Where Do We Go from Here?

March 20, 1950

Having himself helped to deliver it one staggering blow after another over the last five years, President Truman is now curious to know why the nation’s coal industry is sick.

Even if the kind of commission of inquiry he asks for, mainly appointed by himself, could be nonpolitical and objective, it is not needed. For the essential facts about the coal industry are already known. These facts are that John L. Lewis, aided by Congress and the President, has won too many Pyrrhic victories. As a result, coal labor costs are too high, coal is overpriced, the supply is never dependable, and coal is losing out everywhere to the competition of oil, natural gas, and water. In 1947 coal supplied 50 percent of the nation’s energy; last year its contribution was down to 38.5 percent. Of 1,142 new railroad locomotives on order, only twelve will be powered by steam.

It is not the coal industry that needs to be investigated but the President’s own incredible labor policy.

Mr. Truman has repeatedly demanded the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Law, called it “unworkable,” denounced it as a “slave labor act,” and otherwise encouraged Mr. Lewis and other labor leaders to flout it. He failed to act under the injunction provisions of the law until weeks and even months after he should have acted. Then a Federal judge held that though the miners continued to strike after the injunction, they were not in contempt because, don’t you see, they were merely acting “as individuals.” This made the injunction meaningless and the government impotent. And nobody in the government even drew the logical conclusion that if Mr. Lewis could not get his own back-to-work order respected he should no longer be dealt with as the miners’ spokesman.

So, because of the crisis that Mr. Truman himself helped to bring about, he asked Congress for power to seize the mines. Having made the government impotent to deal with the strikers, he threatened to crack down on the struck-against. This seizure threat forced the prompt surrender of the mine operators. If it hadn’t, Congress would no doubt have given Mr. Truman his requested legislation.

Yet the legal situation that such a law would create would be fantastic. Thanks to present law Mr. Lewis is dictator of the nation’s coal industry. It is considered an infringement of his sacred constitutional rights even to prevent him from ordering three-day weeks to deprive the nation of coal. But under Mr. Truman’s seizure law property rights could be abridged every time Mr. Lewis chose to create a crisis. Then the government could step in and dictate wages and profits while it ran the mines. Though this would abridge rights, there is no assurance that it would end strikes. For miners could still refuse to work “as individuals.”

Mr. Truman seems to have forgotten entirely that even when he seized the railroads in May of 1946 he did not end the strike that had been declared against the generous wage decision of his own fact-finding board. On that occasion Mr. Truman was finally reduced to proposing that he be given the totalitarian power to throw the strikers into the Army and force them to run the trains that way.

Mr. Truman’s labor policy was already bankrupt in 1946, and he has learned absolutely nothing from his experience since then.

The power of industry wide unions was never so menacing as now. The simplest solution would be to repeal the Wagner-Taft-Hartley Act, lock, stock and barrel, and so restore free, two-sided wage bargaining.

If this solution is deemed at the moment politically impossible, then the second best course is to remove the sweeping immunities of the labor unions from the antimonopoly laws, and above all to stop compelling individual employers to deal with industry wide unions. If nationwide unions continue to be imposed on industry by law, they will in time make it impossible for our private-enterprise system to function. This is the alternative that confronts us.