Square Deal for Labor?

"My fellow Americans," said President Eisenhower, looking squarely out from the nation's TV sets one night last week. "I want to speak to you tonight on an issue of great importance to every man, woman and child in this nation. It is above any partisan political consideration. It affects every American regardless of occupation, regardless of political affiliation. I speak of labor reform legislation."

For weeks the President had been urged by Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen and House G.O.P. Leader Charlie Halleck to do what he had never done in the six and a half years of his administration : throw his great public prestige into a raging congressional fight--this time into a long, long fight for labor reform with teeth. Last April the Senate passed the mild and much-amended Kennedy-Ervin bill that requires unions to make annual financial accounting, bars convicts from high union jobs, respects rank-and-file rights, but makes no real move to clean up abuses of boycott and picketing power. Last fortnight the House Labor and Education Committee reported the milder-than-that Elliott bill (TIME. Aug. 3), which was favored by Speaker Sam Rayburn, opposed by a powerful coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats.

Last week the G.O.P.-Southern Democratic House coalition got behind sterner, identical bills filed by Georgia Democrat Phil Landrum and Michigan Republican Robert Griffin. In an advance nosecount, the coalition could only muster 209 votes for Landrum-Griffin--ten short of the 219 needed to win. Results:1) the President decided to take to TV to demand reform of labor inequities--"a national disgrace," and 2) Virginia Democrat Howard Smith, Chairman of the Rules Committee, stalled the mild Elliott bill just long enough so that the President could make his speech, and public reaction could pile up before floor debate begins this week.

Earnest Hope. "I want only effective protection from gangsters and crooks for the people of America," said the President. "Chief among the abuses," as he sees them:

BLACKMAIL PICKETING. "Take a company in the average American town--your town. A union official comes into the office, presents the company with a proposed labor contract and demands that the company either sign or be picketed. The company refuses because its employees don't want to join that union . . . Now, what happens? The union official carries out the threat and puts a picket line outside the plant, to drive away customers, to cut off deliveries. In short, to force the employees into a union they do not want. I want that sort of thing stopped. So does America."

SECONDARY BOYCOTT. "Take another company--let us say a furniture manufacturer. Instead of picketing the furniture plant itself [the union officials] picket the stores which sell the furniture this plant manufactures ... to make the stores bring pressure on the furniture plant. How can anyone justify this kind of pressure against stores which are not involved in any dispute?"

No MAN'S LAND. "A labor dispute occurs at a small plant. The union or the employer goes to the Federal Labor Board. The board says the case is too small for federal action [and] state officials can't do anything because the states have no authority. That leaves the worker and his employer in this no man's land ... So all too often the dispute is settled--if we can use such a word--by force ... I want to give the states authority ... I want the no man's land abolished."

Of the bills in Congress, the President summed up, the bill that best measured up to these needs was the Landrum-Griffin bill*--"a good start toward a real labor reform bill." He gave his point extra punch when he stressed his final-term nonpartisanship. "I don't come before you in any partisan sense--I am not a candidate for office." And he carefully stopped just short of the Write-Your-Congressman-Now appeal that would have weakened that impartiality. "It is my earnest hope," he said, "that Congress will be fully responsive to an overwhelming national demand. Thank you and goodnight."

Above the Battle. Just as the President's congressional advisers had expected, thousands of letters, telegrams, phone calls swamped the White House and Capitol Hill. Two hours after Ike signed off, A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany took to the air to argue that the Landrum-Griffin bill was "a blunderbuss that would inflict grievous harm on all unions.'' And A.F.L.-C.I.O. Vice President Walter Reuther, attending a conference of the United Auto Workers and the Machinists' Union, said that the President "has been taken in by the opponents of organized labor." The Landrum-Griffin bill, Reuther added, "will weaken the honest labor unions and play into the hands of the dishonest."

The A.F.L.-C.I.O. was all out for the mildest-yet labor bill, filed by California Democrat John F. Shelley (former president of the California State Federation of Labor). The Shelley bill skips over picketing and boycott abuses, requires financial accounting from unions, and also from management "of expenditures for union-busting activities and hiring of labor spies," as George Meany put it.

Thus, on the eve of the biggest battle of the session, the heat was on some 15 to 20 Republican swing voters who might be pulled by homeside railroad and building-trades union lobbyists to vote for mild legislation. It was also on an equal number of Southern Democrats tempted to vote for a tough bill but under heavy pressure from Speaker Rayburn--"This is a party issue. What are you, a Democrat or a Republican?"--to vote for the Elliott bill. And over the battle hung the prospect of a presidential veto of any labor bill that did not meet the proposition, as the President put it, "that American workers and the public get the kind of protection that Americans deserve."

*Specifically, the Landrum-Griffin bill 1) bans picketing by one union where another union is recognized, also where the picketing union has not applied for a NLRB recognition election within the preceding 30 days; 2) extends Taft-Hartley's partial ban on secondary boycotts to railroad, airline, farm and domestic workers, outlaws threats of boycott; 3) authorizes states to handle no-man's-land disputes.

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