The Needless Crisis in Coal

March 6, 1950

By the time this article appears, the legal and economic outcome of the coal strike may be fully known. But the confused ideas and laws which brought on this crisis will condition the terms on which it is settled, and the precedents set may even decide the very nature of our future economy.

The immediate cause of the crisis was President Truman’s failure to invoke the injunctive provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act until too late. There was not a shred of excuse for this irretrievable loss of time. The Taft-Hartley Act provides: “Whenever in the opinion of the President . . . a threatened or actual strike or lockout affecting an entire industry or a substantial part thereof. . . will, if permitted to occur or to continue, imperil the national health or safety, he may . . . direct the Attorney General to petition any district court” etc. (My italics.) The threatened emergency was obvious to everybody else weeks and even months before Mr. Truman got around to admitting its existence. By the time he did, our national economic life was already in such peril that John L. Lewis could dictate almost any terms he pleased.

But the causes of the coal crisis go much farther back than Mr. Truman’s procrastination. The Taft-Hartley Act, notwithstanding its injunctive provisions and all the nonsensical charges about its being a “slave labor” law, merely continues the basic provisions of the Wagner Act with a few minor amendments. Like the Wagner Act, it turns the government itself into a union-organizing agency. It legally compels employers to negotiate with a Petrillo or a Murray or a Lewis no matter how unreasonable his demands. It sanctions and builds up industrywide unions. It encourages strikes by taking nearly all the risks out of them. It practically deprives the employer of the right to declare that the strikers have quit their jobs and to offer permanent employment to others to take their place.

Our one-sided laws are in turn the result of a confused ideology which believes that unions can do no wrong and that they can be granted sweeping legal immunities without danger of abuse, including immunity from the antimonopoly laws. The unions are granted a sweeping “right to strike” which is interpreted to include not merely the acknowledged right to the individual to quit his job but the spurious right forcibly to prevent anybody else from taking the job that he has deserted.

Under cover of protecting these spurious “rights” of the unioneers everybody else’s rights are abridged. The railroads were deprived of their right to run coalburning trains and the public of its right to travel on such trains—even when there was still officially no emergency at all. The states and cities suspend the right of private ownership and use of coal, the right to supply or get current or the right to turn on electric lights. And all to protect the precious right of John L. Lewis to paralyze the economic life of the country until he can dictate the terms on which he will refrain from doing so.

The government continued to force the operators to negotiate with Mr. Lewis as the spokesman for the miners after those miners defied his public orders to return to work—which meant that, if his orders were given in good faith, he was no longer their spokesman. Because the government made itself impotent even to enforce its own injunction, it was proposed to seize the mines. Instead of punishing the strikers, it was proposed once more to punish the struck-against. Such action is not only unnecessary and irrelevant, but it erodes the concept of private property and brings us nearer to nationalization by default. Meanwhile miners’ union goon squads are permitted to roam the country and to resort to mass picketing, intimidation, or violence to prevent anybody else from mining coal.

Yet no one proposes to reexamine first principles; no one proposes to enforce the common law against violence, vandalism, and intimidation, and no one proposes simply to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, period.