Unions and the Law

May 13, 1957

As a result of the revelations concerning Dave Beck and his Teamsters union, the Eisenhower Administration is asking for still further Federal statutory intervention in the field of labor relations—the public disclosure of union receipts and expenditures, especially regarding pension and welfare plans. But Prof. Sylvester Petro of the New York University School of Law, I am confident, would suggest first of all a simpler solution, which is to cease making labor unions and their agents immune from the laws against violence, coercion, extortion and fraud which apply against everyone else.

“No other private association,” writes Petro in his new book The Labor Policy of the Free Society (Ronald Press. $5), “has displayed so much corruption and arrogance as some trade unions have. No other private association has so habitually terrorized and exploited both members and nonmembers, or so institutionalized the practice of compelling persons to become members. The combination . . . is no mere coincidence. . . . Internal corruption in some trade unions and the external dangers to society posed by many trade unions can all be traced directly to compulsory, coercive practices.”

FREE EMPLOYEE CHOICE

Petro has written what seems to me by far the best analysis of the law of labor relations that has yet appeared. This is because he has tried to think out the basic political and legal philosophy most consonant with a sound free society; because he has given great study and thought to the economic consequences of alternative labor laws and policies; because he is a student of the common law as well as statutory labor law; because he is thoroughly informed on current court and NLRB decisions; and most of all because he has an excellent legal mind.

Petro begins by examining the basic institutions of a free society—personal freedom, freedom of contract, and private property. He dismisses the specious contrast between property and human rights: “Property rights are human rights, and nothing else.”

The right of association is also basic. Trade unions must be protected in the free exercise of that right. But neither employers nor trade unions can be permitted to engage in violent, coercive, or fraudulent conduct. Action otherwise illegal is not made legal by concert. Unions have a full right to strike, peaceably, for higher wages or better working conditions. But they have no right to use violence, intimidation or coercion to prevent other workers from taking the jobs they have voluntarily vacated. Petro would illegalize, for example, all mass picketing as a form of intimidation and a clear violation of the central principle of “free employee choice.”

WHY WAGES RISE

There are several important problems in labor law that Petro does not seem to me to have fully solved or clarified. This is not surprising when one considers the inherent difficulties of the subject as well as the intemperate and confused thinking that customarily beclouds it. But his book is full of courageous and magnificent common sense, and throws a brilliant light on a hundred points. His attacks on certain features of the Taft-Hartley Act, on the Norris-LaGuardia Act, on President Truman’s seizure of the steel plants in the 1952 strike, on the Supreme Court’s argument that picketing is just a form of “free speech,” and on the same Court’s recent doctrine of pre-emption, are beautiful specimens of relentless legal reasoning. He calls in forthright terms for the abolition of the National Labor Relations Board, and the complete repeal of the Norris-LaGuardia Act. His book deserves to be widely quoted and studied for a long time to come.

As a fitting companion to the Petro book, I suggest Why Wages Rise by F.A. Harper (Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington, N.Y., $1.50). Harper supplies the economic basis on which many of Petro’s propositions rest. He proves by reasoning and statistics that wages rise because productivity rises; that productivity rises mainly through increased investment in equipment made possible by profits; and that labor unions do not and cannot, by themselves, raise the general level of real wages for the whole body of the workers.