Too Much Labor Law

July 31, 1961

The Kennedy Administration, according to Newsweek (July 11) and The Wall Street Journal, plans to ask Congress for deep new Federal intervention in labor-management disputes, including the following powers:

1—Power to set up labor-dispute inquiry boards with “a lot more muscle” than those currently authorized by the Taft-Hartley law. They would be empowered to recommend settlement terms, not just find “facts.” They could jump in at Presidential direction before a strike occurs.

2—Power to seize key industries, putting them under government management when deemed necessary to stop or avoid crippling strikes.

3—Power for the President to force strikers back to work by decreeing a “cooling-off” period without the present necessity of going to court and convincing a judge that a national emergency requires issuing an injunction.

These powers would amount to compulsory arbitration. They would in effect enable the government to fix wages. In the long run they would carry us into a completely controlled economy. A President could handpick boards to bring in the kind of decision he wanted. Settlement of every major strike would be thrown into politics. Few Presidents could resist the temptation to press for the settlement that seemed to yield the maximum political profit at the moment.

YIELDING TO DEMANDS

This would mean substantially yielding to the unions’ demands. As in the past, this would be disguised from the unsophisticated because the unions would always demand more than they actually expected to get. Anybody inclined to doubt this yielding has merely to notice what has happened even under the “weak” and “conservative” Taft-Hartley injunctions as they stand. The 1959 steel strike was finally settled (through the intervention of Vice President Nixon) only by a grossly inflationary wage increase. Settlements would be even worse if the government had still greater coercive powers.

The new powers would not reduce the number of strikes or strike threats, but immensely increase them. Whenever one of the compulsory arbitration boards “recommended” a settlement (which, as experience with the railroads proves, would be binding on the employers but not necessarily on the unions), 100 unions would contend that they were entitled to an equal wage increase or benefit, an equal “pattern.” The government would soon be setting wages all around the circle.

PENALIZE THE VICTIM?

The new powers would be almost certainly abused. Seizure of the companies would not penalize the strikers but the struck-against. During any tenure as operator, the government would be in a position to grant increased wages and other benefits which corporate managers could not easily rescind when they regained control. Truman tried to set a pattern like this when he seized—illegally—the steel companies in 1952.

With the Railway Labor Act of 1926, the Norris- LaGuardia Act of 1932, the Wagner Act of 1935, and the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, Congress has tried to cure the evils brought on by government intervention in labor-management disputes by still more intervention. For a generation, the government has asked and Congress granted more and more “powers”—a larger and larger “arsenal of weapons,” as Mr. Kennedy and Secretary Goldberg call it. The situation has grown steadily worse.

And almost no one has dared to ask for the one clear remedy—the simple restoration of freedom. Not freedom for “collective” bargaining only but freedom for all bargaining—freedom for a minority union to bargain for its own members, freedom for any individual worker to bargain for himself, legal freedom for the employer to bargain with anyone, to hire, discharge, or replace whom he pleases. Plus protection for individual workers and employers against violence and coercion, or intimidation by mass picket lines.

In brief, the solution most likely to provide maximum labor peace, maximum wages, and maximum employment would be to repeal all Federal “labor-relations” laws and restore freedom of choice for the individual.