Union Power and Public Policy; L. Wolfman

What is surprising about the Teamsters' case is that Congress, the public, and the newspapers are so sur prised at the Senate Committee's disclosures. For the fact is that the history of the Teamsters' union is a history of lawbreaking. The record of the unionization of the laundries of Seattle is one of force, violence, and intimi dation. In a law-abiding community such conduct would Dr. Wolman, Professor of Economics at Columbia University, is an eminent authority in the field of labor relations. [100 ] be unthinkable. But, in Seattle where the union got its start, and in many other parts of the United States, these and similar actions are regarded as legitimate instru ments of trade union growth, as accepted means for C'stabilizing" business, and as the appropriate methods for increasing and applying union power. Dangerous Premises The law and public policy which account for the great growth of union power during the past twenty years have rested on highly dangerous assumptions, as recent events have shown. It was assumed that the goals of organized labor were so beneficial and pressing that nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of their realization. Beginning with the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935, the machinery of government devoted itself to promoting unions, to removing obstacles from their path, to assisting them in achieving their objectives, by fair means or foul. In the process, law enforcement was suspended or held to be inapplicable to union activities.

It was only natural that unions came to consider them selves above the law and behaved accordingly. It was equally natural that union leaders and officials should feel free to use their newly acquired power and resources without fear or restraint. In this setting, the Teamsters' affair is simply a detail on a large, national canvas. For, where organizations pos sess great power, the abuses and corruption associated with it are bound to take· on a variety of forms, from the [101 ] misuse of union funds for personal gain to the cutting of cables in a telephone strike. What these have in com mon is the disregard of people's rights and of the law. Violence, or threats, or intimidation come to be widely practiced; adherence to unions is made increasingly com pulsory; dues, assessments, initiation fees and, often, other union charges flow automatically into the union treas uries; and union political influence has become so con siderable and widespread as to challenge the public authorities at nearly all levels of government.

Few of us realize how universal and persistent this flouting of the law and denial of men's rights have become in this country and how little is being done to attend to these evils. Yet, the daily press and periodicals of all sorts constantly carry stories of what goes on in this respect in one or another part of the United States. A few examples, culled at random from current publica tions, show the way law and civilized standards of con duct are defied with impunity in the operations of union labor. OrganizaUonalPickeUng A bill to prohibit organizational picketing in New York State was introduced in the state legislature by the Senator from Rye and was withdrawn by him the end of March. He withdrew his bill because he believed it lacked sufficient votes for passage. A special dispatch to the New York Times from Albany says the bill was 4:4:solidly opposed by Democrats, influenced by the Iead[102 ] ers of organized labor." It was doubtlessly opposed by some Republicans, also.

Organizational picketing is a pure and simple holdup and racket. The picket line is set up to force an em ployer to require his employees to join a union to which they neither belong nor wish to belong. The practice is a common one in New York and elsewhere. Often the picket line will be withdrawn for a consideration, i.e., for money. The courts, the civil authorities, the police are all familiar with this device by which unions undertake to impose their will on employers and employees alike. What is here practiced would seem to entail abuse of power of the first order. But neither organized labor nor the authorities behave as if the matter is any of their concern. Union Rackets A close, but puzzling, variant of this type of intimida tion is described by the chief labor reporter of the New York Times in an article in that paper, March 31, 1957. With names omitted, the true story runs as follows: A family-run furniture factory in a suburban commu nity was visited by a union representative, with a pocket full of [union] charters .... These gave him the technical right to organize almost any kind of worker in any kind of plant.

He threatened to call a strike unless the company agreed to a cash down payment of "several thousand dollars." In addition, the employer was to put a relative [103 ] of the organizer on its payroll at $100 a week. His sole duty would be to collect his pay. Rather than submit to what they felt would be a ruinous pattern of extortion, the owners decided to seek advice from legitimate labor sources. They were told that it was time to end their seventy-year-old policy of resisting unionization. The conclusion of this story ought to be evident. At a midnight meeting the company and the "legitimate" union got together, with the result that the racketeering union was defeated by the bona fide union, and the employer was saved from extortion. Of course, a skepti cal reader of this tale might well wonder where the public authorities, the police, and the courts were during the unfolding of this episode and why the employer found it necesary to turn to a union rather than to the authorities to protect him from gangsters or their equiva lent.

