Lopsided Labor Law

January 21, 1963

Congress is being urged to do many things that are not urgent and some things that ought not to be done at all. But aside from a few forlorn proposals by individual congressmen, it has no plans for dealing with the most urgent domestic problem now facing the country—that of paralyzing strikes.

This problem is being treated for the most part either as if there were no real solution to it, or as if that solution were merely to move into still further government control—“fact-finding,” compulsory arbitration, or outright wage- and price-fixing. Most politicians and publicists simply refuse to re-examine the Federal laws passed in the ’30s and ’40s (particularly the Norris- LaGuardia Act and the Wagner-Taft-Hartley Act), or to ask whether these were not, perhaps, steps in the wrong direction. Suppose we had today the Federal and state labor legislative situation that existed prior to 1932 (together with local law enforcement) and either the East and Gulf Coast dock strike or the New York printers’ strike had been called?

Each of the New York newspapers would probably have tried to continue publication. It would have offered permanent employment, say to any competent printer, at a basic wage of $145 a week. If the employers and the applicants were guaranteed adequate police protection, is there any doubt that the papers would get enough eligible applicants even from members of the union itself? And if mass picketing were again treated in law as what it is in fact—intimidation and coercion—would members of non-striking unions abet the strike by “honoring” the picket lines?

TOWARD WAGE-FIXING

Of course if the members of the striking union were really underpaid, as they contend, it would be impossible for the employers to replace them permanently with suitable substitutes. It is precisely because they know that other and less privileged workers would be eager to take over their “underpaid” jobs that they set up picket lines. What is constantly forgotten is that the coercion unions exercise is primarily coercion of their fellow workers.

The crippling strike of the Atlantic and Gulf Coast dock workers would not have been possible without the intimidation unions are permitted to exercise through picket lines and violence In the dock strike that favorite remedy of so many employers and conservatives—the forced return to work under the “emergency” provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act for a “cooling-off” period of 80 days—has been exhausted. So leaders of the maritime industry, in despair, are calling for compulsory arbitration. No demand could be more shortsighted. If compulsory arbitration were imposed in the shipping industry, it would soon be imposed everywhere. Then demands for “equality of treatment” and “guidelines” would lead to outright wage- and price-fixing and a regimented and petrified economy.

OUR DOUBLE STANDARD

What is urgently needed is not more laws but revision or repeal of bad laws now on the books. Unless we want to be forced step by step into more and more government control and coercion, we must restore free competition in the labor market. This means first of all enforcement of the common law against coercion and violence. It means prohibiting all picketing in numbers. It means ceasing to give unions power to bargain for anyone but their own members. It means, in brief, restoring free collective bargaining.

Some will think that it also means prohibiting industrywide unions, or any union extending beyond a single plant or corporation, and otherwise making unions subject to the antitrust laws. Such measures are of dubious necessity and dubious enforceability. But certainly labor law must be made more balanced and two-sided. Either we should enact right-to-work laws, or illegalize the closed union. Either we should once more permit “yellow-dog” contracts, or prohibit compulsory union membership. The right not to join a union should be as clear as the right to union, and the right to work as clear as the right to strike.