Strikes in the Union Essay Example

Strikes in the Union Essay Labour unions are, as we know, specifically exempted from the antitrust laws, and so the proposal is natural enough merely to remove the exemption. This would clearly be desirable in a number of situations in which unions do with impunity in the product market what business men may not do, and in others where unions become virtually agents in mutually beneficial deals with business men whereby the law is circumvented. But it is not clear to me how the courts would apply the law in the crucial areas of collective bargaining, strikes, boycotts, and picketing, for instance. The anti-trust laws as they stand are not directed to these matters, and sooner or later a set of principles appropriate to them must be evolved. It would seem to me that it is specific legislation designed for the labor area that is needed, and that only the greatest confusion could result from merely asking the courts to apply the anti-trust laws as they stand to labor unions.The weapons of labor in its struggle ag ainst capital arefew, but powerfulthe strike, picketing, the boycott, sabotage, mass protest and demonstration. However, changes have occurred in the form and the extent of their application. These changes have been the result, in large part, of labors increasing awareness of the strength of the weapons and of a greater knowledge of their use; in part, these changes have been adaptations to aggressions or recessions by employers and to interference by the government or intrusion by social agencies. Thus a strike can be the spontaneous, scattered, and chaotic walkouts of the railroad strikes in 1877, or the disciplined and well-organized walkout of the textile workers at Lawrence in 1912; it can take the form of the localized and isolated protest by the southern Colorado coal miners in 1913, or the federated nation-wide drive by all the steel crafts in 1919; it can serve as a symbol of sympathy and support, like the refusal of the railway workers in 1894 to handle Pullman cars, or as a demand for the release of political prisoners, like the demonstration strike of 1912 in behalf of Ettor and Giovannitti, or as a mass defense against a concerted employer-offensive, like the San Francisco general strike of 1934 (Babson, 1984).Capital, on its side, likewise has developed methods of controlling labor during times of peace and of defeating it in times of strife. Some of these methods are overt, such as the lockout, the hiring of armed guards, and the importation of strike-breakers; others, like espionage and the blacklist, are covert. Furthermore, in welfare work and the company union, capital has found more subtle and insidious means of controlling labor, splitting its ranks, and dissipating its force. Any doubt concerning the effect of welfare work, whether so intended or not, is dissolved by a study of the absolute domination over labor gained by the Pullman Palace Car Company or the United States Steel Corporation through their welfare systems. Any uncertainty c oncerning the purpose of the company union, no matter what its alleged intention, is clarified by a study of the conception and birth of the Rockefeller Industrial Representation Plan during and after the Colorado coal strike of 1913-1914. During the progress of the struggle between capital and labor, the government, whether city, county, state, or federal, has interfered often and has rarely proved itself impartial or neutral (Jeffrey-Jones, 1978).Nor should this intervention be unexpected, if it is remembered that the government was established on the principles of freedom of contract (at least for labor) and private property (Frazier, 1962). No amount of verbal artifice can conceal the fundamental opposition of organized labor to these two principles. When workers demand the eight-hour day or an increase in wages, they automatically invade the right of the employer to the full use of his property and the freedom of other workers to work a longer day or for lower wages if they so choose. When workers strike for recognition of their union and then picket in order to render the strike effective, they at once restrict the freedom of other workers to work where they please, with or without union affiliation, and the employers expectancy (which has been decreed a property right by the Supreme Court) to hire workmen. It is not strange, therefore, that in protecting the principles of private property and freedom of contract the government, almost without exception, sends its police, sheriffs, militia, and federal troops to help crush strikes. Nor is it strange that the courts sustain the dispatch of the governments forces against the strikes, by causing the arrest of workers on such charges as vagrancy, picketing, contempt of court, riot, and rebellion. Even legislation, perhaps in a more oblique manner, frequently operates against labor during a strike; for example, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the Interstate Commerce Act, while ostensibly enacted to curb the mo nopolistic tendencies of industry and commerce, served to father the labor injunction at the time of the Pullman strike of 1894 (Foulkes, 1980).In the same way, such social agencies as the press, the radio, the pulpit, the movies, and the schools are conservative, in the sense that they act to conserve the existing economic and political set-up of society, and to defend the principles upon which it is erected. As a result, they assist in suppressing any serious outbreak of labor that occurs, whether in the deliberate and conscious manner of the council of newspaper publishers that directed the San Francisco press in its onslaught upon the general strike of 1934, or in the naà ¯ve and unconscious manner of the New England clergyman who, in vindication of the 12-hour day in the steel industry, cited the words of the Toiler of Galilee-I must work the works of him that sent me while it is day; for the night cometh when no man can work† (Foulkes, 1980).The struggles of labor for b etter working and living conditions have led it to combine in organizations both for mutual assistance and for mutual protection. While many of these organizations were short-lived, as was the American Railway Union founded in 1893 by Eugene V. Debs, others existed over a period of years (and continue to exist) and exercised a steady influence upon the ideology and practice of organized labor in the United States. All degrees of attitude toward capital, the government, and society are represented in these organizations. The Brotherhoods of railroad workers, originally fraternal societies which slowly acquired the trade-union function of collective bargaining, have retreated gradually from the principle of collective bargaining to the policy of partial collaboration with capital and regulation by the government. Likewise, a large part of the American Federation of Labor has exhibited an inclination toward the idea of coà ¶peration with capital and the practice of mediation and arbit ration. On the other hand, the Chicago anarchists of 1886 and the Industrial Workers of the World renounced coà ¶peration with employers and condemned arbitration as enervators and partitioners of the ranks of labor. Between these two groups there developed a sharp conflict; one group was conservative, the other radical, in the sense that it wished to get at the root of labors difficulties in the existing society and, if necessary, to change the basis of that society. As