Word: cio
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Failure to expand membership, of course, is one reason for this loss of power. The smaller the proportion of workers that he speaks for, the less influence a union leader has with a politician. In Massachusetts, the state AFL-CIO, hit by sagging membership, lacks the $150,000 that it needs to computerize its lists of voters. Knowing that the unions' ability to turn out the vote has declined, Bay State politicos feel less obligated to court labor...
LEADERSHIP. Even his harshest critics agree that he is as sharp as ever mentally, but George Meany has saddled the union movement with an unfortunate image. In what has to be the understatement of the year, Chaikin, an admirer of Meany, ruefully concedes that the AFL-CIO boss turns people off because, "he does not have the personality of an ever-smiling, ever-effusive, warm, merry-appearing man." One university expert on labor adds that Meany's performances on TV "must strike the 24-year-olds, a quarter of whom are college-educated, as something out of prehistoric ages...
Meany and his allies have followed parochial policies that turn off potential labor supporters. The AFL-CIO's dead-end support of the Viet Nam War is the standard example, but there are others. The union movement has lost touch with many rising forces in U.S. society. Feminists and civil rights leaders worry that seniority rules hinder the promotion of women and blacks; consumerists and ecologists find unions ranged against them out of fear that consumer-protection and environmental laws will cost workers jobs. Columbia University Industrial Relations Professor James Kuhn believes that to regain power, "labor needs the imagination...
...issue holds such potential for further damaging labor's reputation as inflation. Though Meany has called inflation the worst enemy of workers, he has opposed every Administration call for wage restraint, while offering no proposals of his own. Jimmy Carter and his aides are furious because the AFL-CIO would not support the President's bill to put mandatory limits on hospital revenues and thus costs. They argue persuasively that the bill would have benefited the great majority of union members: the higher that hospital bills rise and the more that employers have to pay in medical-insurance premiums...
Whenever Meany steps down?his current term runs until 1979, when he will be 85?his successor is just about certain to be AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Lane Kirkland, 56. Kirkland has a reputation as both an intellectual and a pragmatist. He vows that labor's political support in this fall's mid-term elections will be determined by how legislators voted on the labor-reform bill, rather than going blindly to Democrats. For example, in Illinois the AFL-CIO for the first time will aid the re-election campaign of Republican Senator Charles Percy, who voted...