A Measure of Hope for Labor

This American Labor Day falls in a time marked by both setbacks for organized labor in this country and remarkable triumphs for it in another corner of the world.

In Poland, Solidarity has emerged, after a long and austere struggle, the victor over a grim and debilitated Communist Party. The shipyard worker and his comrades from Gdansk, not the sour bureaucratic heirs of V.I. Lenin, are the true leaders of the Polish workers’ state. The theorists who claimed to speak for the working people have been routed, perhaps forever, by the working people. In the West, conservatives, like liberals, do not hesitate to hail as a manifestation of the enduring human drive toward freedom the parliamentary victory of this trade union.

In the Soviet Union, too, workers banded together for the common good are shaking the shoddy edifice of Soviet Communism. Joined to ethnic and nationalist turbulence, the demands of workers for a better life--the demand of a coal miner for a simple bar of soap--put at hazard the Soviet Communist Party and the very future of the Soviet state.

So it is with justice that American labor leaders are taking pride, after so many bleak years, in their brothers to the East. Here at home there is much less for them to be proud of.

The American labor movement is slipping, in number, in strength, too often in imaginative and vigorous leadership. One reason is simply success. The battles, often bloody, for decency in wages and working conditions in America’s heavy industry were fought and won decades ago. Now there is less of that kind of industry, and management is both more enlightened and quicker to see where its true self-interest lies. Laws now enforce some standards that once had to be bargained for. Global competition is driving union leaders to artful compromise to preserve American jobs, just as John L. Lewis accepted the shrinking of the miners’ union to produce higher wages in the more automated coal industry.

Some unions are flourishing, notably the teachers’ and governmental workers’. But the failure of the auto workers to organize the Nissan plant in Tennessee can only discourage American labor; the UAW is one of the most farsighted and flexible of American unions. The unions have not yet been able to win the protracted struggles at Eastern Airlines and Pittston Coal.

And the changing nature of the American economy does not present the old opportunities for union organizing. Many companies are smaller and more diverse. The economy of this growing metropolis is an example.

In a world where national productivity is the key to national economic health, the unions’ interest, no less than management’s, lies in devising means to increase that productivity. The most hopeful sign for American labor may well be its increasing interest in working out with management ways to make workers happier with their jobs by helping them gain more flexibility in their work and more say in how it should be done. It is up to management not to treat this emerging labor trend as a sign of weakness merely, but as an opportunity for a joint endeavor for the good of all.