Revise Our Labor Law

November 23, 1959

There are the strongest reasons why the President should immediately call a special session of Congress to deal with the labor crisis.

“If the [steel] strike is resumed at the end of 80 days,” Secretary Mitchell has declared, “the Administration will have recommendations to Congress as to what to do to settle the strike.” But this is to imply that the President will take no action until more damage has been done, until still more unemployment has been suffered, until there is once again paralysis in industry.

Even if the steel strike is miraculously settled before these words appear, the nation still faces the prospect of resumption of the East Coast longshoremen’s strike, the possibility of a nationwide railroad strike, and the probability of an outbreak of a new nationwide wave of strikes if the steel wage settlement is after all inflationary. If, however, the President utilizes the period of grace allowed by the 80-day injunction, he may not only forestall future paralysis but encourage a quicker settlement of the steel strike itself.

COERCIVE PICKETING

To find the right solution we must first of all recognize the coercion that made the 116-day strike possible. Most press and Washington comments, as well as court decisions, have been curiously oblivious of this coercion. When the strike was called, not a single plant against which it was called tried to continue producing steel. Not a single plant dared to try. If it had tried, any former striker or other worker who had applied for work (on the calculation that $127 a week, say, was at least acceptable until something better turned up) would have been lucky to escape intact. For the union threw picket lines around the plants, and their purpose was to intimidate and coerce. As one reporter put it at the beginning of the strike: “Any ‘back-to-work’ drive under company sponsorship would touch off picket-line violence of a type unknown in the steel industry since the strikes of twenty years ago.”

One looks in vain, either in the Supreme Court decision, or in the lengthy dissent of Justice Douglas, for any acknowledgment that this coercion exists. The Justice declaims against injunctions that, “force men back to work” and “bludgeon all workers.” He praises the enactment of the Norris-La Guardia Act as ending the “easy” and “abusive” use of the injunction in labor disputes. He implies (resurrecting a hoary myth) that such injunctions were typically used to force men to work against their will, when they were in fact used to order strikers to desist from intimidatory picketing, violence, or irreparable injury.

LICENSE TO INTIMIDATE

The fact is that today unions are in effect licensed to intimidate and coerce anyone who tries to oppose a strike. What they claim is not merely the right to quit their jobs but to prevent others from taking the jobs they have vacated. They have become in effect agencies entitled to use intimidation or violence to enforce their ends. That is why and how they can choke off at will the nation’s supply of steel or of almost anything else.

The first and most important labor reform is to restore the rule of law. Employers who wish peaceably to continue their business, workers (including former strikers) who wish peaceably to apply for the jobs that have been vacated, are entitled to adequate local police protection of life, person, or property. And in order that they may get it, the first thing that must be done is to repeal the Federal legislation that stands in the way—including the Norris-La Guardia Act and either the whole of the Taft-Hartley Act or any provision in it that abridges or clouds the employer’s or the individual worker’s right to freedom of bargaining.

Such a proposal is not “anti-labor” but pro-labor. It is the self-declared champions of labor who advocate or defend laws that bring about industrial paralysis, and then hysterically seek to cure the paralysis by proposals for compulsory arbitration, by Federal seizure (Harry Truman and Senators Morse and Kennedy), or by drafting the strikers into the Army (President Truman). Not until private coercion is prevented can personal liberty be secure.