Preface

I have followed the Kohler Company’s struggle with the United Automobile Workers Union for years, as stage after stage of the dispute has demonstrated the things that have gone wrong in the labor policy of the United States. But its full value as a textbook illustration of the defects of our labor policy was not complete until August 26, 1960, when the National Labor Relations Board handed down its decision on the charges brought by the UAW against the company. With that decision, the dispute acquires an historic significance, for now it points up in a dramatic way all the principal shortcomings of our present labor policy.

These are four: the toleration shown to union violence by government; the governmental favoritism which has encouraged union officials to fall into greater and greater antisocial excesses; the unfair and sometimes impossibly heavy burdens which have been placed on employers, all coming to rest eventually on the shoulders of the consuming public; and finally the reposing in administrative agencies of judicial functions which those agencies have abused, to the infinite harm of society.

During its dispute with the Kohler Company, the United Automobile Workers Union engaged in sustained violence which covered almost the whole range of illegality, stopping just short of murder. It violated the laws of all levels of government, from local trespass laws to the federal government’s National Labor Relations Act. The Kohler Company, on the other hand, despite the burdens placed upon employers by our labor relations laws and the provocations of the union, pursued throughout the dispute a course of legality. Yet the decision of the National Labor Relations Board rewards the union and punishes both the company and many of the employees who came to work for it during the strike, at a time when it took considerable courage to do so.

I submit this document as evidence that our labor policy stands in compelling need of reform. While the Kohler dispute illustrates all the major evils of present labor policy which I have mentioned, it focuses attention on one perhaps more forcefully than on the others: the administrative law approach in labor relations. Experience with the National Labor Relations Board in this case alone is a strong argument for restoring to the constitutional courts of this country the full authority of decision in labor cases. When it is realized that the defects of the Board revealed by this case are duplicated in countless others, the argument becomes overwhelming.

I hope that this book will serve also to correct the historical record concerning the Kohler Company and Kohler Village. Using all the methods of propaganda, the officials of the Auto Workers Union have accused the Kohler Company of being a “feudal, reactionary, dictatorial employer.” They have led people to understand that Kohler Village is a regimented “company town” whose residents are little more than exploited serfs.

Frankly suspicious of such charges, I made an independent investigation of both the Village and the Company’s history and policies, with the results summarized in Chapter 1. A whole book might easily be written about the company or the village; both are models of the best in American practice and tributes to the practicality of this country’s highest ideals. But since the prime purposes of this book are to set forth the facts of the Kohler strike and to reveal the inherent defects in administrative law, I have confined myself to the barest possible account of the character of the Kohler Company’s policies and of life in Kohler Village.

I am indebted to the officers of the Kohler Company for the unreserved cooperation they have extended in my efforts to ascertain the facts. They have been, I believe, entirely candid on every subject which I chose to explore. As to all facts and issues involved in the dispute with the Auto Workers, my sources have been official documents and the transcript of the record in the Kohler-case hearings before the National Labor Relations Board and its trial examiner.

SYLVESTER PETRO

New York City