Professor Selekman Finds Labor Beginning Period of Transition

Organized labor in the United States has come of age and faces the transition from fighting for working benefits to administration of its recent gains, Benjamin M. Selekman, Kristein Professor of Labor Relations at the Graduate School of Business Administration, declares in an article written for the summer number of the "Harvard Business Review."

"From marginal, barely tolerated institutions, trade unions have become within the past decade outstanding aggregates of group power in the nation. The long historic struggle for recognition has ended," Selekman's report continues.

With the increased responsibility of power, according to Professor Selekman, "the mature labor leader confronts one essential test for every policy he frames: does it enable him to meet simultaneously the requirements both of the dynamic protest movement for which he speaks and of the stable, complex administration which he must serve?"

"Bristling Difficulties"

"Every line of scrutiny, every angle from which the union official's job may be examined leads to a very real and sympathetic respect for its paradoxical complexities. Indeed, so bristling are the difficulties that they make it almost naive to expect any quick achievement of the maturity that all would agree is indispensable."

In a further statement it is averred that legislative action must be carefully considered if it is to be of help, and that "no legislation anywhere among democratic nations has yet succeeded in compelling men to work when they feel themselves sufficiently aggrieved to lay down tools."

In closing the article, Professor Selekman, in a message to executives, contends that the industrialist must remain steady to allow the country to catch up with the swift changes in industrial relations.