Wages by Edict?

December 28, 1959

On Dec. 11, the governor of Minnesota threw a brilliant light on the one-sidedness of labor law and law enforcement in this country.

The old labor contract between Wilson & Co. and the United Packinghouse Workers of America expired on Aug. 31. Work continued on a day-to-day basis. On Oct. 29, the company broke off negotiations until “binding assurances be given us that the lawless acts started last May and continuing through the sitdown strikes of the week of Oct. 26 will not be repeated.” On Nov. 3, the union’s workers struck. After a few weeks the company warned them to return to their jobs or be replaced. On Nov. 30, the company tried to continue operating with nonunion labor. Hundreds of pickets surrounded the plant and resorted to violence, overturning and stoning cars of nonunion workers.

Then Governor Freeman called out the National Guard, who used fixed bayonets to restore order. But not order that permitted the company peaceably to operate its plant or the nonunion workers peaceably to process meat. The National Guard shut down the plant. Production workers hired to replace strikers were turned back at the gate. All court orders pertaining to the dispute, including one to limit pickets, were suspended.

SOLDIERS AS PICKETS

Under the guise of maintaining peace and order, in other words, Governor Freeman called out the military not to permit peaceable production but to stop it; not to maintain the right to work but to deny it. He subverted the rule of law and turned the National Guard into an instrument for enforcing the aims and policies of the union.

The governor’s highhanded action merely carried one step farther the legal premises on which our national labor legislation and our local enforcement (or non-enforcement) have rested for the last quarter-century. Unions today are tacitly granted the right not only to strike, but to prevent others from taking the jobs they have vacated. Thanks to mass picketing, with its latent threat of violence, no struck steel plant has attempted to continue production with nonstrikers.

And our statesmen have remained willfully blind to this situation.

But now even “liberal” politicians have suddenly come to see that the labor legislation they did so much to fasten on the country leads to industrial paralysis. In panic, they seek to cure this paralysis by still more government intervention. Governor Rockefeller has come out in favor of compulsory arbitration of labor disputes, and Adlai Stevenson in favor of compulsory arbitration and even seizure of plants.

‘THE END OF AN ERA’

True, Rockefeller opposes “any legislation setting up compulsory arbitration as an automatic and generally accepted remedy for industrial disputes, for it negates the concept of collective bargaining . . . and our economy would tend to be regulated by fiat. But the present situation points up the need for an exception.” What this overlooks is that once a union were led to think it could get more by forcing compulsory arbitration through a sufficiently prolonged nationwide strike, the “exceptions” would become the rule.

McDonald is angling for government arbitration today precisely to get himself off the hook. He knows that no politically appointed board would dare to award him less than the company offer he has rejected. He also knows the history of the Railway Labor Act—how the rail unions have not hesitated to reject the awards of Presidential “fact-finding” boards that they did not wholly like (e.g., 1941), and forced boards to bring in new awards more acceptable to them. Rockefeller and Stevenson talk like men ignorant of this history.

Stevenson now declares that “we cannot tolerate shutdowns which threaten our national safety.” He thinks “the steel strike has dramatized the fact that we are at the end of an era.” But the era which has ended, let us hope, is that in which government has not only tolerated but built up the irresponsible private power of nationwide unions to use mass picketing and the threat of violence to prevent employers who refuse to meet their terms from continuing production peaceably with other workers.