Unions and tbe Public Authorities Many years ago, Dave Beck began his career as a union official by organizing the teamsters and the com panies they worked for in Seattle, Washington. If the accounts of these organizing campaigns can be trusted, they were strong~arm enterprises with no holds barred. Beck came out of them a successful labor leader and a prominent and accepted figure in the community. He could not at that time have accomplished what he set out to do without either intimidating public officials or [104 ] operating with their support. In any case, the seeds of corruption and the abuse of power must have been sown early in his career. It stands to reason, of course, that powerful labor organizations will apply their power to public agencies and officials whenever they stand to gain by doing so. Mass picketing and its attendant violence affords the simplest and most usual example of such pressure and the fruits it yields. In the now famous Kohler strike, the United Auto Workers, the striking union, prevailed upon the officials and unions of municipal employees of Sheboygan to prevent a ship from unloading a cargo of clay, raw material for the Kohler shops.

Nationwide Boycott In the nationwide boycott of Kohler products by the UAW, the union has undertaken by exerting political pressure to keep public agencies from purchasing Kohler products, however satisfactorily these products may meet competitive specifications. The Reverend Edward A. Keller of the University of Notre Dame, in a highly informative article in Human Events (Vol. XIV, No.8, February 23, 1957), points out that nine government bodies have adopted boycott resolutions against Kohler and that a resolution introduced in the Minneapolis City Council would excuse the city from the performance of any unexecuted contract where there were "labor trou bles or disputes ... from whatever cause arising, .and whether or not the demands of the employees involved [105 ] are reasonable and within the power of any party to bid or contract to concede .... " No one knows how many arrangements that bear the earmarks of collusion between public and private agen cies exist throughout the country. But, whether numerous or not, examples of them are not difficult to find. In the March issue of The Contractor, the official organ of the builders and contractors of Maryland, attention is called to efforts to prevent open-shop contractors, who were low bidders, from being awarded the contract for a fraternity house on the campus of the University of Maryland. The specifications warned prospective bidders that over $4,000,000 worth of construction was under way on the campus with 100 per cent union labor, and stated that "the university reserves the right to protect itself against any situation which may place the progress of these jobs in jeopardy."

This obvious attempt to scare away nonunion contrac tors was brought to the attention of the Baltimore Eve ning Sun. When that paper focused the light of publicity on the University' s practice, its president announced that the statement in the specifications was unnecessary. The extent to which union influence or pressure is exerted against the public interest, denying people their right to work, to bid for jobs, or to stay in business is, of course, unknown. But, as more and more examples are disclosed, it becomes clear that the ramifications of this form of union conduct are much broader than was commonly supposed. It was, for example, only during the last year that the Interstate Commerce Commission [106 ] was asked to require trucking companies to carry cargo boycotted by the Teamsters' union. In April of this year an examiner of the ICC recommended that the Commis sion cancel operating permits of truck lines refusing to handle freight labeled ~Chot cargo"-goods coming from establishments involved in labor controversy-by the Teamsters.

These random examples of the exercise and misuse of power suggest that the investigating committee of the United States Senate, now deep in the personal scandals of officers of the Teamsters' union, might profitably turn its attention to the deeper issues of that situation and of others like it. For what this country should be concerned with are mistaken public policies which build up aggre gations of power that inevitably and in manifold ways violate the public interest and destroy individual rights and liberty. [107 ] THE EXCEPTION MAKERS THE BACKBONE of socialism in the United States gets all of its starch from the inconsistencies of countless Amer icans" most of whom believe in freedom everywhere except in the case of their own pet projects. They say they want universal freedom, "but this is neither the time nor the place .... " Or, stated in another way, our rapidly growing socialism has nothing to sustain it except the alarming aggregate of nearly every person's "but." The exception maker is socialism's only ally!