'End of an Era' for Organized Labor
NIEBUHR, REINHOLD
'END OF AN ERA' FOR ORGANIZED LABOR Steel strike points up need to protect public interest By Reinhold Niebuhr IT IS INTERESTING that so many thoughtful people have come, apparently...
...It is basic in the sense that while local transportation systems may not directly affect the total national well-being, they certainly threaten the life and health of the ever more intricate and large-scale urban centers of our nation...
...Although I am no expert on labor problems, I have followed most of the arguments of the specialists, and I think I discern the solution of the problem, at least in broad outline...
...Congress has only a short lime before the end of the injunction period to provide the necessary legislation for a new era, which will avoid both compulsory arbitration and threats to national welfare...
...But there is also a third factor which helps to prompt this almost general conviction that we have reached the end of an era in labor-management relations...
...The conclusion rests upon two presuppositions...
...but the policy seems promising...
...Perhaps the opinion that the bargaining process may threaten the common welfare should not be defined as a "presupposition" but as a conclusion, drawn from obvious evidence in the operation of a highly technical civilization...
...But it must be observed, apropos of the threatened transit strike in New York City, that the transportation industry, including municipal and nation-wide transportation, is also "basic...
...The other instrument was the comparable freedom and disinterestedness of our political institutions...
...They refuted the Marxist charge that government was merely the "executive committee" of the "owning classes...
...Unfortunately...
...According to reliable sources, this committee became convinced that the steel workers would never have sanctioned a strike on the wage issue alone...
...One is that collective bargaining has become a part of the process by which both justice is achieved and freedom maintained in our democratic society...
...The Taft-Hartley Act did not give it this authority...
...It has come to be regarded as almost as basic as the right to vote, though it has no Constitutional warrant and is not enshrined in the Bill of Rights...
...Perhaps this is a straw in the wind...
...They struck because they felt themselves threatened by the companies' insistence on having more authority over the work rules...
...Everyone agrees that the injunction provided by Taft-Hartley may have prevented an agreement between the contestants...
...That is the failure of the machinery provided by the Taft-Hartley Act to protect the public interest against the perils inherent in the free bargaining process...
...it may point to a basic solution of the important problem in which the failure of the injunction to protect the public interest has signalled the end of an era...
...END OF AN ERA' FOR ORGANIZED LABOR Steel strike points up need to protect public interest By Reinhold Niebuhr IT IS INTERESTING that so many thoughtful people have come, apparently simultaneously, to the conclusion, voiced by Adlai Stevenson, that the steel strike—or more particularly, the failure to settle the strike—has brought us to the "end of an era...
...If this is so, the committee might well have settled the strike if it had had the authority to participate in the bargaining...
...What is the reason for this general conclusion...
...It is to introduce the public interest through skilled representatives in the very bargaining process—and not by the heavy hand of an injunction at the end of the process or upon its failure...
...The evidence for this opinion becomes the more conclusive as bargaining units grow in size and "big labor" faces "big corporations" in the "cold war" of negotiations intended to avoid a strike...
...So we stand at the end of an era...
...But at any rate, the equilibrium of economic power was a valuable instrument of justice in our free society...
...In short, the protection of the public interest through the power of the courts has proved to be abortive...
...and that in any case, the 80 days in which the workers are forced to work under the authority of the injunction are not really a "cooling-off" period...
...The other presupposition which prompts the opinion that the steel strike represents the end of an era is that a breakdown of negotiations between management and labor becomes a threat to the whole national economy, at least when it occurs in one of the "basic industries...
...It may not...
...We shall soon know whether this experiment will prove the efficacy of this method...
...Fortunately, New York's Mayor Robert F. Wagner, when faced with the threat of a transit strike...
...The reason for its importance is this : It is generally recognized that the equilibrium of power achieved between management and labor and expressed in the bargaining process is one of the instruments used by a highly technical society, with ever larger aggregates of power, to achieve that tolerable justice which has rendered Western civilization immune to the Communist virus—because it refuted the Marxist charge that modern capitalism made for the "increasing misery" of the workers...
...An ancillary proof of its possible efficacy is given by the work of the committee which President Eisenhower appointed to investigate the issues of the steel strike before he called for an injunction...
...True, the equilibrium of economic power was not the only instrument by which Western democracies saved themselves...
...The steel industry is certainly "basic...
...sensibly introduced this method by appointing a distinguished panel to participate in the bargaining in the interest of the public...
...There is little prospect that the strike will be settled during the period of the injunction...
Vol. 43 • January 1960 • No. 1
