Reform Our Labor Law

June 2, 1958

The demand for real reform in our labor laws has reached a point where the Democratic Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson, has promised action at this session in the Senate. But there is little prospect of action by the House and, if legislation does emerge, no prospect whatever that it will be anything but innocuous or positively mischievous.

The dilemma of the present recession is that nothing but politically unpalatable measures will permanently help, while nothing but politically popular measures are being proposed. A score of measures have been taken, and scores more are pending, to increase deficit spending and inflation. These measures may have a temporary effect in increasing national-income figures. But they merely pile up greater difficulties for the longer future. And they divert attention from the need to curb the present power of the giant industrywide unions to impose wage rates which either disrupt production and employment or force continuous inflation to try to make such excessive wage rates payable.

LABOR LAW ‘HOLIDAY’

This big-union power could be curbed, not by any “repressive” or “punitive” or “union-smashing” legislation, but merely by repealing most of the New Deal Federal labor legislation passed since 1932. This legislation has turned the Federal government, in effect, into a union-organizing agency and put the full machinery of government behind the union monopolists.

None other than John L. Lewis has several times proposed that we try a “holiday” of a year or two from present Federal labor legislation. But this proposal is probably too far out of accord with the way in which public opinion has been conditioned in recent years to be regarded as politically feasible. Something close to the same practical result, however, could be achieved by following the recommendations of Prof. Sylvester Petro in a recent pamphlet, Personal Freedom and Labor Policy, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs at New York University.

While a good many union leaders have been shown to be cheap crooks and embezzling scoundrels, he points out, still more laws against stealing will do no good; we already have such laws. They deal with only the most superficial symptoms of the things that have gone wrong in labor relations. We need to return to basic common-law principles.

FREE EMPLOYEE CHOICE

Petro declares that the legal reforms needed “may all be subsumed under a single heading: Unqualified supremacy of the principle of free employee choice.” In detail, this would require:

1—A broad prohibition of restraint and coercion by employers and unions of the right of employees to make up their own minds on the question of union membership or participation in strikes.

2—A specific provision of law to the effect that picketing, even when “peaceable,” is subject to ban when it has or is intended to have coercive effects, either physical or economic.

3—A specific declaration that the ban on restraint or coercion applies to the economic coercion implicit in all “agreements” proposed by unions or employers which make union membership or nonmembership a condition of employment. (“Integrity demands that if unions be allowed to impose compulsory unionism agreements, employers must be allowed similarly to impose nonunion agreements.”)

4—A clear prohibition against secondary boycotts.

5—Emphatic repeal of the exclusive-bargaining, majority-rule principle. This would include a positive statement that unions shall be the exclusive bargaining representatives of only those workers who expressly delegate such authority to them. The present statutory and doctrinal requirement, imposing a legally enforceable duty upon employers to bargain only with majority unions, would then need to be deleted.

Finally, Petro adds, defects in labor-law administration and enforcement are as grave as the defects in the law itself. He would repeal all anti-injunction legislation, abolish all labor-relations boards, and return administration of justice in labor relations to the courts.