New Labor Charter

In other congressional action last week:

P: The Senate passed 88 to I (Nevada's George Malone) the Kennedy-Ives labor bill (TIME, June 23), after voting to require employers as well as union officers to swear that they are not Communists to qualify for National Labor Relations Board services. The Senate earlier rejected a Kennedy-Ives proposal to strike the requirement from the law as "ineffective." Aiming at correcting labor abuses by requiring 1) periodic secret-ballot union elections, 2) regular union reporting to the U.S. Labor Department on financial and other dealings, the bill now goes to the House, where its fate, in an election year, is doubtful.

P: The House passed, 345 to 12, and sent to the Senate the long-awaited Administration bill to soften the McMahon Act's atomic secrecy provisions. Under the bill the Administration would have discretion to tell any NATO ally the latest facts of the size and destructiveness of nuclear weapons, could also pass along, subject to congressional veto, nonnuclear components of atomic weapons for arming by the U.S. in the event of war. Any ally that had made "substantial progress" in its own atomic weapons program (i.e., Britain), subject to the same veto, could receive actual weapons designs, nuclear materials.

P: The Senate, illustrating the swiftness with which hot political issues sizzle up and then subside in Washington, passed a bill creating a new space agency by voice vote with only a third of its members present. Under its terms, space research and space projects programing would be planned by a seven-man board consisting of a new space director, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and representatives of three other agencies interested in astronautics (not more than one of them in the Defense Department). The measure now goes to conference to iron out differences with a House bill passed early this month, which would create a single space boss, taking advice from a looser 17man committee but not bound to follow it.

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