Public Workers' Powerhouse

At meetings of the AFL-CIO executive council, says one insider, the vote usually ranges from 25-to-l to 34-to-l, depending on how many other union chiefs are present to vote down Jerry Wurf. While that may be an exaggeration, the 54-year-old Wurf, head of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, is certainly a maverick in the stolid hierarchy of organized labor. He has bucked the AFL-CIO high command on such issues as the 1972 election (Wurf was strong for George McGovern, while the federation observed a pro-Nixon neutrality) and the Viet Nam War (he repeatedly opposed council resolutions in support of the war). Even so, Wurf is a growing power in the union movement, as Governors, mayors and county executives no longer need to be told.

Wurf commands the fastest-growing union in the entire AFL-CIO; its 614,-000-member ranks have tripled since he took over the union in 1964 in a rank-and-file revolt against an ineffective leadership. Lately the A.F.S.C.M.E.'s rolls have been swelling by 1,000 recruits a week. Members range from zookeepers to engineers and social workers. About a third are women, and a third are blacks--two groups that union leaders have found difficult to organize or have ignored. This success has been achieved against fierce resistance from many government officials who insist that public workers have no right to strike. Some 120 road workers in Garrett County, Md., won recognition for their A.F.S.C.M.E. local only after striking the state highway department for 365 days, one of the longest public service strikes in U.S. history. Some 1,300 mostly black garbage men in Memphis got their local recognized in 1968 after a bitter 65-day walkout that indirectly precipitated the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; he was shot there while rallying support for the strike.

Wurf has achieved his success by a kind of gruff militancy that is a fading memory in many unions. A last-minute college dropout (in his senior year), he looks deceptively like a brooding scholar with his horn-rimmed glasses, roughhewn features and thatched gray hair. He dispels the image when he speaks, showering listeners with four-letter words in a manner that is both threatening and amiable. Wurf's dogged, determined style has aroused traditionally conservative public workers. "Let's face it," he says, "a guy who's been collecting garbage for 20 years is no militant. But when your employer is some elected official who wants to make a show of keeping down taxes, and the worker is the guy who gets it in the neck, you do find a militant."

To give the public workers more political clout, Wurf has joined forces with the National Education Association and the firefighters union to organize the 3,000,000-member CAPE (for Coalition of American Public Employees). It is lobbying in Washington for a kind of national public employees labor relations act that will give workers full collective bargaining rights. Wurf has pushed hard for repeal of the Hatch Act, which forbids public workers to choose sides during an election, and has openly encouraged political activism within his union. An A.F.S.C.M.E. road show tours the country to teach local unionists how to organize political rallies, telethons, and letter-writing campaigns. "Before," explains Wurf, "we were afraid to politicize the union, and we got nowhere, so now we are political as hell."

Wurf viewed the AFL-ClO's detente with the Nixon Administration after the last election as "a dangerous game." But George Meany's recent blasts at Government policies may indicate that the detente is disintegrating. That possibility can only give satisfaction to Jerry Wurf, an old-fashioned labor leader who believes that any collusion between unions and the Government "erases labor's moral commitment" to the American worker and consumer.

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