Again, NLRB

U. S. Labor struggled, suffered, bled, racketeered and rioted, picketed and paraded its way toward industrial democracy for three-quarters of a century. In all those years labor had no national legal protection. In the U. S. were no laws against black lists, white lists, yellow-dog contracts, labor spies, propaganda, professional strikebreaking. On the contrary, the U. S. Supreme Court had specifically proclaimed the employer's power to discharge men for union activity.-- But by 1935 Congress had put teeth in Section 7A of the old National Industrial Recovery Act, brought out the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act, and U. S. Labor had what it proudly hailed as a Magna Charta.

For a brief moment, Labor beheld the dawn of a millennial day. But the cream of the country's lawyers confidently advised employers to pay no heed to NLRB rulings. When the Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act, tories and liberals alike were dazed. Labor's Magna Charta would work. Antiunionism was powerless.

In the 18 months before the Court decision, NLRB had been able to hold only 76 plant elections in which workers chose their own unions. In the next 12 months there were 1,142. The rush was on. In the rush, A. F. of L. brother fought C. I. O. brother. To rule between hard-boiled employers and hard-boiled union chiefs, NLRB sent many a radical young theorist, many an idealist who saw everything in black (employers) & white (workers). No Abraham Lincoln was on hand to design a just and tolerant reconstruction. The carpetbaggers swarmed in, and the night riders. NLRB ruled with a high hand and little regard for feelings. Soon businessmen big & little who agreed on nothing else agreed in hatred of NLRB. Congress began to feel the way the wind was setting.

In July 1939 the House authorized an investigation of NLRB, to be led by Virginia's Howard W. Smith, an oldfashioned, seldom-spoken Democrat whose district is rural except for about 2,000 Alexandria railroadmen who always vote against him anyway, if they have an alternative. "Judge" Smith's country-lawyer shrewdness was underrated only by New Dealers, who laughed at his wing collar, ribboned pince-nez and air of extreme, Coolidge-like caution.

But when "Judge" Smith got his committee hearings under way last December, New Dealers stopped smiling. Wily Mr. Smith, not pretending to be a Bob La Follette or Tom Walsh, had his committee sit mostly as spectators, while a far abler inquisitor, cobra-cold Edmund Toland, dredged from NLRB's messy affairs one damaging fact after another. Infinitely painstaking, Mr. Toland in ten weeks' hearings wove a garish tapestry of the evidence, showed Board bias, incompetence, extra-legal activities.

Last week "Judge" Smith was ready for the kill. Out of Committee he brought a bill to amend the Wagner Act. Among other changes, the amendments would:

>Create a new NLRB board of three members (salaries: $10,000 each).*

>Create a new Administrator ($10,000), who would receive complaints, make investigations.

>Allow this Board only judicial functions, with no powers of administration, initiation, prosecution or enforcement.

>Allow the Board to apply for Court enforcement of its rulings only through the Administrator.

>Deny the Board right to enter disputes between union units in a plant except on employers' application, or 20% of the workers in a proposed bargaining unit.

>Strip from the Act the statement that it is the policy of the U. S. to encourage the practice & procedure of collective bargaining.

>Grant employers the right to propagandize their workers or the public.

>Limit to six months the period for which the Board may order back pay to reinstated workers.

Committee dissenters, ineffectual New Dealers Healey and Murdock, called the amendments "emasculatory." But emasculation was a long way off, for the case of NLRB was now dumped into the ample lap of handsome Mary Teresa Norton, who comes from Jersey City and Boss Frank Hague, and who looks 20 years less than her age (65). Chairwoman of the 21-man House Labor Committee, buxom Mrs. Norton snapped that it would have been "much more honest" of the Smith committee to propose outright repeal of the Wagner Act. Fearing that Mrs. Norton, in motherly fashion, would simply sit on the bill, Smith's chum, combustious Eugene ("Goober") Cox of Georgia laid plans to force the bill out of Mrs. Norton's committee as soon as possible.

Legally, Mrs. Norton can stall for 30 days. Betting was: she would try for 60.

Probability was: House passage of modified Smith amendments during April; then a lingering death in the Senate Labor committee some time before the National Conventions meet; then a resurrection of the issue in the Presidential campaign.

In this most recent chapter of Labor's history, political moralists could find much to marvel at, little to approve. Labor's Magna Charta was obviously in peril; equally obviously, the peril had arisen in part from zealotry in the Government and greed in the house of Labor itself.

*Adair v. United States, 208 U. S. 161 (1916) and Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U. S. 1 (1915).

*While Mr. Roosevelt could possibly renominate the present members, shrewd Mr. Smith believes one or more might not get Senate confirmation.

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