George Meany
William George Meany was an American labor union administrator for 57 years. He was a vital figure in the creation of the AFL–CIO and served as its first president, from 1955 to 1979.
Meany, the son of a union plumber, became a plumber himself at a young age. Within a decade, he was a full-time union official. As an officer of the American Federation of Labor, he represented the AFL on the National War Labor Board during World War II. He held the position of AFL president from 1952 to 1955.
In 1952, Meany proposed a merger of the AFL with the Congress of Industrial Organizations. He managed the negotiations until the merger was completed in 1955, creating the largest federation of unions in the United States. He was AFL–CIO president for the next 24 years.
Meany had a reputation for integrity and consistent opposition to corruption in the labor movement, and strong anti-communism. He was one of the best-known union leaders in the U.S. during the mid-20th century.
Early years
Meany was born into a Roman Catholic family in Harlem, New York City on August 16, 1894, the second of 10 children. His parents were Michael Meany and Anne Cullen Meany, who were both American-born and of Irish descent. His ancestors had immigrated to the United States during the 1850s. His father was a plumber and served as president of his plumber's union local. Michael Meany was also a precinct level activist in the Democratic Party.Meany grew up in the Port Morris neighborhood of The Bronx, where his parents had relocated when he was five years old. Always called "George", he learned that his real first name was William only when he got a work permit as a teenager. Meany quit high school at age 16 to become a plumber like his father, beginning work as a plumber's helper. He then served a five-year apprenticeship as a plumber and got his journeyman's certificate in 1917, with Local 463 United Association of Plumbers and Steamfitters of the United States and Canada.
His father died of heart failure in 1916 after a bout of pneumonia. When Meany's older brother joined the U.S. Army in 1917, George became the sole source of income for his mother and six younger siblings. He supplemented his income for a while by playing as a semiprofessional baseball catcher. In 1919, he married Eugenia McMahon, a garment worker and a member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. They had three daughters.
Beginning of union career in New York
In 1920, Meany was elected to the executive board of Local 463 of the Plumber's Union. In 1922, he became a full-time business agent for the local, which had 3,600 members at that time. Meany later stated that he had never walked a picket line during his plumber's union days, explaining that his original plumber's union never needed to picket,because the employers never attempted to replace the workers.
In 1923, he was elected secretary of the New York City Building Trades Council, the city federation of unions representing construction workers. He won a court injunction against an industry lockout in 1927, which was then considered an innovative tactic for a union, and was opposed by many of the older union administrators.
In 1934, he became president of the New York State Federation of Labor, the statewide coalition of trade unions. During his first year of lobbying in Albany, the state capital, 72 bills that he promoted to the state legislature were enacted into law, and he developed a close working relationship with Governor Herbert H. Lehman.
He developed a reputation for honesty, diligence and the ability to testify effectively before legislative hearings and to speak well to the press. In 1936, he cofounded the American Labor Party, a pro-union political party active in New York, along with David Dubinsky and Sidney Hillman, partly to organize support among union socialists for the re-election that year of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and mayor Fiorello La Guardia.
National leadership in Washington, DC
Three years later, he relocated to Washington, D.C., to become national secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Labor, where he served AFL president William Green.During World War II, Meany was one of the permanent representatives of the AFL to the National War Labor Board. During the war, he established close relationships with prominent anticommunists in the American labor movement, including David Dubinsky, Jay Lovestone and Matthew Woll. In October 1945, he organized the AFL boycott of the founding conference of the World Federation of Trade Unions, which welcomed participation by labor unions from the USSR and was later called a communist front.
The labor strikes of 1945-1946, which were organized to a large extent by CIO unions, resulted in passage of the Taft Hartley Act in 1947, which was perceived widely as anti-union. One provision required union officials to sign loyalty oaths affirming that they were not communists; this had a major effect on the CIO unions. Meany, in opposition to John L. Lewis and other leftist union leaders, replied that he would "go further and sign an affidavit that I was never a comrade to the comrades" since he had always ostracized communists. Within a year, most U.S. union administrators unaffiliated with the Communist Party signed the affidavit, later upheld by the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1949 that the Communist Party was unique among American political parties in swearing allegiance to a foreign power.
