William George Meany (August 16, 1894 – January 10, 1980) was an American labor union administrator for 57 years.

Meany had a reputation for integrity and consistent opposition to corruption in the labor movement,[1] and strong anti-communism.

[2] Meany was born into a Roman Catholic family in Harlem,[3] New York City on August 16, 1894, the second of 10 children.

When Meany's older brother joined the US Army in 1917, George became the sole source of income for his mother and six younger siblings.

[4] He developed a reputation for honesty, diligence and the ability to testify effectively before legislative hearings and to speak well to the press.

[6] In 1936, he cofounded the American Labor Party, a pro-union political party active in New York, along with David Dubinsky and Sidney Hillman, partly to organize support among union socialists for the re-election that year of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and mayor Fiorello La Guardia .

[8] Three years later, he relocated to Washington, D.C., to become national secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Labor,[7] where he served AFL president William Green.

[6] During the war, he established close relationships with prominent anticommunists in the American labor movement, including David Dubinsky, Jay Lovestone and Matthew Woll.

[10] The labor strikes of 1945-1946, which were organized to a large extent by CIO unions, resulted in passage of the Taft Hartley Act in 1947, which was perceived widely as anti-union.

John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers termed the merger a "rope of sand", and his union refused to join the AFL–CIO.

Mike Quill, president of the Transport Workers Union of America also fought the merger,[16] saying that it amounted to a capitulation to the "racism, racketeering and raiding" of the AFL.

[16] In 1953, the International Longshoremen's Association, accused of racketeering, was expelled from the AFL, an early example of Meany's efforts against corruption and organized crime in unions.

[citation needed] Meany also fought corruption in the AFL affiliated United Textile Workers of America from 1952.

[1] Concerns about corruption and the influence of organized crime in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, managed by Dave Beck, caused Meany to begin a campaign to reform that union in 1956.

In response, the AFL–CIO instituted a policy that no union official who had taken the Fifth Amendment during a corruption investigation could continue in a leadership position.

According to John Hutchinson, a professor at UCLA, "few American union leaders have such a public record of repeated and explicit opposition to corruption".

[22] Charles Cogen, president of the American Federation of Teachers opposed Meany in 1967, when the AFL–CIO convention adopted a resolution pledging support for the war in Vietnam.

In his speech to the convention, Meany said that, regarding Vietnam the AFL–CIO was "neither hawk nor dove nor chicken"[23][24] but was supporting "brother trade unionists" struggling against Communism.

That philosophy had often criticized the labor activists for conservatism, racism, and anticommunism, and during the late 1960s and early 1970s, it included many promoters of Communism, such as the Viet Cong.

[27] After Nixon's landslide defeat of McGovern, Meany said that the American people had "overwhelmingly repudiated neo-isolationism" in foreign policy.

[28] Meany's support for the war effort continued to the final days before Saigon was captured by the North Vietnamese in April 1975.

He called for President Gerald Ford to provide a US Navy "flotilla" if it was needed to ensure that hundreds of thousands of "friends of the United States" could escape before a communist regime could be established.

Meany blamed Congress for "washing its hands" of the war and of weakening South Vietnam's military, damaging its "will to fight".

[29] In particular, Meany accused Congress of failing to provide adequate funding for US troops to stage an orderly withdrawal.

[30] In 1963, Meany and Reuther disagreed about the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a major event in the history of the civil rights movement in the United States.

[34] Amidst of the Great Society reforms advocated by President Johnson, Meany and the AFL–CIO in 1965 endorsed a resolution calling for "mandatory congressional price hearings for corporations, a technological clearinghouse, and a national planning agency".

Extensive photo documentation of labor union activities from the 1940s to the present are in the photographic negative and digital collections.

Additionally, collections of graphic images, over 10,000 audio tapes, several hundred movies and videotapes, and more than 2,000 artifacts are available for public research and study.

[48] Meany's entry in the biographical encyclopedia American National Biography was published in 2000, authored by historian David Brody.