PART III THE DEEPER ISSUES 9. ON WINNING STRIKES AND BREAKING UNIONS

THE BOARD’S DECISION is so weak that one suspects an unrevealed motivation. Naturally it is difficult to pin down such a motivation with certainty. But the decision is shot through with remarks which suggest that the Board was influenced by a philosophy of labor relations which has long since worn thin. This theory holds that an employer is guilty of trying to break a union each time that he firmly resists the union’s demands. It rests on the feeling that a union should never lose a strike.

Many people still hold to these views, even though they lack any foundation in fact today and lead to gravely harmful results. But precisely because they are widely shared, and because they are unsound and unwholesome, they must be examined carefully and if possible dissipated. For unless they are, they must inevitably lead to even more disastrous results than they have already caused.

Both its trial examiner and the Board itself repeatedly made reference to the Kohler Company’s attitude toward the union and the strike. They apparently considered it worth repeating several times that company spokesmen talked about “teaching the union a lesson”; that the company’s bargaining team thought in September of 1954 that “further negotiations would be futile”; and that as of September 1954 the company thought it was “winning the strike.”

None of these charges or insinuations had any proper legal significance; even if they were all true they could not be considered unfair practices in themselves or evidence of any other unfair practices. It is perfectly permissible for a company to teach a union a lesson, or to try to do so. For that matter, the UAW leaders in the Kohler strike took on the teaching function far more often and more explicitly than the company people did; the union agents repeatedly expressed the intention to teach the nonstrikers (the “scabs,” as the union called them) and the company “a lesson.” The only difference lay in the pedagogical methods which the respective parties adopted.

Mr. Conger testified without contradiction that the lesson he intended to teach was that the Kohler Company would not be intimidated by the union’s violent and unlawful conduct; that it would not be coerced into concessions which it felt unwise; and that the union would not be rewarded for its bullying tactics. In short, this lesson would be taught by lawful methods for a lawful purpose. The same was not true of the union’s intentions. Bent upon teaching the company and the nonstrikers that it was unwise to resist, the union’s teaching technique was composed of mass obstruction, violence, vandalism, and the nationwide secondary boycott. The union’s boast that it would “break the company” shows that the union lesson was to be taught by unlawful methods for an unlawful purpose.

More needs to be said on this. It is perfectly proper and in the public interest for employers and employees to bargain collectively and to reach agreements on mutually satisfactory terms. There is nothing wrong, either, in an employer’s making additional wage offers or other concessions in the course of peaceful, legitimate negotiations. But it is not in the public interest for an employer to make concessions as a result of violent pressures of the kind which the UAW brought to bear.

The public interest is harmed when an employer gives in under such pressure, in the same way that it is harmed whenever persons give in to bullies. Wage concessions forced by violent action are the same as the “protection money” exacted by racketeers. Decent social standards are destroyed in the process. The jungle begins to take over. With labor costs higher than they need to be, prices go up. Consumers have to pay more. When they refuse to do so, men are thrown out of work. This is the reason there is so much unemployment in such heavily unionized industries as coal-mining, steel, and autos.

The total social cost of violently imposed wage increases is thus an extreme one. It is not just a matter of economics or of material welfare. Far more precious considerations are involved. The good society is one in which personal freedom is at a maximum, where people can follow their own choices without fear of brutal dictation. The employer who stands fast against thugs deserves praise and support—not the kind of perversion of law and justice of which the NLRB was guilty in the Kohler decision.

Then there is the suggestion that the Kohler Company was somehow guilty of something evil in believing that it had won the strike. As a general rule, the public is the true and ultimate victor when a company wins a strike. Winning a strike means that production is resumed on the basis of the company’s offer rather than the union’s demands. Whether the strikers themselves come back to work or their jobs are filled by replacements does not matter here. What matters is that costs are lower and production more efficient under terms offered by employers than under those demanded by unions. Unions are out to get more and more for less and less—more and more money for less and less work. The public has to pay that bill, nobody else. For a government agency to take the position that it is wrong for a company to win a strike is tantamount to scorning and rejecting the public interest, to serve the special interests of a pressure group instead.

