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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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on training staff people to handle arbitrations, with a lot of difficulty. Some people could, some people couldn't. They had classes that the lawyers arranged, because why do you need a lawyer? The truth of the matter, by now you need a lawyer. Now you're into very, very tricky kinds of things. When the hospital senses you're weak, they're going to throw everything into arbitration. That's what's happened now. This was unheard of for us to have all of these cases.

Q:

But what you're saying is interesting because what you were saying before about the union's aggressiveness is something that distinguished it from unions as they operated by and large then and certainly today. It's more like the CIO union in the early stages of organization. Radicals have always criticized so-called business unionism because there's a tendency to submit to legal structures and to avoid shop-floor confrontations and to use lawyers instead of workers and so on and so forth. What I'm getting at, and I think it's important because 1199 is a model of a left-wing union, so to speak, in some ways, aren't we looking at a process that's somehow inevitable in unionism?

Foner:

Probably is inevitable, particularly in today's unions, where unions are not strong, where employers are much stronger than the unions. But there was a history in our case, and you've got to see it. See, our handling of things under a contract emerged from the way the contracts were won. For example, one of the big things that we developed -- this was an Elliott Godoff strategy -- was the high noon. That is, when you were organizing in a hospital, and when he reached a certain percentage of cards and you were trying to get management to agree to a quick election, we would stage a high noon. By that, at noon everybody from every place would come running to the director's office and pile in there and say, “This is what we want, an election right away.” That high noon strategy began to be carried over into confrontations with managements after they had contracts. You had to be careful that you didn't do it so you ended up with big lawsuits, see, and that kind of thing, but for the most part we could get away with those things. So that this mass approach of workers feeling that they could do most anything, there was a history to it in the way we did things.

Q:

But gradually it was eroded?

Foner:

Gradually it was eroded. Remember the history is also that you had people who were involved in the '59 strike, you had people involved in the '62 strike, you had small strikes in other places as well. So you had a lot of people who helped set the union up who had





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