Our Laws Create Strikes

July 14, 1952

Settlements have a way of suddenly being made even when they seem least likely; and it is possible that, when these lines appear, the steel strike will be over. But it has not been possible, since the extraordinary decision of the Wage Stabilization Board, to settle the strike without destroying the last pretence of a wage “line” or “ceiling.” The strike can now be settled only by bringing a threat of further inflation. For the terms of settlement, even if they prove no more favorable to the strikers than those offered by the steel companies several weeks ago, will not only greatly raise the cost of producing steel; they will let loose a flood of new wage demands and new strike threats from other unions that will insist on catching up with the steelworkers. And, of course, no consistent reason will be left for refusing these demands.

The steel strike is primarily Mr. Truman’s strike. If he and his board had not interfered, it probably would have been either averted or settled long ago, and on far more reasonable terms than it is possible to settle it now. But the Wage Stabilization Board not only recommended wage increases that destroyed even all its own stretchable standards of “stabilization,” but it assumed authority to recommend a union shop. Then, to make it still more difficult to get a settlement, Mr. Truman’s price controllers announced that they were not prepared to allow the companies to pass on in prices the increased government-awarded wage costs. This was an attempt to use price-and-wage control powers, not to stabilize, but to boost wages and to squeeze profits.

Even if Mr. Truman were belatedly to apply the injunction provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, as Congress has explicitly requested, it is doubtful that this would settle the strike. For he has publicly declared that the Taft-Hartley procedures at this time would be “grossly unfair” and “futile”; he has denounced the companies for “conspiracy against the public interest,” and he has virtually invited the unions to flout the law. Yet though Mr. Truman’s course has encouraged and prolonged the steel strike, Congress cannot escape its share of responsibility. It helped to create this paralyzing nationwide strike by its own legislation over the last twenty years. It still lacks the courage to repeal or amend that legislation. It has granted the unions special immunities from the antimonopoly laws. Through the Norris-La Guardia Act it has made private injunctions against strikes all but impossible. Through the Wagner-Taft-Hartley Act, it has made it perilous or impossible for an employer to discharge strikers and hire other workers in their place. It has made the government, in effect, a union-organizing agency. And it has forced employers to recognize and bargain with industrywide unions.

In the July issue of its monthly Survey, the Guaranty Trust Co. of New York argues ably and temperately that: “The only solution to the problem that is in harmony with the basic American principles of free labor and free enterprise is to limit the size of the bargaining unit. . . . It may not be necessary in all cases to confine the bargaining unit to the single-plant level, or even the single-company level, What is essential is that the bargaining unit be kept small enough to make it possible for a dispute to be fought out . . . without threatening such serious effects as to necessitate or furnish a pretext for governmental intervention in the public interest.”

The Survey seems to imply that industrywide bargaining should be illegalized. This, in my opinion, is a drastic step that should at least be deferred. What Congress should do immediately, however, is to stop forcing employers to recognize and deal with industrywide unions, to stop legally imposing industrywide unions on employers. For the industrywide unions, as Leo Wolman has summarized it, “can today paralyze the economic life of the country or dictate the terms on which they refrain from doing so.” And the industrywide unions are the creatures of present Federal law.