Seizure Is No Solution

June 16, 1952

The decision of the Supreme Court that the President’s seizure of the steel industry was illegal and Mr. Truman’s prompt return of the companies to their owners averted a grave constitutional crisis. But as I write this we are back not only to the immediate problem of how to settle the renewed steel strike, but to a larger problem: What can we do about the present ability of nationwide unions to slow down or halt all industry unless their demands are met?

As a solution to this problem, most of the proposals now before Congress are not reassuring. For they propose to give the President the very seizure powers he usurped. They propose to tell him, in effect, that he was right in the first place—that what was wrong was not his policies, but existing law. They would simply give him the power to do legally what he had done illegally. They would give him the power to repeat with every industry the course he followed with steel.

That course may be summarized as follows: (1) When an industrywide union makes a set of demands, no matter how extravagant, they are turned over to a governmental board, packed with “public” members favorable to the unions, for decision. (2) The board then decides that the industry should grant the union demands practically in full—even though this makes a joke of all the previous “stabilization” standards of the board itself. (3) The union leaders and the President then treat this decision as unilateral compulsory arbitration, completely binding—on the employer. (4) If the employer fails to grant the board’s awards in full, his plant is seized by the President, who then imposes the wage increases, compulsory unionism, or other awards of the board.

The tacit assumption behind Mr. Truman’s whole policy, in short, is that there is only one way to prevent or settle a nationwide strike, and that is to grant practically all union demands.

Such a policy has exactly the opposite result of what the President contends. It “prevents” or “settles” a present strike only at the cost of buying a hundred future strikes. For it amounts to a capitulation by employers, government, and public to every major union demand. It rewards extravagant demands; it rewards strikes and strike threats. Under it the unions obviously get more by striking or threatening to strike than by not doing so. Mr. Truman’s policy, in brief, creates the very evil it purports to avert.

A sound solution lies in precisely the opposite direction. It is to stop governmental encouragement of strikes and governmental rewards for striking. It is to take away from union leaders the special immunities and sweeping monopoly powers that have been deliberately conferred on them by Congress. A thoroughgoing reform would involve the repeal or drastic revision of the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932, which makes the granting of a private plea for a strike injunction practically impossible, even where union intimidation and coercion are involved, and the repeal or drastic revision of the Wagner-Taft-Hartley Act, which in effect turns the government into a union-organizing agency. The minimum change would be to restore the provision in the Taft-Hartley Act, as originally passed by the House, which removed the compulsion on employers to bargain with industrywide unions.

Mr. Truman’s high-handed seizure of the steel industry raised a larger and deeper issue, which even an adverse six-to-three decision of the Supreme Court did not remove. This is the danger to our free-enterprise system of the hostility to it shown by the President, not only in his steel seizure, but in his incredible onslaught of May 26 against the public utilities, in which he threatened to invoke the Corrupt Practices Act against them for having the audacity to defend themselves against his attacks. Such governmental hostility, if long continued, must inevitably undermine confidence and discourage and choke off new investment. If that happens, the free enterprise system will have been effectively destroyed. It is up to Congress to erect safeguards against the execution of such demagogic threats.