Can Labor Clean Its Own House; S. Petro

[322 ] basically, of the fact that governments in this country have been failing to protect the basic rights of free men in the labor field. The basic rights of free men are the rights of private property and freedom of contract. These rights, when their exercise is protected by government, give men the freedom to control their persons and their property. They mean in the labor neld that a worker has free access to all employment opportunities; that he may take work whenever the wages and other conditions are acceptable to him; refuse it when they are not. They mean that the worker's will and inclination prevail regarding whether ' and when he· will accept or continue in employment, not the will of anyone else-unless the worker has come to some voluntary agreement on such matters with some one else. Property and Contract No man can be called a free man unless he has these rights intact. Unless workers are free men, they will not keep the house of labor clean. As a matter of fact, unless they are free men with the rights of free men, they will be unable to keep it clean. Men who have learned to accept being pushed around, who have been compelled to follow outside decisions on matters affecting their most intimate personal affairs and responsibilities, are im mersed powerlessly in dirt so pervasive that they have trouble remaining conscious of it. They may not even think of cleaning up things. And perhaps they are better [ 323] off so; for if by a powerful exercise of imagination and will they should conceive of a cleansing operation, they would be literally incapable of doing anything about it, and they might get badly hurt.

For government has not been doing the job for which it was created. Certainly it has not been doing the job in labor relations. We have government committees studying all phases of the labor-management field, ex cept the critical phase-namely, the status of law and law-enforcement. The basic job of government every where, and particularly in the labor relations field, is to protect and promote the rights of private property and freedom of contract. Our governments have been established in order to do three great jobs: (1) prevent and punish violence, fraud, intimidation, and coercion; (2) protect the personal freedom and the freedom of contract of all persons, including workingmen; and (3) in general, make men secure in their persons, properties, and opportunities. In a word, we expect government-and government under takes-to prevent some people from pushing others around. Failures of Government Trade-union leaders and businessmen are undoubt edly guilty of a good many kinds of antisocial conduct.

Their transgressions, however, are insignficant when compared with the failures of government. Established to protect private property and freedom of contract, our [324 ] governments have themselves been guilty of some of the worst forms of expropriation and interference with free dom of contract-not only, but especially, in labor rela tions. Conceived essentially in order to maintain the peace-to prevent and remedy violence and coercion government has abdicated that responsibility to a great degree. Government has taken away from workers one of the most valuable aspects of their property and contract rights. It has told them that they cannot make their own employment contracts. A worker has to accept the dic tate of a governmental agency as to his "appropriate bargaining unit." Once he finds himself in this arbitrary grouping, he is forced to give up his right to bargain for himself, if a majority of the employees in that grouping so will it. Indeed, if he has been vigorous and sturdy in his objection to the union chosen by a majority, he is more than likely to find himself in a very bad way. But he will be unable to do anything about it because the government authorized to protect his property and con tract rights has expropriated him.

Member Has Little Control There is no likelihood that such a man will have any influence on the way the union is run. An organization which can control a man's activity against his will is not going to be very solicitous about him. He will have to tread very softly if he wishes to tread at all. Not much house cleaning can be expected of him. All.. that can be [ 325] expected is that, if conditions become absolutely intoler able for him, he will go away. When such men have no alternative but to go away, there are left only people who, as a whole, have very little stomach for house cleaning, if, indeed, they can even recognize dirt when they see it. When our people in government get seriously concerned with doing their job in labor relations, they will want to repeal the expropriation inherent in the appropriate-bargaining-unit and majority-rule principles. Violence Goes Unpunished Government action in the labor relations field cannot be taken seriously at all, either, until our duly consti tuted authorities begin acting straightforwardly, vigor ously, and courageously against violence in labor disputes.

There is no excuse whatsoever for the practically univer sal failure of government agents to do this part of their work. Governments are absorbing about a third of the national income, and I understand that there are over seven million nonmilitary federal, state, and local em ployees. In the absence of the most cogent evidence and argument to the contrary, one may therefore insist that we are spending enough to entitle us to expect basic protection against brutality, violence, and intimidation in labor disputes. This is not a matter upon which reasonable minds may differ; everyone is against violence in labor disputes. Again, there are no difficult or complicated technical problems; it is necessary only to prevent masses of people [326 ] from gathering at a strike-bound plant. It should be a great deal easier to limit picketing to one or two persons than it has been to disperse the rioting people in Little Rock. So far, however, our governmental authorities have been dismal failures. A more or less futile court order after violence has occurred is the most that one can expect. As things are now going, an employer can count himself lucky if he doesn't have to pay unemployment compensation when union violence discourages people from working!