This perversion has had extremely serious consequences, going far beyond the Kohler case. Not the least of these is the arrogant impudence of so many union officials today, who act more like spoiled children than men in whom workers and the country have reposed serious responsibilities. The favoritism shown at all levels of government has inculcated in union leaders the idea that they can get away with anything. They act accordingly.

No one suggests that a union should never call a strike. Everyone agrees that workers have a right to leave their jobs when they are dissatisfied with their pay or with other conditions. But too often strikes today represent the decision, not of the workers, but of the union leaders, and thus become a personal issue. For example, Mr. James Carey, president of the Electrical Workers Union, has been quoted recently as having said that “I owe G. E. a strike.” Well over 70,000 men and their families were hurt by the abortive 1960 strike against the General Electric Company—a grave result to be traced to personal pique. Union leaders would not act that way had such government agencies as the NLRB not led them to believe that they belong to a specially privileged class.

Union leaders who make a personal issue of strikes get themselves and others into a great deal of trouble. The average businessman knows his own business well, and he has a good idea of his employees’ thinking. He will not let a dispute reach the strike stage if he can help it. But if he feels that the men and the market will not support the union’s demands, he may take a strike. Once he takes a strike, he is likely to hold out stubbornly.

Then, after having foolishly brought trouble upon himself, the union leader of the spoiled-brat type gets frantic. He runs for help. He will beseech local politicians, the clergy, the governor of the state, perhaps the President of the United States to take his part against the “vicious,” “reactionary,” “backward” employer. The UAW did all this during the Kohler dispute. Mr. Carey did it before and during the 1960 strike against General Electric.

If the outsiders refuse to side with him, the union leader acts more than ever the spoiled child. He directs the vituperation formerly concentrated upon the employer toward the unwilling outsiders. Mr. Mazey hurled insults at the Wisconsin clergy who failed to agree with him that the Kohler Company was a mediaeval sweatshop. He said that a judge who sentenced one of the UAW bullies should have been dismissed from the bench.

The next step is violence. The union leader has called a strike when he should not have done so. His own members show a disposition to return to work. Others show an interest in taking the jobs which the strikers have left. Having anticipated these results, the employer’s resistance to the union’s excessive demands stiffens. Political and other prominent figures have declined to bail out the leader. Somehow the plant has to be kept from operating. There is only one way left—bar access to the plant, boycott the company, with vicious telephone calls in the night frighten those who wish to return to work, hurl paint bombs through living-room windows, spray acid on cars.

All these things happened during the Kohler strike, and they have happened in hundreds of other recent strikes. A gory pattern has developed. But important as it is to understand the pattern, it is even more important to understand its causes. Those causes may accurately be summed up in two words: governmental favoritism. On the one hand, the laws of the land vest in unions special privileges available to no other person or group in society. On the other hand, government personnel at all levels have winked at union violence and other forms of unlawful conduct. No agency has been more culpable in this process than the NLRB. No case has so clearly illustrated the process from beginning to end as the Kohler dispute.

Each time an employer takes a firm stand in negotiations with a union he is accused of being reactionary and anti-union. If he attempts to exercise his fundamental right as a free man to continue operations during a strike, he is charged with “union-busting.” The NLRB apparently credits such accusations.

But it is wrong in every way to equate firm resistance with “union-busting.” When you go to a store and insist that the price be lowered for you, you do not accuse the storekeeper of attempting to destroy you if he refuses. You do not even think of yourself as having been destroyed if the next person who comes along offers to pay the price which you have found too high. In the same way, it is improper for a union to accuse an employer of a destructive motive when he firmly refuses to raise his offer.

