Encouraging Strikes

December 24, 1962

The strike of the printers’ union against New York newspapers raises once more the vexed question of what the attitude of government and the law should be in regard to unions and strikes in general.

A word ought first to be said about the merits of this particular strike. In October the average weekly wage paid in all U.S. manufacturing establishments was $97. (This compares with an average of $68 in 1952, of $37 in 1942, and of $17 in 1932.) The New York newspaper printers were getting $141 a week. They initially asked for $160, and for a basic 30-hour week. The publishers offered an increase of $8 a week over two years, to correspond with the settlement of the Newspaper Guild strike. The Typographical Union replied that the publishers had not even begun to “negotiate.”

The plight of the New York printers hardly seemed desperate enough to justify their action in calling a strike at the height of the Christmas season, throwing 20,000 people directly out of work, injuring thousands of small newspaper stands and stationery stores, and depriving more than 5 million people of their daily papers. If the strike goes on long enough, or is settled on burdensome terms, it may put some newspapers permanently out of business and their employees out of work.

CAN UNIONS RAISE WAGES?

Why does the public tolerate such strikes against it, year in, year out? Probably because most people still believe that the unions, using the “weapon” of the strike, can in fact raise wages above the level they would otherwise reach. Economic analysis has shown again and again that this belief is a delusion.

The unions can raise money wages. But the gain is canceled out (with the help of inflation) by an equivalent rise in prices. Or an individual union can force an increase in wages for its members at the expense of all other workers, who must pay that wage increase in higher prices. In recent years the most highly paid workers have been achieving further victories against the more poorly paid. But union pressure cannot raise real wages for all workers. The attempt only creates unemployment. Our persistent 5.8 percent unemployment, in spite of record GNP figures, is mainly the result of excessive wage rates in key industries.

But the delusion that strikes and union pressure can raise real wages for all workers above the level that free competition would have brought is the reason why the law encourages unions and strikes.

LAW NOT IMPARTIAL

Under the Taft-Hartley Act the government has become, in effect, a union-organizing agency. It legally compels an employer to “bargain” with a specified union. It confers on a union representing a mere majority, exclusive power to bargain for all the workers in a given unit. It in effect grants unions the intimidating and coercive powers of mass picketing. It in effect deprives the employer of the right to treat a striker as a man who has quit his job, and to replace him peaceably and permanently. This is why a steel plant or newspaper no longer even attempts to carry on its business during a strike. In New York even strikers, after nine weeks, are entitled to unemployment insurance.

Yet the strange myth continues that the government and the law are “neutral” during a strike. When a strike occurs, instead of there being any demand for revision of the laws that encourage the strike (and reduce its risks) there are demands for still more government intervention—direct intervention of the President or Secretary of Labor, resort to the compulsory return-to-work period of the Taft-Hartley Act, compulsory arbitration, even direct wage and price fixing.

But no one calls for the obvious solution—to revise or repeal all the Federal labor legislation since 1931 and return to the principles of the common law. Under these principles unions would no longer be privileged to resort to intimidation or coercion. Individual workers would be free to join or not to join unions, to strike or to stay on the job.

Wages, employment, production, peace, would all gain by the change.