Any talk about a clean house for labor is absurd and ridiculous until violence and the conditions in which it breeds are extirpated. Peace and order bring one kind of person to the fore; violence and intimidation are the conditions in which another kind of character flourishes. The point doesn't need any further emphasis. Laws Unenforced What cannot be overemphasized is the failure of gov ernment to enforce the basic and sensible laws of the land, federal and state. Both federal and state laws forbid all kinds of economic coercion in labor relations. Employers are prohibited from coercing workers in re gard to their choice of unions. Unions are equally pro hibited. The Taft-Hartley Act and the laws of many states, when properly understood and interpreted, de clare that unions may not force membership upon unwilling employees through the use of economic pres sures. This means that such plainly coercive measures [327 ] as stranger picketing-that is, picketing by a trade union which represents none of the employees of the picketed establishment-compulsory-unionism contracts, and all boycotting techniques are forbidden.

Compulsory Membership It is a well-known fact, however, that the administra tion of law leaves untouched most of those forms of union coercion. As a consequence, one may conclude with confidence that the unionization which we have known for the past ten years or more has been, to a considerable extent, coerced unionization: employees have been compelled, the national labor policy to the contrary notwithstanding, to accept unions not of their own choosing. It is necessary to distinguish between the anti-union coercion of which employers are guilty and the coercive methods of organization pursued by unions. No one doubts when an employer fires or threatens to fire a man for joining a union, that the employer is violating the law. Moreover, there is little doubt that the NLRB will prosecute such cases and, if there is any evidence at all of anti-union coercion, hold the employer guilty of an unfair practice. In fact, in the current investigations of the Senate Committee on Corrupt Union and Manage ment Practices, the Committee is to a considerable extent merely raking over cases in which the NLRB has found employers guilty of unfair labor practices.

As yet, however, the Committee has not seen fit to [328 ] inquire into the thousands of cases in which the Teamsters and other unions have been using stranger picketing and various kinds of boycotts as methods of compelling unionization. There cannot be the slightest doubt that stranger picketing and boycotts do involve economic coercion of precisely the same type as the employer's discharge or threat of discharge. Likewise, there cannot be the slightest doubt that such coercive methods of organization are all clear violations of the Taft-Hartley Act. Organizing Methods Yet for more than ten years stranger picketing, ~~rov ingsitus" picketing, hot-cargo agreements, and a number of other techniques of coercive and compulsory unioni zation have been in constant use all over the country. The number of employees who have been compelled against their will to join unions must be of a very large order of magnitude. And for more than ten years, these coercive organizing methods, though plainly contrary to the law, have been held by the NLRB to be not unlawful.

It is true that in October the NLRB took a small step in the right direction by holding unlawfully coercive one narrow and illusory category of stranger picketing. Ac cording to the Board a union violates the law if it engages in stranger picketing after it has been defeated in an election, provided that it is unwise enough to say that it is picketing for immediate recognition. If the [329 ] union engages in stranger picketing before it has been defeated in an election, and if it is astute enough to say that it is picketing for organizing purposes-not for im mediate recognition-then, according to the NLRB, it may not be guilty of unlawful coercion. That is a pure case of tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee. There is no basis in the law generally, in the Taft-Hart ley Act, or in common sense for the distinction which the Board has drawn. If stranger picketing is economi cally coercive in any case-as it undoubtedly is-then it is economically coercive in every case; for its methods, objectives, and manner of operation are always the same, no matter when it occurs or what it is called.

