Chairman Carey's Chickens

Right at the start of their trip to Russia last October, the eleven-man C.I.O. delegation, headed by Secretary-Treasurer Jim Carey, failed to see things eye to eye. En route, in an unheated Paris hotel, one of the delegation's passionate Russophiles griped about the cold water for shaving. In Moscow's National Hotel, the same man thought any complaint about the cold water was Trotskyite sabotage.

Amid factory visits, ballet performances and vodka toasts, Chairman Carey's delegates twittered and taunted each other as stormily as Mother Carey's Chickens. Their visit to Russia lasted eight days. But it took 150 days for them to agree on the report that was finally published last week.

The delegation had a few, hard reservations--they were not impressed by Soviet mass production technology, they found the Soviet standard of living low, by U.S. standards. They said: "The shortage of most consumers . . . makes a worker less concerned with . . . his wages than with . . . finding commodities which he can buy." But mostly they were "impressed" and sympathetic over Soviet workers' wartime heroism, postwar plans for reconstruction, monolithic trade union organization, and cradle-to-grave social security.

At a mass meeting of trade unionists in Leningrad, the CIOers made enthusiastic speeches, topped by the passionate cry of Russia-loving Reid Robinson (Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers): "We must break down the propaganda that you have no democracy as we have!"

Nowhere in the final report was there any echo of the feeling voiced by British trade unionists, who also paid a visit to Russia last year. Said the Britons (in a report by their Iron & Steel Trades Confederation): "The functions and activities of the trade union may differ . . . in a Socialist [and] a Capitalist state, but never, in our view, to the point . . . accepted in the Soviet trade unions--that the workers' principal interests can safely be left to a workers' government . . . at all times. . . . Our faith in the perfection of human beings, and particularly governments, has not yet reached that dizzy height."

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