Sugar, Fares, Picketing

September 12, 1960

Import quotas: Our foreign policy becomes more and more incomprehensible. Castro seizes more than $800 million of American property in Cuba, arrests our citizens, engages daily in a calculated hate America campaign, and we dare not break off relations with him. Then we break off relations with Trujillo, who had not seized American property, arrested our citizens, whipped-up a hate American campaign, or invited the Russians in.

We explain that Trujillo is a “dictator” as if Castro were not a far more dangerous one, so far as our interests are concerned, and as if we were not recognizing scores of dictators all over the world, including Khrushchev himself. We continue to recognize Khrushchev though he shoots down our planes and murders our aviators above neutral waters.

No one in the Administration has seemed to consider what the long-run consequences are going to be of our strange sugar policy. Who is to be allowed to send sugar to us, and exactly how much, and whether those who sell to us are to be paid a bounty over the world price, is to be decided by Congressional fiat or the day- to-day whim of the Administration. The U.S. is still committed to pay the Castro government a subsidy of about $96 million a year above the world price for the 2.4 million tons of sugar remaining in the Cuban quota.

The resentment and economic disruption we are going to cause by this discrimination can easily be foreseen. The first step toward economic sanity and freedom would be to abolish entirely the whole sugar import- quota system and to substitute a uniform tariff. This would also allow us to abolish domestic quotas.

Socialist ‘Profit’

“City Transit Nets $5 Million Profit” ran the headline. What a triumph for municipal ownership and operation! At last an answer to the critics of local socialism. For though the New York City subways had tripled their fares since the city took them over, they could not seem to show anything but an operating deficit. The 1958–59 operations, for example, had shown a deficit of $10,184,316.

How has the new miracle happened? Well, the Transit Authority concedes that it did receive a little help. There were subsidies from the city totaling $18,604,499. Without them the city’s transit lines would have shown a deficit in the fiscal year ended June 30 last of $13,391,570. But such a detail ought not to be allowed to obscure the great fact that the Transit Authority’s books did show a “profit” of $5,212,928. Could private enterprise, paying heavy taxes instead of getting them, have done as well?

Why Labor Chaos

If you want to know why we have labor violence, if you want to know why an employer has no way of settling a strike except by giving in to the demands of the union, if you want to know why the government itself is impotent to halt what it calls “cost-push” inflation, you have merely to read the decision of the National Labor Relations Board holding the Kohler Co. guilty of prolonging by unfair labor practices the six-year-old strike by the United Auto Workers Union.

The board admits that the union engaged in illegal “belly-to-back” mass picketing and violence after the walkout began on April 5, 1954. But the board apparently regarded this violence as trivial compared with the unfair labor practice engaged in by Kohler. And what was this unfair labor practice? Why, the company granted a wage increase of 3 cents an hour to nonstrikers “without bargaining with the union.”

So the board ordered Kohler to rehire all the strikers (except 77) who had not been permanently replaced prior to June 1, 1954, the day of the wicked wage increase, provided they applied for reinstatement. The union estimates that this might mean replacing 1,700 to 2,000 of the total 2,500 that the company employs. And the board specifically ordered that this should be done even if it required discharge of the replacements, some of whom have now acquired six years seniority with Kohler.

Whatever “collective bargaining” is now interpreted to mean, it obviously does not mean free bargaining. The employer, or the non-union worker, has no bargaining freedom that any one is bound to respect.