In the nature of things, it is open to a union to ask for any amount it wishes; requests cost nothing. But there are narrow limitations to what an employer can pay. A mere five-cents-per-hour wage increase, for example, cost the Kohler Company hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. That may not seem significant to an outsider, but it is, of course, a substantial amount for the person who has to pay it. Tactically and propaganda-wise, the employer is at a disadvantage; he seems always to be resisting. But the intelligent person will realize that the unions’ talk is cheap, and should be discounted as such.

It would be more accurate to say that the UAW was out to break the Kohler Company. The union, not the company, was the aggressor. The company did not make demands of the union; it offered concessions. The Kohler Company did not assault union men; it tried to defend itself against assaults. The nationwide secondary boycott was the union’s device, not the company’s.

When all is said and done, no business can break a union by resistance to its demands even if it should wish to do so, without doing greater harm to itself in the process. Unions have all the natural advantages in an industrial dispute. When they are broken, they break themselves.

The decision to strike, in the first place, is for the union to make. A calculated risk is involved. If large numbers of the workers seem content with the employer’s offer, or if there are other people in the vicinity willing to work at the wages offered by the company, the union is simply arrogant and unintelligent in calling a strike. The employer cannot be blamed. He is doing what anyone would do, and what the public interest requires, when he refuses to concede an increase which he considers excessive. He knows that if he asks the public to pay more than it is willing to pay for what he has to sell, he cannot complain if people stop buying. He does not think that the public is trying to break him. Instead, when goods do not move at the price he is asking, he lowers the price. Assaulting the public, or barring access to his competitors’ goods, does not occur to him.

The same moves are available to a union, and continue to be available even after a strike has proved to be a mistake. If it appears that the employer is going to be able to carry on business despite the strike, the union leader’s duty as a responsible member of the community is to terminate the work stoppage. When he is intransigent, he himself breaks the union, or seriously weakens it.

We should be perfectly clear on this point. Union leadership forfeits its right to represent workers when it is stupid or arrogant or both. And it is both stupid and arrogant in prolonging a strike that should never have been called in the first place. The people who are hurt worst in these cases are the workingmen, particularly those who uncritically repose their faith in the union leaders. They are the ones who lose their jobs, whose families suffer deprivation, whose whole future may be seriously impaired. Union leaders ought not to be rewarded when they have betrayed such a trust.

On the contrary, mechanisms which penalize arrogance and stupidity on the part of persons in positions of authority have a moral and material value to society which cannot be exaggerated. A society which rewards arrogant blunderers invites a great deal of trouble for its members. One which removes stupid and arrogant persons from positions of authority is serving its members in the best possible way. Viewed in this light, the employer who resists excessive union demands is a public servant of the highest order. Firmness and courage have always ranked high in the category of social virtues. They are especially valuable in industrial disputes, when union leaders have all the propaganda advantages; when talk, which is cheap, goes very far; and when resistance, which must be silent, counts for something only among the most sensitive and intelligent members of society.

These considerations expose the deeper significance of the Kohler stand in its dispute with the UAW. They also illuminate the profundity of the philosophic errors which animated the NLRB’s decision. The Board did precisely that which a social agency should not do. In the grip of antisocial misconceptions, the Board rewarded social vice and penalized social virtue.

10. TOWARD THE RULE OF LAW

FROM ITS FIRST entry into the Kohler dispute to its final decision in August of 1960, the NLRB conducted itself more in the manner of a kangaroo court than of a fair-minded legal tribunal. It would be a serious mistake, however, to conclude that this has been a special case. On the contrary, although the Kohler case is in some respects unique, the NLRB has conducted itself in a similar fashion throughout its history. It has inherent faults, the roots go deep into the law which created it, and a change in personnel would not affect those roots in the slightest degree. Correcting the situation requires basic change. A genuine rule of law in labor relations can come only when three measures are taken: first, revision of those features of the basic labor relations law which can never be administered in a fair judicial manner; second, abolition of the NLRB; and third, restoration of full power to the true constitutional courts of the country.

