Backward Step

April 4, 1960

Because the Landrum-Griffin bill, in the form in which it passed the House, contained some unexpected curbs on labor-union power, many conservatives hailed its final passage as a great victory. But Sylvester Petro, professor of law at New York University, in the most realistic analysis that I have yet seen, contends in the National Review of March 26 that the new law “fails to remove existing shortcomings in labor relations or to alleviate even the more glaring defects in labor legislation.”

Few persons seem to realize how important the changes were—“all for the worse”—in the bill that emerged from the conference committee of the House and Senate. Those changes were apparently made at the suggestion and insistence primarily of Senator Kennedy and his legal advisers, principally Prof. Archibald Cox of the Harvard Law School. Professor Petro thinks it appropriate to call what emerged “The Kennedy- Landrum-Griffin Law,” a name which he shortens to K-L-G.

BAD LEGISLATION

It is, of course, impossible here to discuss all the details of K-L-G, but Petro finds it, on the whole, bad legislation, both in terms of what it does and what it does not do.

It is legal in most states for unions to force employers to agree to closed shop and union-shop contracts; K-L-G secures the right of unions to exercise these restraints. By a perversion of the majority-rule principle, unions have the privilege of putting themselves forward as exclusive bargaining representatives even for unwilling employees. The minority are denied the right to make their own employment contracts. The exclusive bargaining principle is a special privilege which unions alone enjoy. K-L-G accepts this principle.

In the recent Albert Lea strike of Minnesota, Governor Freeman closed a plant until the courts intervened because a union was resorting to violence against workers who were crossing its pickets in order to go to work. “This kind of privileged crime,” writes Petro, “can only be coped with when we take the honest and courageous step of prohibiting all mass picketing, by applying existing laws against coercive picketing.” K-L-G says nothing about this.

K-L-G does nothing, either, to curb the so-called pre-emption doctrine, contributed by the Supreme Court, which practically holds that, because Congress has “pre-empted” the field, the states no longer have the power to regulate labor relations within their own boundaries. And K-L-G is an ineffectual counter to anti-injunction laws “which make it almost impossible for persons seriously injured by unlawful union conduct to secure the immediate injunctive relief which is in many cases the only relief that is of any use at all.”

PICKETS AND BOYCOTTS

K-L-G devotes a great deal of complicated language to picketing and boycotts. Yet instead of prohibiting “stranger-picketing,” which is generally conceded to be coercive, it explicitly authorizes it under certain conditions for 29 days. K-L-G reverses “one of the healthiest and most significant principles of the Taft-Hartley Act.” This was the declaration that permanently replaced strikers were not eligible to vote in future representation elections in the units in which they were no longer employed. Under K-L-G, replaced strikers can vote for a year after the strike has been called. K-L-G, finally, by dealing in detail with the internal affairs of unions, establishes the dangerous principle of Federal supervision of private associations.

What should have been done instead of passage of the Kennedy-Landrum-Griffin Law is clear. On the one hand, there should have been removal of the special privileges given to trade unions by present law. On the other hand, there should have been enforcement of the basic laws of the land against union violence and coercion.

But because of the new law, the politicians can pretend that at least something has been done toward solving the labor problem, and can ignore that embarrassing issue completely in an election year while busily discussing “civil rights,” subsidies for Federal school construction, and medical aid for elderly voters.