a consequence, interwoven in the struggles of labor can be detected the influences of anarchism, syndicalism, communism, and other doctrines for the conversion of society. In other words, labor was led from its immediate desire for higher wages and fewer hours to an examination of causative defects in the structure of society (Foulkes, 1980).Besides the primary cleavage in organized labor between the conservative and radical factions, other secondary cleavages appeared as new problems of procedure and theory arose, bringing with them corresponding differences of opinion concerning their proper solution. Tactics were tried, discarded, tried again. Violence was answered at different times with the boycott, sabotage, counter-violence. Mass picketing was the reply to the labor injunction, mass protest and demonstration to the partiality of the courts. Certain problems recurred again and again, and some of them still trouble American labor organizations. One is the question of the Negro. Unless organized labor can agree upon a method of including him in its ranks, he will continue to be, as in the steel strike of 1919, a depressor of wages and a potential strike-breaker. Another problem, even more pressing, is that of craft versus industrial unionism. Shall craft unions, like most of those in the steel industry, be the structural unit of a nation-wide organization of labor? Or shall all the workers in an industry, regardless of skill or special craft, be included in one industrial union, capable o f united and simultaneous action? A third problem is dual unionism. Dissatisfaction with the conservatism of existing organizations, uneasiness concerning the official scabbing induced by craft unionism, inability to get rid of the wellestablished officialdom of trade-unionsall these have led to the formation of rival unions. Thus in 1912, the I.W.W., in opposition to the existing United Textile Workers of America, organized the workers in the entire textile industry of Lawrence, Massachusetts. More recently, the Communists have organized such dual unions as the National Textile Workers Union and the National Marine Workers Union (Barrett, 1987).An increasing number of unions and employee associations in public service are reexamining the use of strikes to resolve contract disputes. For many years, government employee unions voluntarily included no-strike pledges in their constitutions or operated under longstanding resolutions condemning strikes. However, at their 1968 conventions, two postal unions, the Fire Fighters, and the National Association of Government Employees deleted their no-strike clauses and directed further studies on the strike issue.These changes in attitude toward the strike occur at the end of a decade during which the number of strikes by public employees has risen steadily. In 1966-67 alone, strikes in the public sector, at the state and local levels, caused more idle man-days and involved more workers than strikes in all the preceding eight years ( 1958-65).Federal antistrike laws date from a 1912 prohibition directed at postal employees, who were granted the right to organize but were not allowed to join unions asserting the right to strike. Over the years this bar was extended to cover other Federal employees.Nearly two million school children throughout the country were denied critical days of education when the fall term began. . . [in 1967] because of disagreements between their teachers and boards of education. Breakdowns in negot iations between the parties over wages, classroom discipline, and managerial responsibility brought a rash of teachers strikes in New York, Michigan, Illinois, Kentucky, Florida and elsewhere. These strikes, and those of other public employees such as firemen, policemen, transit workers, garbage collectors, and social workers. . . raise serious questions for the public. Are such strikes increasing in number? Why do they occur? Can they be avoided, or hopefully even eliminated? (Barrett, 1987)We have all learned to live with occasional strikes in private industry. Why do we inject a different standard in public employment? Certainly the airline strike in the summer of 1966 caused some disappointment among vacationers and businessmen alike, and the Ford strike of 1967 delayed sporting new auto models to our neighbors. But by and large, these interruptions in industrial service and production are sufficiently irregular and sufficiently remote from our immediate needs, that we have come to accept them as a cost of the free labor market.Employees of Federal, state and local governments long protected by civil service rules have belatedly awakened to the fact that workers holding the same jobs in private industry have for a third of a century had the legal protection of the right to form, join and assist labor organizations of their own choosing, to engage in collective bargaining, and to withhold their services if offered conditions of employment that were judged unacceptable. As the services of government move more and more into tasks traditionally performed by privately employed workers, such as provision of light and power, housing, and recreational facilities, there are bound to be more demands for those rights long guaranteed to private industry employees.This is coupled with the fact that conditions of workers in private industry have surpassed or caught up with those of the public employee. Employees in private industry can win higher pay, shorter hours and better working conditions much more rapidly in an expanding economy, particularly in an era of even mild inflation. Any increased costs are easily passed on to the consumer. Government workers, on the other hand, once wage leaders, tend to be held back in their wage expansion by increasing demands for government services, and protests over rising budgets and tax rates. The existing legislative process of fixing civil service wages is slower, less responsive to direct worker pressures than is collective bargaining. These factors all help to create a wider and wider disparity between levels of compensation for comparable work in private industry and public employment. But, if this difference is not enough to spark public employee unrest, there are also wage disparities within the public employment industry itself (Jeffrey-Jones, 1978).A few craft unions in public employment, such as building-trades and building-service unions, have been successful through legislation and political pre ssure in achieving agreement to pay to those in public employment the prevailing rates obtainable by their union brethren in private industry. This tends to arouse further the jealousy of other public employees who have lacked the political strength to obtain concessions matching private employment benefits. This disparity may well increase in the future if wages in private industry take an inflationary turn.This contrast in levels of compensation has led trade unions traditionally active only in private industry, such as the Teamsters Union, the Common Laborers and District Fifty of the United Mine Workers, to begin organizational activities among public employees, particularly as their private industry membership remains constant or shrinks. Public employment is the fastest growing industry in the United States, making it an attractive area for the unions to begin organizing. More and more unions are likely to enter this field, thus increasing competition among unions to gain cont rol of this unorganized group.