1. Kangaroo Court?

Webster’s New International Dictionary defines a kangaroo court as a “tribunal in which, although conducted under some authorization, the principles of law and justice are disregarded or perverted.” The NLRB is an administrative tribunal conducted under the authorization of the National Labor Relations Act. Anyone who has read this short book up to the present can bear witness to the fact that the Board has “disregarded or perverted” a number of “principles of law and justice.” Reference to it as a “kangaroo court” is therefore proper, even on the basis of the ground already covered.

But there is more. The Board and its trial examiner did not play fast and loose with the facts and the law only in the ways already described. In a number of ways they denied the Kohler Company its basic right to due process of law. While there is no need to burden this account with the details of all the denials of due process, two instances should be recounted.

The UAW charged the company with having given its employees the celebrated three-cent increase on April 5, 1954. The complaint issued by the NLRB accepted this date and accused the company of having committed an unfair practice by giving the increase on April 5, 1954. In its answer to the complaint, the company admitted giving an increase on April 5, 1954. Throughout the hearing, reference was constantly made to “the three-cent increase of April 5.”

In a true court of law, all facts alleged in the complaint and admitted in the answer are regarded as established, with no need of further evidence, and the April 5 date should therefore have been regarded as established by the pleadings. In spite of this principle, the trial examiner ruled that the increase was made on June 1 or thereafter, admitting it was a matter of “drawing a date out of a hat.”

The Kohler Company could have established that the increase was made on April 5, 1954. It had documentary proof in the supervisory bulletin which has already been quoted here. Moreover, there were at least two hundred people in the plant on April 5, 1954, who had received the increase as of that date; and they could have testified to that effect. After the trial examiner pulled the June 1 date “out of a hat,” the company offered the evidence which would establish the April 5 date. But the trial examiner denied the right to submit such proof. The NLRB upheld this denial. Furthermore, after upholding this denial, the NLRB went on to uphold the trial examiner’s ruling that the increase was granted on June 1, 1954!

This rank denial of due process was not erased by the Board’s insistence that it would have found the increase an unfair practice even if the date were April 5, rather than June 1. For by the Board’s own ruling, the Kohler Company was relieved of the duty to meet and treat with the union between April 5 and May 28, when the mass picketing was going on. That being the case, it could be argued with great strength that the increase ought not to be considered an unfair practice, coming as it did at a time when the union was engaging in admittedly unlawful conduct and the Kohler duty to bargain was suspended.

The trial examiner was guilty of another even more egregious denial of due process. Since an employer is not obliged to negotiate while the union is engaging in violent misconduct, the trial examiner should have admitted into evidence all testimony offered by the Kohler Company concerning violent and unlawful conduct. Instead, the trial examiner denied admission into the record of a vast amount of such evidence, evidence showing violence throughout the summer and fall of 1954 and even continuing beyond that. This evidence was denied admission because the trial examiner considered it “merely cumulative.”

But now note the upshot of this denial. Both the trial examiner and the NLRB held that Kohler was excused from meeting with the union between April 5 and June 1, 1954; between June 29 and August 5, 1954; and between August 18 and September 1, 1954. Proved union violence excused the company’s refusal to negotiate in those periods, they held. Yet after denying admission of evidence which proved that the union violence continued throughout the summer, the trial examiner held that the Kohler Company unlawfully refused to bargain between June 1 and 28, between August 5 and 18, and after September 1!

This denial of due process, extreme as it is, pales somewhat in significance before the remarkable fact which emerges from the rigging process which we have been observing: the Kohler Company was held guilty of unlawfully refusing to bargain only during the periods in which it engaged in sustained negotiations. During all periods in which it absolutely refused to meet with the union the company was held to have committed no violation of the duty to bargain.

In the collection of strange and remarkable features of the NLRB’s decision which we have already witnessed, this one must certainly occupy a prominent position. The guilty must be rewarded and the innocent punished; and the innocent must be punished most severely when they are most innocent. As Webster says, a kangaroo court is a tribunal in which “the principles of law and justice are perverted.”

