Situational Pressures and Functional Role of the Ethnic Labor Leader

Abstract

HIS paper grew out of a larger study of T ethnic minorities in the unions of Los Angeles County.1 It is an exploratory study, based upon a highly selected group of informantschiefly leaders of local unions high proportions of ethnic membership. The purpose of such a study is to call important problems to attention and to suggest leads for further inquiry. In this discussion the term role will be used in a somewhat vestigial sense; it should be made clear at the beginning that the concern here is less the internal psychological field of the actor than those gross regularities in the external situation wherein the actor must move. Such a framework places the burden of analysis, not upon the self concept of the individual leader, but rather upon the recurrent necessities of the organization-i.e., the conditions of a specifiable role. Two aspects of the unions are singled out as especially critical for other features of the organization. The first of these is the external function of the organization, and the second is the reflection of this function in the form of pressures upon the system of roles, and the system of control, within the local. The guiding question for determining external function, empirically, can be put as follows: What does a labor union have to do to stay in business? In gauging the position of a given officer, it can be stated thus: What does he have to do in order to keep his job? In answering such questions one may avoid an excessive emphasis on the formal blueprint of the organization. The necessary functions of a union can be summarized as follows: (1) to express and channel the protest behavior of workers and thus exert pressure on management; (2) to achieve accommodative relationships within the institutional environment, thus allowing for organizational stability and the means to deliver the goods. Arthur Ross has stated the reciprocals of these demands in four specific relationships.2 (1) The local must establish contractual relationships management; (2) the local must live with some International union; (3) the local must get along with other significant unions in the locale, and, (4) the local must control its members. The importance of a particular group will vary the sources of the union's organizational strength; no union will be free of such necessary relationships. (For example, certain locals are relatively independent of their Internationals but are highly dependent upon the consent of the membership; others exhibit an exactly reversed relationship these two groups.) The organized centers of power which the union must live with, or control, affect the necessary functions of the union personnel. This discussion will be concerned the most central figure in the union, the professional leader-and particularly the leader of Mexican or Negro identity. Certain propositions can be advanced for the positions of all labor leaders. The first thing to note is the relative instability of tenure. The * The research upon which this paper is based was supported by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and by the Department of Anthropology and Sociology of the University of California at Los Angeles. I Scott Greer, The Participation of Ethnic Minorities in the Labor Unions of Los Angeles County (unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles). 2 Trade Union Determinants of Indistrial Wage Policy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949).