Unions and union leadership

The main purpose of this collection of articles is to give the reader some feeling for and understanding of the union as an enterprise made up of live human beings. At the same time I have tried to convey through the selection of articles that these human beings are not al together sufficient unto themselves, but are part of a stream of his tory and contemporary social forces. In making this purpose effective I have looked for four qualities in a selection:

(1) Does it really illuminate? (2) Does the selection describe a representative situation rather than an offbeat situation? (3) Is it competently written? (4) Is the writer in a position to take a reason ably disinterested view of the immediate circumstances about which he is writing?

I have tried to maintain several sorts of balance in the design of the volume as a whole: as between reporters and academic writers; as among various kinds of union situations; as among the various social science fields-Le., economists, sociologists, psychologists, etc. Finally, I have tried to maintain a balance of viewpoints, not as be tween pro-union and anti-union, because this is not a debater's man ual-all of the contributing authors, in fact, with one possible excep tion, are pro-union in the sense that they accept the role and function of a labor union in an industrial society. The balance of viewpoints that I have tried to achieve is of another kind: specifically, how the observers perceive the role and function of the labor union in indus trial society. This sort of balance is represented by observers who think the unions are doing pretty well; by others who think the unions are not going far enough; and by still others who think the unions have gone too far.