2. Politics and Prejudice

Chapter Nine of this book deals with prejudice, exploring two biased and erroneous views which may have accounted for the NLRB’s indefensible rulings. At this point we may as well face squarely the additional possibility that the decision was politically motivated. That suggestion is not being made here for the first time. It has become common gossip among specialists in labor relations. President George Meany of the AFL-CIO was only expressing a generally held opinion when he said of the NLRB’s Kohler ruling that “the timing of that decision bears all the marks of political expediency.” This was said, incidentally, in the course of a speech which Mr. Meany made before the September 1960, convention of the International Association of Machinists.

There is no way of proving absolutely that a decision has been politically motivated; naturally, the NLRB members would firmly deny that this or any other decision was so influenced. However, the inference seems fair in this case, as similar inferences have seemed fair in respect of large numbers of other decisions handed down by the NLRB over the years. The NLRB took an inordinately long time to hand down this decision. Why should it choose to hand down an anti-employer decision in so celebrated a case during a presidential election campaign? The extraordinary vulnerability of the decision on both facts and law confirms the inference that the decision was politically motivated. Putting the case as mildly as possible, it would have been easier on the facts to decide in favor of the Kohler Company than against it.

But whether or not the decision was in fact politically influenced is far from being the most important point here. The fundamentally important point is that administrative tribunals are particularly susceptible to political considerations, in a way in which duly constituted courts are not. Members of administrative tribunals are short term political appointees; they are an essential part of the political equipment of the administration which gives them their office.

Federal judges, on the other hand, have life appointments in office. Although political considerations figure in the selection, their tenure for life has been deliberately designed to release them from future political pressures. By and large the system works. With few exceptions, the federal courts are real courts of law; their judges are above politics, in the best sense of that expression. Even the relatively few biased judges are such, not because of the pressure of their position, but because of moral and intellectual shortcomings about which very little can be done.

NLRB members are in no such sheltered position. If they displease the administration in power, they can have little hope of reappointment. Therefore even those with the necessary moral and intellectual equipment can never be in a position to act as real judges. For a real judge must be ready to offend the current political powers whenever consideration of law, fact, or equity call for such offense. For a true judge, there is no dictum more compelling than the old saying, “let justice be done even if the heavens fall!”

3. Fundamental Defects of Administrative Law

The binding political orientation is only one of the fundamental defects of the NLRB. There are other equally basic reasons why the NLRB can never be a truly judicial body. These lie imbedded in the law which created the Board (the National Labor Relations Act), and in the limitations put upon administrative agencies by the Constitution of the United States.

Neither the NLRB nor, for that matter, a true court can make the NLRA’s collective bargaining rules work. Those rules are inherently defective. On the one hand, the law compels an employer to bargain in good faith; on the other hand, it declares that an employer need make no concession or reach any agreement. But attempting to force good-faith bargaining without compelling agreement or concession has proved to be a hopeless job. It has led the NLRB further and further into the bargaining process, till now the NLRB can be seen dictating the terms of agreement. That is in substance what happened when the NLRB held the Kohler Company guilty of an unfair practice because it declined to make the offer that Judge Murphy suggested.

The same thing has happened in many other cases. For example, the NLRB has recently held that an employer may not condition his agreement on the union’s agreeing to have a vote among the employees before any strike is called. Such decisions involve economic, not juridical, judgments. They put the NLRB at the bargaining table, not on the bench.

The NLRA’s majority rule principle similarly obviates any possibility of the NLRB’s operating in a genuinely judicial manner. This principle means that a union selected by a majority of the employees voting in an appropriate bargaining unit is the exclusive representative of all employees in that unit including the employees who do not vote at all, as well as those who vote against the union.

Even the problems of defining appropriate bargaining units and of deciding which employees are eligible to vote cannot be made to yield to the kinds of rules which lead to solid judgments. The structure of industry is too complex and employment is too fluid. Hence arbitrariness is a salient feature of unit and eligibility decisions.

