Seizure Creates Strikes

June 23, 1952

Never has a rebuff to a President been so unmistakable, so prompt, and so richly deserved as that dealt by the Senate to Mr. Truman after he had asked Congress to let him continue to flout the Taft-Hartley Act and to give him industry seizure powers instead. And nothing has so clearly revealed why Mr. Truman can not be trusted with such powers as his argument in favor of them.

Congress, he says, should “encourage the parties to settle their differences through collective bargaining.” But it is precisely his own plan that destroys collective bargaining. When both parties know in advance that their dispute will eventually be turned over to “special [governmental] boards to work out specific proposals” for settlement, then neither party will offer more or accept less than it thinks the special boards will demand of it or award to it.

But Mr. Truman blandly talks as if he can have free collective bargaining and compulsory arbitration at the same time—or even as if they were the same thing! The law he asks for is “to provide for fair and just compensation to the owners for the use of their property during a seizure, and fair and just compensation for the work of the employees.” And this government profit-fixing and government wage-fixing is the way to “increase the incentives for the parties to settle their differences through bargaining”!

Mr. Truman professes to want “sound price and wage stabilization policies” at the same time as he endorses the huge increases awarded to the steel-workers by the Wage Stabilization Board. But before their strike the steelworkers were already receiving an average of $1.88 an hour, compared with an average of $1.64 an hour in all manufacturing industries; steel wages had already increased 20 cents an hour since the Korean war outbreak, compared with an average increase in all manufacturing industries of 19 cents an hour; and steel wages had already gone up in the same period by 12 percent, compared with an 11-percent increase in the cost of living. Even the wage increases and other terms that have already been offered by the steel companies—and rejected by Philip Murray—would rip through the so-called stabilization ceilings and let loose a flood of demands for increases in other industries.

In spite of the constitutional provision that the President “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” Mr. Truman still seems to think that his duty is limited to enforcing only those laws that he happens to like. He tells Congress that for him to apply the Taft-Hartley procedures at this time would be not only “unwise,” but “grossly unfair,” “harmful and futile”; that a court might not grant an injunction anyway, and that even if it did “there is no assurance that it would get the steel mills back in operation.” As Senator Taft has pointed out, these words are “practically an invitation” for the workers to violate the law.

And if the unions would strike even after a Taft- Hartley injunction, why wouldn’t they also strike even after government seizure? The President’s implied but unspoken answer is—because he expects to grant them, at the companies’ expense, the wages and other terms they demand.

Mr. Truman’s seizure solution would, in sum, create the very strikes and strike threats that it professes to cure. It would mean the imposition on industry of the strikers’ terms; and unions would threaten to strike to bring about this very result. It would make a mockery of wage “stabilization.” It would turn price-and-wage control into a political weapon. It would entrench industrywide unions. It would impose compulsory union membership on every worker. It would undermine free enterprise and eventually injure workers most of all.

The real solution, to repeat, lies in the opposite direction. It lies in allowing price-and-wage control to lapse. It lies in having Congress reverse the course it has pursued for the last twenty years—by removing the sweeping grants of monopoly power it has conferred on union leaders.