BLUE COLLAR MAN.

By Theodore V.Purcell '33. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 262 pp. $6.00.

Over a period of ten years Father Purcell has been conducting research among workers and supervisors in the packinghouse industry. During the course of his work he became intrigued by a question which managers and union leaders have often raised but not adequately answered: Can a worker hold "dual allegiance" to both company and union? Purcell's findings strongly suggest that the allegiance to one does not automatically mean lack of allegiance to the other.

To those who assume that the two sets of attitudes are antithetical this report will undoubtedly come as a surprise. Among workers in three plants of Swift & Company, Purcell found dual allegiance expressed by 73 per cent of the Chicago, 78 per cent of the Kansas City, and 99 per cent of the St. Louis workers.

To arrive at his conclusions the author devises a set of criteria for measuring attitudes of the worker-as-employee and worker-as-union-member. As an employee the worker was encouraged to talk about his supervisors, aspects of the job, promotion opportunities, wage incentives, aspirations for his children, and his attitude toward the company as a whole. As a union member he discussed the leadership, grievance system, his own participation in the union, and other aspects of unionism. A composite scoring was made for each set of attitudes then matched. Among the several hundred workers interviewed it was the exception to find that favorable union attitudes correlated with unfavorable company attitudes or vice versa. Even after two strikes attitudes do not appear to have changed radically toward one or the other institutional group.

Father Purcell does not rely on statistics alone: he makes liberal use of direct quottions from the workers themselves.