Real Labor Reform

August 24, 1959

None of the legislative proposals now being debated in Congress deal with the central labor problem today. That problem is symbolized by the present steel strike. Regardless of what comes out of the House and Senate, it will clarify our thinking to ask ourselves what real labor-reform legislation would seek to do.

In his broadcast to the nation of Aug. 6, the President made the remarkable statement that “The legislation we need has nothing to do with wages, or strikes.” But wages and strikes—the power of a single man to bring a nationwide industry to a halt unless his inflationary wage demands are granted—are precisely the main problems we need to deal with. The corruption of a few labor leaders is also a problem; but it is not the central one, and it would probably disappear if the main problem were courageously dealt with.

There is no doubt that the reforms the President asks for are needed. The question is whether they go far enough. For example, it is clear that a union official ought not to be allowed to put “a picket line outside the plant, to drive away customers, to cut off deliveries” in order to “force the employees into a union they do not want.” But should a union be allowed to use intimidatory mass picketing to enforce any other demand, even a “legitimate” one? Does the end justify the means? Is not all coercive picketing “blackmail” picketing?

MASS PICKET LINES

Yet all major steel strikes have been enforced by mass picket lines. Because of this the companies have not dared to try to continue production in any of the major steel strikes since the end of World War II. Workers who would have found the terms offered by the companies acceptable have not dared to apply, or to continue work.

The overwhelming majority in Congress not only calmly accepts all this, but a group under the leadership of Senator Symington is pressing a resolution calling on the President to appoint a special fact-finding board to recommend settlement terms. This is, in effect, an attempt to do for David McDonald what he cannot do for himself, even with the one-sided advantage that existing labor law already gives him. These senators must know very well that their “fact-finding” board would not dare to bring in a recommendation for a settlement that would award no more than the companies have already offered. They know that McDonald would not accept such a settlement. What they are proposing, in effect, is compulsory arbitration that would force the companies to yield enough of the steel union’s demands so that McDonald would consent to let the country make steel again.

‘THE RIGHT TO WIN’

Yet, in a way, these senators are only taking the next step to which existing legislation and union ideology logically lead. If employers are to be legally compelled to “bargain with” a specified union, no matter how unreasonable its demands; if this union is legally assigned exclusive bargaining power for all employees in a unit, and not merely its own members; if this union is allowed to set up mass picket lines to prevent an employer from offering the jobs abandoned by the strikers to other workers, and to prevent other workers from applying for them; and if, even with the cards thus stacked against them, the employers do not yield to the strikers’ demands, then the only way to get the industry going again is for the government to interfere still further and order the employers to grant enough to satisfy the strikers.

Thus the right to strike has come to be interpreted as the right to win a strike. A built-in inflationary process is set up by which unions are to win new rounds of wage increases without end, while the monetary authorities are directed to insure full employment, at no matter what wage level, by offsetting excessive money wages with more inflation.

What is needed is not new legislation, which the union leaders can assail as a “legalistic strait jacket,” but primarily the repeal of special union immunities and privileges, above all of the privilege, not granted to any other group, of private coercion. Once that privilege were removed, the problem of labor racketeering would easily sink to manageable dimensions.