The Operator

Back in the depression days of the '30s, Nathan Shefferman, the son of an impoverished Baltimore rabbi, got himself a job with the New Deal's National Labor Board, became something of a success as a labor relations man. Shef, as his friends call him, did not remain long in the ranks of the Government's labor forces. In 1935 he went to work for Sears. Roebuck & Co. as labor relations boss. Four years later, while still working for Sears, Shef formed Labor Relations Associates, and after 18 years was running probably the biggest labor consulting service in the U.S. (upwards of 300 clients).

How Shef operated in behalf of his clients was the big question last week when Arkansas' Democratic Senator John McClellan and his labor-management rackets investigating committee opened a new cycle of hearings. On one occasion, the committee heard, Shef's firm was hired by the Morton Packing Co. in Webster City, Iowa to keep the United Packinghouse Workers Union from organizing the plant. Union-Buster Shefferman, said one witness, sent an agent into the plant to organize a "committee" to propagandize against the union--and succeeded. About a year later, after the Continental Baking Co. bought out the Morton company, the management assigned Shef the reverse task: get the employees to join the Bakery and Confectionery Workers Union. Swayed again by a supple Shefferman agent, the workers joined up, got a contract that was so impotent, said one union organizer, that "I was almost ready to blow my top."

To another Shefferman client, the Whirlpool Corp., Shef supplied the services of an "industrial psychologist," one Louis Checov. His "Human Equation Test," the committee heard, was ostensibly geared for tracing the psychological makeup of employees, but in reality was set up to discover their pro or anti-union sentiments.

Sears paid Shef's firm about $239,000 from 1953 through 1956 to keep harmony in the ranks of Sears employees. In a Boston Sears store, witnesses said, the company and the Shefferman organization threatened to dismiss union leaders and actually fired some, tried to lure union organizers away with high-paying jobs, set up a diversionary "independent" union. Admitted Sears Vice President Wallace Tudor: activities of Shefferman's firm, and of some Sears personnel, were "inexcusable, unnecessary and disgraceful. A repetition of these mistakes will not be tolerated by this company."

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