The Plumber Who Delivers

Yes, I am a plumber. I don't know how humble I am, but I always try to stress the importance of the plumbing business. You can put millions of people in a great city and get along without lawyers, but you couldn't put them in there without plumbers. So I must warn you never to underestimate the importance of a plumber. In fact, I know anyone who has ever got a bill from a plumber doesn't underestimate them.

WHEN he addressed the A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention in Miami last June, George Meany spoke as a plumber who is no longer underestimated. For many years, his brand of unionism has been rather flippantly declared an anachronism--much too parochial and materialistic for a society with a strong streak of idealism. While other labor leaders graduated to a more sophisticated statesmanship, Meany stayed the same, still speaking in the gruff accents of his Bronx boyhood, still looking like the traditional portly boss with heavy lids drooping threateningly over steel-gray eyes. His ever-present cigar only served to complete the unflattering picture.

Yet today, for all the attacks on him as a has-been, Meany is in a stronger position than ever before. When a zealot in the Nixon Administration suggested that labor leaders should be required to retire at 70, Meany, who is 77, simply laughed. He is too secure and having too good a time as president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. to worry about such a possibility. The troubled economy has made him something of a prophet, since he was urging price and wage controls long before they were imposed. Whatever they may privately think of him, the Democrats are counting on Meany to help them win the 1972 presidential election. His opposition within the labor movement, meanwhile, has all but vanished. His old rival, Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers, died in a plane crash last year; Reuther's successor, Leonard Woodcock, is friendly with Meany and has moved closer to the A.F.L.-C.I.O., from which Reuther had broken away. Another outcast union, the International Chemical Workers, returned to the federation last spring with Meany's blessing.

Much of Meany's consistent success is due to his own stubborn endurance; he outplots, outfoxes and above all outlasts his opponents. He moves ruthlessly against any labor leader he suspects of venality. When he has discovered corruption in a union, he has demanded the removal of its leaders, the surrender of some of its autonomy and the substitution of control by an executive council of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. In this way, he has steadily built up the power of the federation. When former Teamster Boss Dave Beck lectured him on how union funds should be invested in common stocks, Meany shot back: "You are a good businessman. You belong in the business world and not in the labor world."

In the interests of promoting the welfare of labor, Meany has stuck to bread-and-butter issues and scoffed at the more grandiose schemes of some of his colleagues. His unabashed materialism and anti-Communism have won him many enemies on the left within the Democratic Party; Meany is so antiCommunist, in fact, that he refuses to smoke Havana cigars. Indeed, it looked for a few months last year as if Meany might lead a contingent of labor into the waiting arms of Richard Nixon. Meany and the executive council of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. had been staunchly supporting the President's policies in Viet Nam. Even when Nixon invaded Cambodia, Meany came to his defense.

At the same time, he denounced student radicals. "If the younger generation are that 100,000 kids that lay around a field up in Woodstock," he groused, "1 am not going to trust the destiny of the country to that group." With that, Meany and some 70 other labor leaders marched to a gala dinner in their honor at the White House--an unprecedented invitation from a President, and a Republican at that. Nixon paid tribute to his new ally: "When the old virtues and the good virtues are being brought under question, this man stood like a pillar in a storm." Meany returned the compliment after a fashion. "Let me tell you," he said, "Franklin Roosevelt was just as tricky a politician as anyone who bore the name Tricky Dick ever could be."

But the budding friendship came to grief over the worsening economy. When the economic issue submerged the social one, Meany retreated from his defense of the President and began attacking him. In last November's elections, labor worked as hard as ever for the Democrats, with gratifying results. Meany's object all along was to convince the Democrats that they had better pay more attention to labor and less to the New Left. Meany made the point again last week when he said that if the Democratic presidential candidate is unacceptable--John Lindsay, for example--he might just support Nixon.

Meany is not quite the conservative he is painted to be. Though a predictable hard-liner on foreign policy and law-and-order, he has intervened decisively on the liberal side of many issues. He usually delivers what he promises and does not promise more than he can deliver. Medicare, the Housing and Urban Development Act and the 1964 Civil Rights Act would not have been passed without the active support of Meany's Washington labor lobby. Meany personally appealed to President Kennedy to insert into the civil rights bill an equal employment opportunity clause that would apply to unions as well as to business. He told Kennedy: "The only way I can get to some of my own bastards in the unions is to go to them and say, This is the law and you must comply.' " More recently, the labor lobby threw its strength behind the effort to defeat the Haynsworth and Carswell nominations.

For all his tumultuous years in the public eye as a labor official, little is really known about Meany the man. In private, Meany is more expansive. He paints landscapes and abstracts in oils, and signs them "G.M." When in the mood, he sits down at the organ, removes his cigar, and belts out Irish ballads in an acceptable baritone.

Meany has an almost religious reverence for the labor movement, and wants its dignity upheld. At a time when traditions are in short supply in America and under suspicion as well, that reverence may not be misplaced. "The idea of people trying to better their working conditions is an old chestnut," says Meany. "But it's going to be around for a while." So, if he has anything to say about it, is George Meany.

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