Our Blind Labor Laws

December 21, 1953

What has to happen in order to awaken the American public and its representatives in Congress to the unreality, hypocrisy, and blindness of our present labor laws?

If facts and crises are capable of teaching anything, New Yorkers, at least, have just received an intensive educational course. A few weeks ago workers in the milk industry decided to shut off the milk supply for 12,000,000 men, women, and children in the New York district until their demands were met. Meanwhile their pickets held up trucks, dumped milk, or poured kerosene over emergency shipments for schools and hospitals. Next, the New York newspapers were hit by a photoengravers’ strike. These photoengravers were getting $120 to $131 for a basic week of 36¼ hours. Some of them, with overtime, earned as much as $10,000 a year. But they demanded a $15 weekly increase and a 32-hour week and refused the publishers’ offer of arbitration.

The photoengravers have only about 400 men in their union. It would have been easily possible to publish newspapers without them. But they threw picket lines in front of the newspapers, and other unions decided to “respect the picket lines.” The result was that practically the whole New York daily press was shut down for eleven days.

This situation, it is true, brought forth some indignant comment about labor-union dictatorship. It was pointed out that the decision of other unions to “respect picket lines” was tantamount to a sympathy strike of their own in violation of contract, and that the constitutional right of the press to publish without restraint had been infringed by irresponsible private groups.

Yet when it came to ways of preventing the recurrence of such a situation, what was mainly heard was demands for still more legal coercion. Editor & Publisher, the industry’s magazine, spoiled an otherwise excellent editorial by calling for a prohibition of strikes and “mandatory arbitration” in “any communications industry.” But mandatory arbitration is merely another name for government wage-fixing. It leads inevitably to complete abolition of a free-enterprise system. And it is hard to see any more reason why newspaper strikes should be prohibited than, say, milk strikes.

What is really needed is a complete reexamination of the basic assumptions and actual effect of our present labor law. The Taft-Hartley Act, like its predecessor the Wagner Act, of which it is merely an amendment, abridges the employer’s freedom to bargain, to hire, and to fire. The ability of the unions to deprive New York’s millions of families of milk and newspapers was made possible by the Taft-Hartley Act. Under that act the milk companies were compelled to bargain solely with the striking milk drivers’ union; and the newspaper publishers were compelled to bargain solely with the local AFL photoengravers’ union. Both sets of employers were legally prohibited from “recognizing” or bargaining with any other union or with individuals.

And this Federal law is supplemented and supported by local police action that enforces the picket line rather than the right to work. But mass picketing, whatever its pretenses to “peaceful persuasion,” is a device for intimidation. For customers, to “respect the picket line” is to support the strike. For employees, to “respect the picket line” is to participate in the strike. And to argue that all picket lines must be respected is to argue that all strikes must be supported, regardless of their individual merits.

But the right to strike does not necessarily imply the right to win a strike, and the right to quit work does not imply the right to prevent others from working. The way out of the present union dictatorship is not compulsory arbitration, but repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act (or removal of its abridgements of the right of either workers or employers to associate or not to associate) and local enforcement of the common law against intimidation and violence.