But if such problems could be made to yield to judicial process, a hopeless problem would still remain, the elections themselves. Conducting an election is an administrative act, purely and simply. A court of law cannot remain one while conducting elections.

Administrative law was sold to the people of the United States on the basis of false claims. We were told that the true courts were old-fashioned and outmoded. They were too slow, too technical, too reactionary. They did not fit in the modern world. But administrative agencies, we were told, would remedy all these deficiencies. They would be manned by experts in particular fields. They would be more flexible. They would not be bound by the restrictive rules of evidence and procedure. They would, in short, give us what everyone wants from the legal system: speedy justice.

Not a single one of these claims has been borne out by experience. Bitter experience has taught us that the personnel of administrative agencies are more often than not rigid, doctrinaire bureaucrats who place ideological and political objectives above law and justice. Their decisions follow hidebound patterns of thought which will not admit of change when the facts and the law insist upon change.

They have exhibited no expertise even in the field of their specialization; for example, the NLRB has never really understood what collective bargaining is all about. When it comes to expertise in understanding or administering law, their performance is simply pitiable.

Releasing administrative agencies from the rules of evidence and procedure has proved a sad error. Those rules are the product of centuries of effort devoted to the tasks of clarifying issues and establishing truth. Abandoning the rules has given administrative agencies the opportunity to muddy issues and to play fast and loose with the truth. They have seized this opportunity and exploited it to the full.

The most abysmal failure has come where most was promised. Instead of the speed we were promised, we have experienced delays in law enforcement exceeding anything in previous experience. Here the Kohler case provides an excellent example. NLRB proceedings were instituted in October of 1954. Not until late August of 1960 did the Board hand down its decision. This six year lapse is bad enough by itself. But when one considers that the NLRB decision does not by any means dispose of the case, the travesty on “speedy justice” heightens.

As has been noted, the NLRB decision puts the Kohler Company at a serious disadvantage. Despite its questionable character, the Kohler Company is virtually forced to obey the NLRB’s order. The decision is weak and may very well be reversed. But a risk of several million dollars is involved. So the Kohler Company must restore strikers to their jobs even at the cost of discharging replacements hired during the strike.

Two years or so from now, a federal court may very well reverse the NLRB’s decision. If it does, a great many lives will have been needlessly confused. Many serious and intricate personal difficulties will have been irresponsibly created. Men will have been forced to change jobs, to move their families, to find new living quarters, to undergo the pain and heartache of transplanting children—all because doctrinaire ideologues foolishly felt that “administrative law” was a better juridical system than the one set up by the Constitution of the United States.

With this observation we have reached the basic flaw in the system of “administrative law.” All the defects trace finally to one fact: administrative agencies conflict with the Constitution.

Our charter of government insists that the true judicial power of the United States can be vested only in true courts, manned by judges who have life tenure in office. This federal judiciary, under the Constitution, has mandatory jurisdiction over all cases involving federal law. For this reason, the Congress has never given administrative agencies full judicial power. The violation of the Constitution would have been too open, too flagrant.

This is not to say that administrative agencies as we know them are consistent with the Constitution. Far from it. Congress has given them some of the legal and fact-finding powers which the Constitution reserves exclusively to the federal courts. But this grant is somewhat hidden, and it is complex and devious; it is not the obvious violation of the Constitution which a grant of full judicial power would be. It is, in short, disingenuously enough hidden to forestall constitutional attack, or at least to make such an attack difficult and complicated.

But this very deviousness is what accounts for the delays. First, the legal and fact-finding powers are distributed between the NLRB and the true courts in a way that has been raising trouble consistently for a full generation, with no one knowing even today precisely which powers belong to the Board and which to the courts. This confusion will continue as long as administrative agencies exist. There is no way in which the power to find facts can be fractionalized and parceled out. Either you have the power or you don’t have it.

