Giant Step Backward

May 18, 1959

The Kennedy bill, as it passed the Senate, is much worse than no labor bill at all. It would on net balance increase the appalling power of union bosses. And it would do nothing to reform real abuses.

The quickest way to recognize the faults of the bill is to ask ourselves what a sound and balanced labor law would seek to do. It would either not interfere in industrial labor relations at all (as in the days before the Wagner Act), or it would make it illegal for an employer to require either membership or nonmembership in a union as a condition of employment. The Taft-Hartley Act, like the Wagner Act, piously professes to do this in Section 8a. It declares it an “unfair labor practice for an employer . . . by discrimination in regard to hire or tenure of employment or any term or condition of employment to encourage or discourage membership in any labor organization.” And then, in flagrant contradiction of this balanced principle, it explicitly authorizes a union shop under which an employer can and must fire a man who does not become a member of a union.

The basic requirement of any sound and balanced labor law would be to illegalize beyond the shadow of doubt every practice, including mass picketing, which involves violence, intimidation, or coercion. A guiding principle of labor law should be to protect free employee choice.

UNION ABUSES

The union abuses that any labor law will have to correct are outlined in all their grisly detail by Prof. Sylvester Petro of the New York University School of Law in his recent book Power Unlimited—The Corruption of Union Leadership. The appropriate legal remedies are outlined both in that book and in the same author’s The Labor Policy of the Free Society.

Let us apply to the Kennedy bill the test of the basic principles just stated. We find that, under the guise of correcting union abuses, it would actually increase the stranglehold of the union bosses. It makes a mockery of the principle of free employee choice. By allowing the building trades unions to fasten a completely closed shop on unwilling workers, it takes an enormous step backward. By prohibiting certain narrowly specified types of organizational picketing, it in effect permits other types of organizational picketing that are probably illegal under present law.

One of the worst features of the new bill is that repealing the present explicit provision of the Taft- Hartley Act which forbids voting by replaced strikers in representation elections. The Kennedy bill would now permit the former employees, who had been replaced by a fair employer as a result of a strike, to vote in an NLRB election. This is like permitting people who have moved out of New York to continue to vote in New York local elections. As some critics have pointed out, this could result in certification of a union not wanted by a single employee on the job. Under this provision the government would in effect throw its support behind every strike, and encourage arrogant abuse of the strike power. This provision alone throws doubt on the integrity of the whole Kennedy bill.

WHERE THE BILL FAILS

And the Kennedy bill completely fails to deal with the true causes of union abuses. It gives no protection to employers who are being subjected to shakedowns by racketeers. Its union disclosure requirements add nothing substantial to existing law. Union members already have the right to go to court whenever their officers mistreat them or steal from them. They do not go to court now simply because they are afraid of the physical reprisals which are a favorite technique of unions run by gangsters. The Kennedy bill in no way eliminates the threat of a beating which now intimidates so many union members.

What is chiefly needed today is the repeal of bad labor law—e.g., the Norris-LaGuardia Act. What the Kennedy bill seeks to do is to correct the evils caused by present bad labor law by piling on still more bad labor law, and by interfering still more in the internal affairs of supposedly voluntary associations.

The Kennedy labor bill, if enacted, would be simply one more huge step in the wrong direction.