Labor: But I Love You

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Every inch the husky, handsome, silver-haired leader type, United Steelworkers President David McDonald stood before 900 workers in Midland, Pa., and presented his case for reelection. He wanted a new term, he said, "not for personal pride, but because I love you. I can only say I'm heartsick over what has happened."

McDonald, 62, has ample cause to be sick of heart: after twelve years as head of the union dealing with the nation's most basic industry, he is, by every present standard, a less than even choice to retain his job in the elections to be held next Feb. 9. McDonald is, in fact, confronted by a rank-and-file revolt, and beneath a multitude of more formal complaints festers the grievance of the men in the mills that their president is not one of them and does not really care about them.

To many of the fire-eating unionists of the open-hearth and blast furnaces, McDonald has been suspect from the start. A college graduate (Carnegie Tech, '32) who once aspired to a career in the theater, he was a mill clerk when he attracted the attention of the union's founding president, Philip Murray, with his organizational talents. Murray selected McDonald as secretary-treasurer of the union in 1942, made it clear that McDonald was his heir apparent. When Murray died in 1952, McDonald stepped almost automatically into the presidency.

The Good Life. His control was shaky from the start. He moved into an American Locomotive Co. strike early in 1953, negotiated a private settlement with the firm's president—and saw his own strike committee promptly repudiate the agreement. He further alienated the rank and file by successfully backing a crony, without significant mill experience, for a union vice-presidency in 1955 against the candidacy of the Buffalo district's rough-hewn Irish leader, Joseph P. Molony. The extent of the Steelworkers' restlessness was demonstrated in 1957 when Donald Rarick, a relatively unknown Irwin, Pa., local leader, protesting a union dues hike, ran against McDonald for president, polled 223,516 votes to McDonald's 404,172.

Instead of seeking rapport with his members, McDonald grew increasingly aloof. He golfed with steel executives, used his $50,000 salary (he also gets a generous expense account) to patronize nightclubs from Manhattan to Los Angeles and in many other ways enjoy the good life. In addition to his seven-room fieldstone home in a Pittsburgh suburb, he bought a second house in Palm Springs, and spent much of his time there.

High living by union leaders is a common complaint among rank and file these days (see U.S. BUSINESS). Yet anti-McDonald Steelworkers peg their campaign more formally to the charge that he has neglected the problems of the union's 2,600 locals. While overall wage patterns and working conditions are negotiated in union contracts with the big steel companies, locals are bound by no-strike pledges in arguing local grievances—and the grievance machinery has completely bogged down. It takes three years for some such cases to be resolved. Instead of working to soothe such gripes himself, McDonald has been in the habit of sending out his competent, hard-working secretary-treasurer, I. (for lorworth, a name of Welsh derivation) W. (for Wilbur) Abel, 56.