Second, the coercive power which must stand behind every truly judicial order has been formally denied to the NLRB. To have given it this power would have been once again to reveal the truth: the violation of the Constitution would have been open and flagrant. Hence, formally speaking, an NLRB order has no binding force till it has been upheld by the decree of a true constitutional court. As we have seen, the Kohler Company is virtually compelled to obey the NLRB’s order despite the possibility that a court will refuse to enforce it; and in this way the Board’s orders have an unconstitutionally coercive quality. But the fact remains that as a formal matter, enforcement powers are reserved for the courts. And so every NLRB decision of any importance is taken to the courts for either enforcement or denial of enforcement.

Speedy justice is unattainable under such a stupid and complicated arrangement. The Constitution envisioned state and federal courts all over the country, all with full power over facts and law, and all with the true judicial power to issue binding orders. There is a limit to the speed which is attainable consistently with justice. But within that limit, the structure envisioned by the Constitution is the best one which can be devised.

In its place we have one administrative agency, located with deviously limited powers in Washington, D. C., acting mainly as a roadblock to speed and a hazard to justice. Its fact finding is colored by its ideological prejudices. Its legal analysis is weak because of its doctrinaire attitudes and lack of legal expertise. It has no power to issue the swift and binding orders which alone can serve the ends of justice in many cases. Promising “speedy justice,” it delivers neither speed nor justice. It is a bottleneck. It gives us delay, muddied issues, distorted findings of fact, and perverted conclusions of law. Webster’s definition of “kangaroo court” was obviously not written with the NLRB in mind, but it might have been.

4. A Return to Law

There is no mystery about what needs to be done if we wish to return to the law and to achieve an effective administration of justice. We need as a nation to insist that the forces of law and order prevail against violence. The more flagrant and illiberal features of the National Labor Relations Act must be repealed. The National Labor Relations Board must be abolished. Finally, full jurisdiction and power must be restored to the state and federal courts.

The prevalence of violence in labor disputes can not be tolerated in any country which pretends to be civilized. Whatever superficial indications of civilization may suggest, a country is a jungle to the extent that persons can not go about their legitimate business free of the fear that they will be assaulted or blocked by thugs and bullies. We have the means. The governments of this country have burdened the productive citizenry with confiscatory taxation. There are plenty of police. If hundreds are used to keep order when it is a question of protecting Communist bullies visiting the United Nations in New York City, it is not asking too much to have adequate police protection against union bullies.

The special privileges of compulsion granted unions by the NLRA must be repealed, and personal freedom must be restored to workingmen. The present right of workers to join or not to join unions free of coercion by employers or unions should be strengthened. This can be done best by repealing the majority-rule principle, leaving unions to represent only those employees who want such representation, not those who vote against it. The duty to bargain must be repealed, for it cannot be enforced without reaching a result which nobody wants: namely, agreements compelled by government.

With the repeal of the majority rule principle and the duty to bargain, there will no longer be a need of conducting representation elections. When that point is reached no need for an administrative agency in labor relations will exist at all, and the NLRB may be abolished with no loss to anyone concerned. In fact, there will be a gain all round. Collective bargaining will proceed more wholesomely and more naturally without the bumbling interventions of the NLRB. The gain in progress toward the rule of law and the effective administration of justice will be substantial.

With the abolition of the NLRB, full jurisdiction in labor disputes will revert to the state and federal courts scattered around the country. These genuine courts have no ideological axe to grind. They feel that their function is to find the facts truly and well, and to develop the law on the basis of standards evolved over the centuries. To the degree that speedy justice is attainable, they will give it to us. They have the fundamental power to do so. The absurd roadblock of a single administrative agency located in Washington, D. C., will have been cleared. If we want a rule of law in the United States, this is the only way to get it.

The era of childish rebellion against our fundamental institutions has produced only strife, chaos, and tragedy. Let us then look again to the Constitution and its noble intent to establish justice and to insure domestic tranquility.