On Not ‘Interfering’

August 3, 1959

President Eisenhower has said that he will not interfere in the steel strike at this stage. And certainly he has not interfered in the sense, for example, that Mr. Truman interfered when he seized the companies in 1952 and tried to impose big wage increases on them. Mr. Eisenhower is ostensibly following a “hands-off” policy, to permit “free voluntary collective bargaining.” Yet the Federal government has been in fact interfering, and interfering every day, on the side of the union leaders and of greatly increasing the effectiveness and coercive power of a strike. It is interfering through the Federal labor laws already on the books (with the help of lack of local law enforcement against union coercion and violence).

The Norris-LaGuardia Act, for example, in effect prevents employers or nonunion employees from going to the Federal courts for immediate relief from irreparable injury. Mass picketing is tolerated, and has proved in fact so intimidatory that the steel companies have not even attempted to carry on production in any of the six national steel strikes that have been called since the end of World War II. As one news item matter-of-factly put it a few days ago: “Any ‘back-to-work’ drive under company sponsorship would touch off picket-line violence of a type that has been unknown in the steel industry since the strikes of twenty years ago.” Even in the present strike, picket lines stranded an estimated 500 supervisors in three Jones & Laughlin plants. The stranded personnel was made up of a stand-by corps to prevent deterioration of equipment, maintain essential utilities, and keep a fire watch.

COMPULSORY BARGAINING

Government interference, in fact, began long before the strike. The phrase “free voluntary collective bargaining” has become a mockery. The employer’s “bargaining” is neither free nor voluntary. He is compelled by law to “recognize” and “bargain with” one specific union. No matter how unreasonable the demands of that union may be, he is forbidden to deal with anybody else with whom he might make a more acceptable voluntary agreement. This is a discrimination that the law does not make in favor of any other private group. It supplies corrupt or ruthless labor leaders with a weapon of extortion and shakedowns. Moreover, an officially “recognized” union, though it may originally have represented only 51 percent of a given group of employees, is legally granted exclusive bargaining rights for that group. This means that dissenting individuals or minority unions are denied the right of freely bargaining for themselves.

ONE MAN’S POWER

And so it comes about that one man, one private individual, has the power to bring practically the entire steel industry to a halt overnight. And other single individuals can bring the automobile industry, or the coal industry, or the aluminum industry, or the railroads, or the airlines to a halt. And then the country is helpless. There seems no way of ending the paralysis except by forcing the employers to give in, to grant the union demands, so that union leaders will permit us to start producing steel or aluminum or coal again. No way is even contemplated of resuming production without their consent.

The government’s impotence, of course, is of its own making. But what, meanwhile, does Congress do? It acts as if the whole situation did not exist. It is now tinkering with a labor bill that deals with none of the primary or central problems, but only with secondary and peripheral problems; and even for most of these it proposes the wrong remedies. Congress acts as if there were only one problem—the corruption of some labor-union bosses, or their excessive power over rank-and-file members. Any injustice or harm to nonunion employees, or to employers, or to the public is treated either as if it did not exist or as if it did not matter—as if nobody but union members had any rights that anyone was bound to respect.

This is the ideology behind present Federal law and its discussion. It forgets, finally, that industrywide unions cannot raise wages by coercive strikes except at the cost of bringing on either unemployment or additional inflation. The steel union did both by its strike in 1956.