The New Labor Rules

If the President signed the new labor bill, or if Congress passed it over his veto, the U.S. would have the first set of new labor rules in a decade. What would they be like?

The bill was now being put together by a ten-man Senate-House conference committee, which was combining the Senate's Taft bill with the House's Hartley bill. The two measures attacked many similar points which would almost certainly appear in the final draft. If enacted, the nation's new labor law would:

P:Ban the closed shop, but permit the union shop* if a majority of the workers vote for it in a secret election.

P:Outlaw jurisdictional and sympathy strikes.

P:Make unions suable for: 1) damages resulting from such strikes, 2) any violations of contracts.

P:Require unions to file financial reports; require a worker's written consent to having his union dues deducted by "checkoff" from his wages.

P:Give minority craft and professional workers in a plant the right to have their own separate bargaining agents; exclude from the protection of the act any supervisors who can hire or fire.

P:Give any "substantial" group of employees the right to demand a new vote if they do not think the union truly represents them.

P:Guarantee management's right to speak its mind in a labor dispute so long as management does not threaten reprisals.

P:Create a Federal Mediation Service (in place of the present U.S. Conciliation Service).

P:Empower the Attorney General to seek an injunction in a strike affecting the "general welfare"; require a secret vote by the workers on management's last offer before such a strike can be called. (No final, mandatory method of settlement was provided.)

P:Open the way to Government injunctions against workers when they violate labor laws.

There would be argument over a measure to deny bargaining rights to any union whose officers were Communists or even party-liners. Both houses had approved the measure, but Taft and others believed it unworkable. It would certainly be susceptible to abuse by management.

The House conferees would fight for their effort to regulate a union's internal affairs (e.g., a $25 ceiling on initiation fees, etc.). The Senate was satisfied to let unions regulate themselves, although it did declare that "coercion or restraint" of workers by unionists would be illegal.

Peace in Our Time? The Senate bill would create a Joint Congressional Committee on Labor Management, along the lines proposed by President Truman, to study the whole field of industrial relations and report back to Congress not later than Feb. 15, 1948.

That in itself was an admission that the bill would not be perfect. Like all legislation, it would be the result of compromise. Both the Taft and Hartley bills were needlessly complex, and had some confusing passages. Neither represented a fresh start on the labor problem. They were amendments--fairly substantial--of the Wagner Act. But they in no way interfered with the basic purpose of that act, which was to establish labor's right to organize.

The final bill would take Government off the side of labor in labor disputes and put it back in the role of mediator. It would not break Big Labor's monopoly, but it would force Big Labor to recruit its members by persuasion rather than by Government fiat. It would not put any further economic risk into strikes, but it would make it more difficult to call them. It would try, by legal means, to make labor responsible--which it had not been under the free-&-easy Wagner Act.

As expected, organized labor roared. For one thing, labor had had protection from injunctions for 15 years. Phil Murray cried that the amendments would "tear up all the collective bargaining contracts in the country . . . put the Government's power squarely behind big employers." He was exaggerating. Labor tried to show that the whole thing was a National Association of Manufacturers' plot. The A.F.L. shouted at Congressmen in full-page newspaper advertisements: "Don't be a NAM fool."

Whether the bill would bring peace to industry remained to be seen. New rules would provoke new challenges, raise new questions, require new interpretations. Their workability would also depend on labor's political power and on the economic atmosphere. Whether the amendments were practical, as the Wagner Act was not, would have to be determined pragmatically. Lawyers got ready for a field day.

Closed shop: only union members may be hired. Union shop: workers must join the union after they are hired.

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