Word: afl
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...George Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO. Once upon a time, the American labor movement was viewed as the force which would help transform America into a society of humanity and justice. This vision lingers on only in the memoirs of Reds from the Thirties. Meany, who makes $95,000 a year and has never led a strike, has presided over the metamorphosis of the labor movement into a conservative, often racist force that has pursued Cold War imperialism as aggressively as its ostensible opponents in big business...
What has the unions' backs up is a policy of inflation control that they consider discriminatory. Asserting that the Administration continues to hold wage boosts within guidelines while allowing corporate profits and interest rates to rise unchecked, the AFL-CIO's executive council said last week that it is no longer "reasonable to expect the trade union movement to counsel moderation of wage increases." Just how immoderate the big unions-which include the electrical workers, transport workers, machinists and auto workers-will be when their turns come up in later months remains to be seen...
...meetings of the AFL-CIO executive council, says one insider, the vote usually ranges from 25-to-l to 34-to-l, depending on how many other union chiefs are present to vote down Jerry Wurf. While that may be an exaggeration, the 54-year-old Wurf, head of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, is certainly a maverick in the stolid hierarchy of organized labor. He has bucked the AFL-CIO high command on such issues as the 1972 election (Wurf was strong for George McGovern, while the federation observed a pro-Nixon neutrality...
Wurf commands the fastest-growing union in the entire AFL-CIO; its 614,-000-member ranks have tripled since he took over the union in 1964 in a rank-and-file revolt against an ineffective leadership. Lately the A.F.S.C.M.E.'s rolls have been swelling by 1,000 recruits a week. Members range from zookeepers to engineers and social workers. About a third are women, and a third are blacks-two groups that union leaders have found difficult to organize or have ignored. This success has been achieved against fierce resistance from many government officials who insist that public workers...
This month Chavez will visit AFL-CIO headquarters to ask the labor federation's support for a new nationwide grape boycott. It will be much harder to popularize, though, than the boycott that became a flaming liberal cause toward the end of the '60s. Chavez this time cannot ask consumers to shun all grapes, only Teamster-picked ones, and shoppers have little way of telling which those are. Chavez has strong verbal support from the AFL-CIO, which booted the Teamsters out 15 years ago; but as yet he has received no federation money -and his union...