Solidarity Ever?

Since the formation of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. in 1955, President George Meany, head of the old A.F.L., and Vice President Walter Reuther, boss of the old C.I.O., have eyed each other with deepening disdain. Meany thinks of Reuther as an energetic troublemaker. Reuther attributes many of organized labor's problems--such as declining membership and jurisdictional disputes between craft and industrial unions--to Meany's lackadaisical leadership of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Last week, at labor's Bal Harbour convention, the Meany-Reuther feud was a top conversational subject among the delegates.

Meany chose to display his feelings toward Reuther by calculated insult. Both as a vice president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and as one of John Kennedy's hardest working supporters during the 1960 campaign, Reuther had every right to expect that he would be placed on the committee assigned to greet President Kennedy at the labor convention. But Meany deliberately left Reuther's name off the committee list, assigned him instead to escort a subsequent convention visitor--Eleanor Roosevelt.

Even in the face of the rebuff, Reuther held his tongue. But that only left the convention's 900 delegates wondering how long it would be before Reuther would launch a frontal assault on Meany that might well end up by ending the whole A.F.L.-C.I.O. merger. This possibility was plainly in the mind of Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg when he addressed the convention. Assuring the convention that there were really no insoluble conflicts within the A.F.L.-C.I.O., Goldberg declared: "Our national policies at home, to cope with the problems we face abroad, demand unity--unity on the part of all of our people, unity on the part of the labor movement."

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