The Right to Work

December 27, 1954

On Dec. 7, speaking before the annual convention of the CIO in Los Angeles, President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Labor, James P. Mitchell, showed himself even more willing to subserve the wishes and increase the powers of union bosses than any of his New Deal predecessors had done.

Among other things, he attacked the “right to work” laws now in existence in seventeen states. Under these laws employers and unions cannot enter into contracts that make it compulsory for a worker to join a union as a condition of holding his job. Mitchell demanded that the states wipe such laws from their statute books. This speech apparently came as a complete surprise to the White House. Mr. Eisenhower declared at his press conference the next day that the Secretary of Labor had not necessarily represented the Administration’s views in any part of it. On the day after this comment, Walter P. Reuther, president of the CIO, called this a “repudiation” of Mitchell, and accused the President of perpetrating a “political fraud.” “The Secretary of Labor is not a member of the Cabinet,” he said.

I hope Reuther is right, and that the President will ask for Secretary Mitchell’s resignation. Nothing short of this can clear the air.

When the speech was first published, it looked as if the President, frightened by the election returns, had decided to swing far to the left on the labor issue in one more effort to woo the so-called labor vote. Reuther’s savage attack indicates how futile such appeasement of the union bosses would be even if the President supported the Mitchell program. For the Republicans to adopt that program would be such a reversal of policy that they would lose the voters’ respect, and with it lose far more votes than they could possibly gain.

From the standpoint of principle, the case for the Mitchell program is even worse. To compel a man to join a union as a condition of holding his job puts irresponsible power in the hands of union bosses and is a gross infringement on the individual’s right to work.

Two other major issues are raised by the Mitchell stand. The first is states’ rights. Recent Supreme Court decisions have taken the position that since Congress has chosen to exercise jurisdiction in the labor-management relations field, the Taft-Hartley law takes precedence in any conflict with state law, and any state law in conflict with the Taft-Hartley law is invalid. At the same time the court has been so fantastically stretching its definition of what constitutes “interstate commerce,” subject to Federal law, that it has all but annihilated the powers that the Founding Fathers thought they had reserved to the states in the Tenth Amendment. Unless there is a reversal of this trend, states’ rights will soon be wiped out without the submission of any constitutional amendment by Congress. The general acquiescence in the doctrine that Congress has the right to invalidate state labor laws that apply to what is dominantly or almost wholly commerce within a state shows how far this process has already gone.

Another major point once more raised by the Mitchell stand is the hypocritical and self-contradictory nature of the Wagner-Taft-Hartley act itself. As I pointed out here two weeks ago, that act begins by declaring it to be an “unfair labor practice” for an employer “by discrimination in regard to hire or tenure or employment, or any term or condition of employment, to encourage or discourage membership in any labor organization.” Yet it ends by authorizing the union shop, under which an employer is compelled to discharge a man who does not belong to the union.

This contradiction can be resolved only in one of two ways: (1) Congress can repeal the Wagner-Taft-Hartley act in its entirety, leaving employers and workers once more free to make their own bargaining arrangements; (2) if Congress wishes to intervene to forbid discrimination against union members, then in all consistency and honesty it should intervene to forbid discrimination against nonunion members. As it stands today, the law merely turns the Federal government into a union-organizing agency.