Merger of AFL and CIO
When Green's health began failing in 1951, Meany gradually assumed day-to-day operations of the AFL. He became president of the American Federation of Labor in 1952 upon Green's death.Meany quickly took effective control of the AFL, and proposed to merge with the CIO. It took longer for Walter Reuther to complete his control of the CIO, but when he did he became a willing partner in the merger negotiations.
It took Meany three years to negotiate the merger, and he had to overcome significant opposition. John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers termed the merger a "rope of sand", and his union refused to join the AFL–CIO. Jimmy Hoffa, second in command of the Teamster's Union, protested, "What's in it for us? Nothing!" However, the Teamsters complied with the merger initially. Mike Quill, president of the Transport Workers Union of America also fought the merger, saying that it amounted to a capitulation to the "racism, racketeering and raiding" of the AFL.
Fearing a drawn-out negotiation process, Meany decided on a "short route" to reconciliation. This meant all AFL and CIO unions would be accepted into the new organization "as is", with all conflicts and overlaps to be sorted out after the merger. Meany further relied on a small, select group of advisors to craft the necessary agreements. The draft constitution was written primarily by AFL Vice President Matthew Woll and CIO General Counsel Arthur Goldberg, while the joint policy statements were written by Woll, CIO Secretary-Treasurer James Carey, CIO vice presidents David McDonald and Joseph Curran, Brotherhood of Railway Clerks President George McGregor Harrison, and Illinois AFL–CIO President Reuben Soderstrom.
Meany's efforts came to fruition in December 1955 with a joint convention in New York City that merged the two federations, creating the AFL–CIO, with Meany elected as president. Termed Meany's "greatest achievement" by Time magazine, the new federation had 15 million members. Only two million US workers were members of unions remaining outside the AFL–CIO.
Campaigns against corrupt unions
In 1953, the International Longshoremen's Association, accused of racketeering, was expelled from the AFL, an early example of Meany's efforts against corruption and organized crime in unions. After internal reform, it was readmitted to the now-merged AFL–CIO, in 1959.Meany also fought corruption in the AFL affiliated United Textile Workers of America from 1952. In 1957, he reported that the president of that union had been stealing more than $250,000. Meany also appointed an independent monitor to oversee reform of the union.
Concerns about corruption and the influence of organized crime in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, managed by Dave Beck, caused Meany to begin a campaign to reform that union in 1956. In 1957, amidst a fight for control of the union with Jimmy Hoffa, Beck was called before the United States Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, commonly known as the "McClellan Committee" after its chairman John Little McClellan, of Arkansas.
Televised hearings during early 1957 exposed misconduct by both the Beck and the Hoffa factions of the Teamsters Union. Both Hoffa and Beck were indicted, but Hoffa won control of the Teamsters. In response, the AFL–CIO instituted a policy that no union official who had taken the Fifth Amendment during a corruption investigation could continue in a leadership position. Meany told the Teamsters that they could continue as members of the AFL–CIO if Hoffa resigned as president. Hoffa refused, and the Teamsters were ousted from the AFL–CIO on December 6, 1957. Meany endorsed the AFL–CIO's adoption of a code of ethics, after the scandal.
Meany also organized campaigns against organized crime and corruption in the International Jewelry Workers Union, the Laundry Workers International Union, the AFL Distillery Workers, the AFL United Auto Workers, and the Bakery and Confectionery Workers International Union. He demanded the dismissal of corrupt union officials and internal reorganization of the unions. When some unions resisted, he organized their expulsion from the AFL and later from the AFL–CIO, and he even established rival unions. He established an AFL–CIO Committee on Ethical Practices to investigate misconduct and insisted for unions being investigated to co-operate with its inquiries. According to John Hutchinson, a professor at UCLA, "few American union leaders have such a public record of repeated and explicit opposition to corruption".