One-Way Investigations Even if the Board had gone the whole way, had held that all stranger picketing is unlawfully coercive, one might still ask why it is that such a decision came so late. It is more than ten years since the Taft-Hartley Act was passed. During that time, as well as earlier, stranger picketing has been perhaps the most common of all trade-union organizational methods. Furthermore, the language of the statute has not been changed since 1947. The answer, of course, is that until recently the NLRB has found those parts of the Taft-Hartley Act which define unfair practices of unions to be singularly mysterious and of uncertain reach and intent. Whereas the NLRB found it easy to read the employer unfair practices as proscribing every conceivable type of em[330 ] ployer pressure, the identically worded union unfair practices could not, the Board felt, be intended to mean the same thing.

Skin-Deep Investigation And so, while the Senate Committee has been rehash ing in the case of employer "corruption" only conduct which the Board has since the very beginning prose cuted, it has curiously refrained, thus far at least, from inquiring into the methods by which unions are daily coercing the free choice of employees. To put the matter another way, it has been preoccupied with the surface manifestations of trade-union corruption-the cheap thievery, double dealing, and the embezzling. It has not been concerned at all with even the deeper manifesta- . tions of corruption-the violence and the compulsion which underlie so much of modern American trade unionism. More important even than that, the Commit tee has not revealed any understanding at all of the fundamental causes of both the deeper and the more superficial forms of corruption. The causes lie essentially, I repeat, in the errors, fail ures, and derelictions of government in the labor rela tions field. Unions have been given special privileges at the expense of the basic rights of employees and em ployers. While employers have been forced to take a strictly hands-off attitude, and while the contract rights of workers have been vitiated, unions have been given the formal de jure power to control employment and [331 ] employment conditions, and they have been given the informal de facto power to use violence and economic coercion as means of compelling both membership and acquiescence in union policies, programs, and tactics.

If the house of labor needs cleaning now, it will con tinue to need cleaning until these failures of government are corrected and until the formal and informal special privileges of unions are eradicated. No human agency can be trusted with the kinds of power which the errors in government have given trade-union leadership. Estab lish an environment permeated with coercion and com pulsion and you are bound to attract men who excel in those modes of conduct. Those who do not excel will either have to learn or make way for men with richer natural endowments. Workers who have become accustomed to being pushed around, who, owing to the failures of govern ments to do their basic job, are used to the rigorous controls of compulsory union methods, are in a position to do very little about cleaning up things. They can do nothing but bear the oppression and exploitation of their leadership. Moreover, it would be ill-advised to expect any real forward-looking action from the leadership.

Let the Market Decide If union leaders are to be kept in line, they must remain exposed, like everyone else in a free market, to the loss of their ~~business" when they do not perform satisfactorily. Instead of making a union the exclusive [332 ] bargaining representative for all employees in a finn when it has been selected by only some, the law should see that those who object to the union retain their basic right, as free men, to fend for themselves. When men are forced in the first place to join unions, forced in the second place to go along with all plans and programs conceived by their leaders, and forced in the third place to keep their peace if they wish to keep their jobs (and maybe their health)-it is not at all surprising to find a good many trade-union leaders less than responsive to or honest with their membership. No one should be at all surprised either that the Ethical Practices Committee of the AFL-CIO, for all its concern with "trade-union morality," has failed utterly to deal with the violence, the coercion, and the other matters discussed here. If it had dealt with such matters, there might have been a great many more suspensions and expulsions than there have been.

Power Corrupts Leaders Power acquired by force and subject to no continuing functional check is bound to corrupt. Corporate manage ments are kept in line by the right of stockholders to move their equities when they are dissatisfied and by the right of consumers and other purchasers to take their patronage elsewhere without let or hindrance when price or quality are poor. If the house of labor is to be clean, the same general principles must be applied there, with the workingmen of the nation in the position of stock[333 ] holders and consumers. It is as absurd to expect good clean unionism in conditions of extensive compulsory unionism, as it would be to expect good government in a society where the divine right of kings or the dictator ship of the proletariat was the central political principle. [334 ] HOW TO WORK MORE AND HAVE LESS tv :J."eJe"ic Ba6tiat (1801-1850) Do YOU remember how Robinson Crusoe made a plank on his desert island? Since he had no saw, he used his axe to cut down a tree. Then he chopped the trunk of the tree, first on one side and then on the other, until he reduced it to the desired thickness. This plank cost him 15 days of labor. In addition, he dulled his axe and consumed much of his food supplies.