It Hasn’t Been Tried

November 2, 1959

Will even the disaster of the 1959 steel strike cause us to ask ourselves whether practically the whole Federal labor legislation of the last 30 years has not been misconceived? Whether it has not gone in the wrong direction, toward one-sided and ever increasing government control? Whether it is not necessary to make an agonizing reappraisal of the whole New Deal approach, and retrace our steps toward freedom? Neither the history of the last dozen years, nor the tenor of current discussion, encourages affirmative answers.

Consider what has happened. The steelworkers, as a result of a smashing series of union victories, were, before the strike broke out, the highest paid major group of workers in the country. This means that they were the highest paid major group of workers in the history of the world. They were averaging $3.10 an hour compared with $2.23 for manufacturing industry as a whole.

David J. McDonald assumed that these smashing victories could go on forever. He ignored the height to which steel wages had already been boosted. He ignored the reduction of employment in the steel industry that had followed his 1956 victory. He ignored the competitive inroads that foreign steel was already making on the American industry’s market. He ignored the further inflationary pressure to which another substantial increase in steel wages was bound to lead. He made extravagant demands and recklessly called a strike.

LOST WAGES

But the longer the strike went on the more difficult it became for McDonald to agree to a compromise of any kind. Even if his full demands were now met it would take years for the steelworkers to earn back their losses from strike idleness—to bring them to where they would have been had they not struck at all. That is why McDonald had to reject every offer by the companies with increasing vehemence as “a mess of nothing,” “infamous demands,” “a black-snake whip on the backs of the workers.”

It is bad Federal laws, government intervention, increasing government controls, that have given this man and his union the power to bring a vital national industry to a halt. But as the paralysis was prolonged there was a rising demand from many politicians and press commentators not for a modification or repeal of these laws, but for still more government intervention and control. What they ask is compulsory arbitration, perhaps thinly disguised as “government machinery for fact-finding and recommendations.” Of course no government body can know what a “correct” wage is any more than it can know what a “correct” price is. Compulsory arbitration would carry us step by step into complete government wage and price control and toward an authoritarian economic system. And all decisions would be necessarily political.

COMPULSORY BARGAINING

As Mr. Eisenhower himself declared on May 5: “I deplore the possibility of putting the government into this field, either as party in negotiations, and certainly in establishing laws to fix the levels of profits and of wages and prices. Once we do that, I believe we have gone to a route that is going to hurt the American system as we know it, especially when we are going to do it in peace time.”

In finally seeking an injunction under the Taft- Hartley Act the President declared that “free collective bargaining has not worked in this dispute.” But free collective bargaining is precisely what was never tried. The essence of free collective bargaining is that neither party is under compulsion. Yet the steel companies are legally compelled to bargain solely with a specified industrywide union. The law gives exclusive bargaining power to that union. The law allows that union to set up mass picket lines which physically prevent the companies from trying to continue their business and individual workers from applying for employment and working peaceably at their jobs.

Why not try a courageous revision of existing law to restore free employee choice, to restore genuinely free, voluntary bargaining, collective or individual, on both sides? The President would be justified in calling a special session of Congress to do that in the 80-day injunction period.