The Right to Strike

May 16, 1949

The right to strike is commonly defended as if it were identical with the right of the individual to quit work. To limit the right to strike, it is therefore asserted, is to impose economic “slavery.”

But just as there are qualifications (as reflected in our libel and obscenity laws) even to the right of free speech, so there are qualifications even to the right to quit work individually. A surgeon who quit in the middle of an operation, a railroad engineer who left his train and passengers at a deserted place, or a ship captain who left a sinking ship before the passengers or crew, would be held guilty of criminal neglect of duty.

Moreover, the attempt to treat the right to strike as identical with the right of the individual to give up his job must be set down as either confused or hypocritical. It is not merely that in a strike the workers quit simultaneously and collusively. The difference goes much deeper. For the strikers are not in fact giving up their jobs. On the contrary, they want to keep those very jobs—on better terms. They insist, in fact, that they have property rights in these jobs. They often resort to intimidation, coercion, and violence in order to prevent others from taking the jobs that they themselves have voluntarily abandoned.

So when most union leaders insist on the unbridled right to strike, they are insisting not merely on the right of union members to quit work but on their right to prevent others from taking the jobs they have vacated. They assert the right to prevent others from working. It is a merit of the Taft-Hartley Act that it at least partly and indirectly takes cognizance of this. It makes it (section 8b) “an unfair labor practice for a labor organization or its agents to restrain or coerce employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed in section 7.”

In the case of the Smith Cabinet Manufacturing Co. the Labor Board found, for example, that the following conduct of the United Furniture Workers of America, Local 309, CIO, constituted such restraint and coercion: “(1) the carrying of sticks by the pickets on the picket line; (2) the open piling of bricks for use by the pickets; (3) the blocking of plant entrance by railroad ties, automobiles, raised gutter plates, and tacks; (4) the threat of violence to the nonstriking employees over the loudspeaker . . . (7) the warning given nonstriking employees that ‘when we get in with the union you old fellows won’t have a job’; (8) the placing of pickets in such a manner as to prevent nonstriking employees from performing their work; (9) the goon-squad mass assaults upon various nonstriking employees . . . (12) the barring from the plant of Superintendent Simpson and Foreman McKinney by force and intimidation ...” And so on.

Mr. Truman would have been on strong ground, economically and legally, if he had asked simply for the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, period. But he tried to force a return, with the Lesinski bill, to the intolerable conditions under the one-sided Wagner Act in which the Labor Board was not authorized to take cognizance of the kind of outrages just outlined, though it compelled the employer to recognize and “bargain” with unions that practiced such outrages.

If a Federal labor relations act, therefore, is to be retained, not only must it keep the substance of Taft-Hartley section 8b but one of the most important additions would be an explicit declaration that mass picketing is prima facie evidence of intimidation and that any union resorting to it would forfeit the privilege of using the facilities of the Labor Board.

Such a provision would be far sounder than all the present dubious efforts to illegalize strikes as such. We must never lose sight of the vital difference between the real right to quit work peaceably and the spurious right forcibly to prevent others from working. From time immemorial most union leaders have tried to tie the two together in the same package, and to practice the second in the name of the first.

But the right to work is as sacred as the right to quit work, and no less in need of protection.