US labour unions

I remember a schoolmaster who taught history – a conscientious man in the sense that at the beginning of the term he made a list, which he passed on to us in blurred carbon copies, of the topics or, as they were called, periods he expected to cover during the term.

I realise now that he had no misgivings about the dates that the textbooks assigned to different historical movements. Thus, he chalked on the blackboard '1453 Fall of Constantinople to the Turks beginning of modern history'. And the idea we picked up was that once the Turks had settled in, everybody, in Europe I guess, woke up one morning and said, like a man setting his watch forward to summer time, 'Good grief, it's 1453. It's the end of the Middle Ages, old buddy – time for some modern history!'

At the end of each term, the teacher told us to take out our lists and cross off the following items, like assistants in a supermarket ticking off the orders of tinned soups, detergents, paper towels that had already been delivered. So, he'd say, with brisk satisfaction, 'All right, now. We've done the causes of the Civil War, the Cromwell period; 1660 now, the Restoration period. Next term, we shall begin with Charles II, thank you, that's all!'

This is funny to look back on but it strikes me that his method was not very different from that used by the television networks at their most conscientious. In every country, the TV news departments have not blackboards but elaborate printouts from computers listing the events of the day in the order of their predictable interest to the mass of viewers. Naturally, inevitably, there has been a shift of emphasis since television towards events that are good or exciting to look upon – fires, explosions, acts of terrorism, earthquakes, famine, shootings, arrests and, in every country, at a regular time of the year, the big sports finale, the Cup Final or the baseball World Series.

And since none of us can keep in our minds a picture library of all this turmoil and excitement, the news editors are satisfied that once the visually dramatic side of a story has calmed down, the story, for most of us, is over. So I can just see the TV news editors this week looking at their lists and crossing off, with the feeling of work completed, the Ethiopian famine (far from over), the Mexican earthquake, hurricane Gloria, the hijacking of the Italian ship, the death of Orson Welles, end of the World Series, the finish of yet one more New York marathon. Now what?

One regular story that is devoid of any visual excitement at all is the changes which a government publication, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, puts out every month, changes in the increase or decrease of the employment figures. It's never startling and he would be a rare newsman or documentary director who could make it exciting. It's always a percentage point. So, last month, employment in the United States went up by one-tenth of one percent. Thrilling, eh?

Well, it makes a lot of people in government and in business and newly at work feel better than the 60,000 people who, last week, cheered the Kansas City Royals when they clobbered the St Louis Cardinals by a record last-game score of 11 to nothing. Every one-tenth of a decimal point equals 300,000 more people at work and while every Western government is nagged and worried by equally small percentage increases in the unemployment rate that always makes headlines and TV interviews with people out of a lifetime's job, we ought not to overlook the fact that more Americans are at work today than ever in history.

Of course, there are more human beings than there used to be, but one of the elements of Mr Reagan's strong popularity and one which cannot be illustrated in vivid pictures is the unprecedented employment rate. The president now has over 60 per cent of the people who believe he's doing a good job and that, too, is an unprecedented high index of popularity for a president at the end of the first year of his second term.

Another figure which I believe has something to do with it came out this week and it's one which I'm certain nine Americans in ten would get wrong. It's an amazing, a very dramatic figure but since it can't be made amazing or dramatic on the screen, it's one I'll bet very few people have noticed or thought much about, except the leaders of organised labour who met sorrowfully in their annual convention this week.

It's been just 50 years ago since American labour began a huge, an historic, drive to organise industrial workers. Until then, the most successful unions, the ones that had been making slow but steady progress since the turn of the century, were the craft unions, but 50 years ago the United States, still in the pit of the Great Depression, threw up a labour leader the like of whom nobody has ever seen and who, for the next ten or fifteen years, was not to be forgotten.

His name was John Llewellyn Lewis. He was the son of immigrants from the Welsh mining towns and, unlike many other immigrants who came here to better themselves, to seek other, more promising jobs, immigrant miners, whether from Wales, Cornwall, Germany, Czechoslovakia, wherever, tended to seek out the American mines and go down into them. The Lewises don't seem to have given a thought to the notion, way out there in the Midwest in Iowa, that their son would be anything other than a coal miner. He left school at the age of eleven and went into the mines.

By the time he was 25, in 1905, there was already a United Mineworkers' Association and young Lewis became its legal representative, but this association was only a very small cog in the wheel of labour that was run by the national union, the American Federation of Labor. When the Depression hit in the early Thirties, the industrial workers were not nationally organised and just then, John L Lewis emerged as a national symbol of the depressed worker.

He was a squat but massive figure of a man with a floppy thatch of grey-black hair, shaggy wings of black eyebrows surmounting a grim face that might have been carved from a coal face. Lewis began a nationwide organising campaign that was violent in the most literal sense. His strikers met the clubs of the mine owners' and the steel workers' goons and sometimes the rifles of the National Guard with sticks and stones.

And, week after week, over the radio would growl and thunder this man whose unique hold on a national audience was a form of eloquence based on the rhythms and the remembered cadences of the Old Testament. He scorned the pedestrian leadership of the American Confederation of Labor and formed his own Congress of Industrial Organisations. It was as if some upstart congressman had renounced the government of the United States and set up his own.

Within five years, Lewis had forced the giants of American industry to deal only with the CIO. He brought in his miners and he organised for the first time, the steel industry, the rubber and electrical industries, the automobile industry. He introduce the pithead bath, portal to portal pay – the travel time between home and work – and, in most of these industries, set up their first welfare funds.

The... I think the boldest feature of the CIO, and the one that brought thousands of what you might call outcast labourers into Lewis's union, was his welcoming of unskilled workers in the mass production industries and of immigrants who had come from eastern or southern Europe and who, astonishing to us today, had been excluded from the American labour movement.

Anyway, it was a dramatic time and it brought American labour unions at a bound into line with the European labour movement, except that it never aspired to become a political party. Lewis was quite firm about this. 'I'm not interested in classes,' he once said. 'Far be it from me to foster inferiority complexes among the workers by making them believe through the assumption of political power they belong to some special class. That has happened in Europe, but it hasn't happened here yet.'

Outside the labour movement, to the people at large, John L. Lewis remained a name and a voice to remember through his God-given, rumbling, biblical rhetoric. Even in lighter moments, he coined phrases that everyone remembered. Once when he was testifying in his imperious way before a Senate committee and reciting the blessings he brought to the men of steel, the men of coal and how he'd driven to surrender the bosses who take the profits while the workers take the losses.

One senator suggested that he also had a remarkable gift for blowing his own horn, to which Lewis replied, 'Senator, it is written in holy scripture, he that tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooted.'

Well, it seemed right to recall after 50 years the man who gave the industrial workers of America a new status, a new dignity and the protection of a national union. So now you might wonder, what is that amazing, dramatic statistic that was merely mentioned this week in news dispatches and in 15-second squibs on the telly?

Well, just after the Second World War, American labour unions were at the peak of their power. Close to 30 Americans in a hundred were unionised. Today, only just over 18 in a hundred belong to a union. Very many corporations have taken a leaf from the Japanese book. They share their profits with the workers. Wage increases are agreed on by mixed boards of management and labour.

The statistic is simply this and it reflects the low ebb of organised labour. During the past year, the wage increases secured by the unions average 3.5 per cent. The average increase granted by agreement rather than coercion to non-union labour is 4.2 per cent.

It's hard to guess whether John L. Lewis is groaning in his grave or preening himself.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

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