A Giant Retires

With Meany gone, fractions unions may face trouble

The event had been long expected, yet it still came as a shock that reverberated through the U.S. labor movement. After 24 embattled years as president of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, 85 and ailing, announced last week that he would retire in November. When AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Lane Kirkland broke the news to the members of the federation's executive council, they sat in stunned silence.

Pressures on Meany to bow out had been building the past several months. The crusty autocrat was grief-stricken last March by the death of Eugenia, his wife of 59 years. Then, stepping out of a golf cart, he wrenched his knee and had a severe reaction to cortisone injections. After spending two months in the hospital and a month at home, he returned to work in August in a wheelchair. Meany was able to spend only a few hours a day in the office. "That just added to the stagnation," says an official at AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington. "Nobody wanted to decide anything without hearing from George, and he was just not around enough."

Though Meany would probably never have been voted out of office, rumblings in the ranks were growing. This year union leaders began to complain about Meany's strained relations with the White House. Meany blamed Carter for not pushing hard enough for the legislation making unionization easier that Congress voted down. He denounced the President for supporting the original wage-price guidelines, which he felt favored business over labor. Ironically, on the day that Meany's retirement was announced, the AFL-CIO and the White House reached agreement on an accord that will give labor a voice in the setting of future wage guidelines and in forming economic policy to combat the recession.

Aged and cantankerous Meany was, but there is not a labor leader in the land who says he will not be missed. "George Meany is the AFL-CIO," asserts Fred Kroll, president of the railway, airline and steamship clerks' union. No one ever questioned Meany's dedication to the movement. The second of ten children of an Irish family in The Bronx, Meany became an apprentice plumber at 16. He soon proved as skilled at manipulating people as pipes. Stolid in appearance, sometimes slow of speech, he was easy to underestimate. But in any encounter, few rivals could match his wits or the forcefulness with which he pressed his views.

Rising fast in the hierarchy, Meany was chosen president of the AFL in 1952. He promptly engineered a merger between his craft unions and the industrial unions of the CIO, producing a national labor movement with the muscle to back up its demands. Yet he remained more practical than ideological, a champion of "the American way of life"--thrift, sobriety, patriotism and perseverance. Meany remained an unrepentant hawk; he had battled Communist labor unions in Western Europe after World War II, and he supported the Viet Nam War.

But Meany was unable to maintain the momentum of unionism as more workers turned white collar. Union membership has shrunk from 34% of the work force when he became president to 23% today. Without Meany's capacity for reaching consensus, the fractious unions may have trouble working together. Says Ulric Scott, chairman of Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party: "His departure is as important as his presence. It's like a $100 bill that has been changed into a number of smaller bills. Politicians are going to have to court the AFL-CIO as an organization, not as an individual." Kirkland, 57, who is expected to succeed Meany, is esteemed for his intellect but not for his leadership. Partly for love of power, partly for love of labor, Meany put off the day of reckoning as long as he could. Now American labor is going to have to learn to live without him.

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