Unions: Some Fashionable Fallacies About Trade Unions

Latest, easiest and cheapest, since it is the least hazardous, intellectual fashion is to dissent against unions.

From Victor Riesel to the upper reaches of the Ford Foundation, an orchestrated carping plucks on the anti-intellectualism of the unions, their bureaucratic rigidity, their lack of militance, and the inferior quality of union leaders, who are compared inferentially with the writing fellows. All this is set against an invocation of a time past, the thirties, when unions were, presumably, none of these things.

Most of the windfill is not so, the historic assumptions are untrue, and the conclusions, when they are made, are mainly misapprehensions. Consider the prevailing fallacies and misconceptions current about unions.

First, the so-called resistance of unions to the thoughts of the thinking men. Actually every verbal expression that comes out of American unions is an illustration of the statement by Lawrence Durrell that history is a fleshing up o...