Labor Law and Gangsterism

December 13, 1954

On Nov. 25 the International Longshoremen’s Association negotiated a two-year contract with the New York Shipping Association. It gave the union a 17-cent hourly wage-welfare package increase—and a union shop. The implications of this settlement are worth some study.

The old ILA was found by the New York State Crime Commission to be dominated by gangsters. The American Federation of Labor expelled it and then tried to set up a new union in its place. The National Labor Relations Board, in accordance with the Taft-Hartley Act, held an election last May. The ILA polled 9,407 votes; the AFL, 9,144 votes. Though the outcome obviously indicated heavy dissatisfaction with the record of the old ILA, it had nevertheless retained a narrow majority. And therefore, once more under the provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, the ILA became officially the exclusive bargaining agent for the longshoremen. The AFL union then had no status whatever.

And now that the ILA has secured a union-shop provision, all those dissenters who voted for the AFL must once more join the ILA in order to hold their jobs. As A.H. Raskin, labor reporter for The New York Times, puts it, though the record of the ILA has been one “characterized by shakedowns, sellouts, and betrayal of the union rank and file,” the AFL must now do everything it can “to persuade its members to go back into the ILA as an alternative to economic suicide.” And the union-shop status won by the ILA in the new agreement “will make it possible for corrupt forces to do far greater damage to the welfare of the port [of New York] than was possible in the past.”

Yet nobody in the Federal government has so far shown any recognition of the appalling legal implications of the whole New York waterfront episode. The present outcome was forced on the dissatisfied union members, as well as on the employers, by the Taft-Hartley Act.

We must never lose sight of the fact that the Taft-Hartley Act is merely an amendment to the Wagner Act and retains the latter’s central and most dubious provisions. It provides that any union able to secure a majority of votes from the workers in an “appropriate unit” (designated as such by the National Labor Relations Board) must be recognized and dealt with by an employer as the exclusive bargaining agent of all the workers in that unit. This provision does two strange things that the law does not dream of doing in any other field. It gives a private group a quasi-official status. It becomes illegal not to bargain with it. It becomes illegal to attempt to bargain with any other group. In brief, no matter how unreasonable or how intransigent the demands of this union, the employer is legally compelled to deal with it and nobody else. And by giving a mere majority exclusive bargaining powers it makes it almost impossible for any competing union to establish itself.

Again, though the Taft-Hartley Act begins by declaring it to be an “unfair labor practice” for an employer “by discrimination in regard to hire or tenure of employment, or any term or condition of employment, to encourage or discourage membership in any labor organization,” it ends, in complete contradiction to this, by authorizing the union shop, under which the employer is compelled to dismiss a man who does not belong to the union. The Taft-Hartley provisions in combination force racketeering unions on employers and make the individual worker powerless. He must join the union or commit “economic suicide.”

Finally, the Taft-Hartley Act and Supreme Court decisions have created a dangerous divorce and gap between a Federal decision-making power and a local policing power, and left a no man’s land in which union gangsterism can flourish. The New York police could have cleaned the gangster from the waterfront but never did. One of their excuses has been that jurisdiction over the ILA is in the hands of a Federal agency. Yet this Federal agency is legally blind to local gangsterism, and is not equipped to halt it even if it could take cognizance of it.