Merged Unions

The two great American labor organizations are leaderless. This morning the American Federation of Labor Executive Council will attempt to find a successor to the late William F. Green, and the Congress of Industrial Organization, after a preliminary meeting yesterday, will try to cut through bitter personal wrangling and select a president.

While partisans are plumping for their own candidates, another sizeable element is trying to culminate a post-war trend toward a merger of the A.F. of L. and the C.I.O. This, merger-backers contend, is the best thing possible for American labor, particularly with an administration that will probably look askance at many of labor's demands. Come 1954, they say, labor will provide a politically solid front.

At present, there seems little likelihood that the idea will become reality, but nevertheless the feeling exists that centralized labor is a fundamental necessity, and this is an unhealthy attitude. For one thing, a merger of the C.I.O. and the A.F. of L. will not contribute anything to increasing the membership of American labor unions. Labor has succeeded in organizing only 30 percent of the workers, and even this figure may be an exaggeration; contrast this to England where labor accounts for 70 percent of the working population and it becomes obvious that unions here have much to do.

Indeed, the primary reason the 30 percent mark has been reached has been the intense competition, for membership between the two major unions. To bargain effectively with management, labor must be representative of labor; it isn't now. Single centralized labor might be even less representative of labor because it would no longer have to battle for membership in a non-competitive field. And for the labor movement itself merger would serve no long-term purpose; without competition membership would probably dwindle until labor could no longer hold its own in bargaining.

Not only would central, monolithic labor harm itself, it would necessitate by its very nature interference by Government. The potential for good or catastrophic, especially catastrophic, would be so great that it would force Congress to pass stringent legislation, to regulate labor as a state does a public utility. This would virtually climinate collective bargaining, and transform both parties into little more than vast lobbies, pressuring the government for favorable decisions. In short, such a merger would fuse politics and industrial relations, as they are fused in Europe.

What then is to be gained? Perhaps with one union, labor can campaign more efficiently and without wasteful overlapping in elections. But when compared with the harm such a merger would do to labor itself and to collective bargaining, and the increase in governmental interference it would necessitate, the few short team benefits from merger appear decidedly insignificant.