Balanced Labor Law

October 6, 1958

The new bargaining victories of the United Automobile Workers, in the face of the heavy unemployment already in their ranks and the fall in sales of American cars, may be attributed to the bargaining skill of Walter Reuther or the bargaining ineptitude of the companies. But a “third force” in the background exercised the determining effect. This is the one-sided labor laws and decisions that give enormous bargaining power to union leaders and bargaining weakness to management. A further recent illustration of the effect of these laws was the order issued by the United Steelworkers of America expelling the “ringleaders” of a rebel faction of “traitors” that polled nearly a quarter-million votes in the union’s election last year.

FREE EMPLOYEE CHOICE

It is facts like these that emphasize the irrelevance and futility of measures like the Kennedy-Ives bill, which divert attention from the real labor reforms that need to be made.

One of the few lawyers who do have a sense of the urgency of these reforms, and who combine it with political courage and an understanding of the basic economic as well as legal principles involved, is Prof. Sylvester Petro of the New York University School of Law. In a book and in numerous pamphlets and articles, Petro has emphasized “free employee choice” as the guiding principle of labor legislation. He has supported the Taft-Hartley Act and the state right-to-work laws to the extent that they are built around this principle. But he has criticized the provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act that sanction compulsory-unionism agreements or accept the exclusive-bargaining, majority-rule principle.

In a recent speech before a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society at Princeton, Petro tried to clarify “free employee choice” further by outlining how a brief law might read. I quote some of his principal suggestions:

“1—Employees shall have the right to join or not to join labor organizations and to participate or to refuse to participate in collective bargaining and other concerted activities.

“2—It shall be unlawful: (a) for any employer or trade union by picketing or otherwise to coercively restrain employees in the exercise of the rights stated in Section 1 . . . and provided further that no party subject to this act shall be required to meet, treat, or bargain with any other party or person subject to this act; (b) for any party or person subject to this act to condition employment or to cause or to attempt to cause the conditioning of employment upon membership or nonmembership in any labor organization; (c) for any employer to induce or encourage any other employer or any other person to visit reprisals upon any employee for his exercise of the rights stated in Section 1; (d) for any trade union to induce or encourage any other trade union or any other person to cease or interrupt any economic relationship. . . . Provided that nothing in this act shall prohibit employees during a dispute with their own employer over their own wages, hours, or other conditions of employment from leaving their employment in an orderly way and to go on strike. . . .”

I have omitted several provisions because of the requirements of space. In addition, Petro would add a third set of provisions abolishing the National Labor Relations Board, repealing the National Labor Relations Act and all laws restricting the jurisdiction of the courts in labor disputes and giving full jurisdiction at law and in equity to any court, state or Federal, having jurisdiction over the parties to any case arising.

STOP UNION VIOLENCE

Petro has performed a service in trying to formulate a specific labor law to embody his central principle of free employee choice. By doing so he has helped to point up the one-sidedness of our existing labor laws drawn in the interests of maintaining union-boss power rather than in the interest of the individual worker, employer, or consumer. His accompanying discussion has brought out the unreality of present labor law that ignores the central problem of trade-union violence. The rule of law means rules that apply equally to all persons, not rules framed to favor on group at the expense of another.