of white-collar worker, the retired annuitant." His conclusion: without a "reconstituted philosophy of unionism" that reaches out to include these people, the "alienation of the' intellectuals will continue. Within the decade we may well expect that many of these will turn on unionism and attack the very body they once worked to support."

Union membership has dropped 500,000 in two years, reversing a 20-year trend toward union expansion, reported the Department of Labor last week. The figures: in 1956, U.S. labor unions had 17,500,000 members, v. 17 million in 1958. The reason: the unions' failure to organize the growing force of white-collar workers.

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