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A second bill would amend the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner act). It would guarantee employers the right to state their position in a labor dispute. It would protect craft unions and minorities from the past tendencies of NLRB, which often ruled in favor of big industrial unions. Thus the bill would "strengthen, not weaken, the rights of employees," said Ball. But it would not touch labor's right to organize, the cherished and long-fought-for right which the Wagner act insured.
The third bill aimed at such paralyzing stoppages as industry-wide strikes in coal and shipping, would end industry-wide bargaining by making it illegal for a labor organization to represent workers, or even advise or support workers in two or more companies more than 100 miles apart. Employers likewise would be enjoined from forming united fronts. The bill, said Ball, "will return the power to bargain to the local union where the individual employee can participate . . . and eliminate the monopoly situation where a handful of union leaders can shut off the nation's total supply of any product."
The fourth bill would outlaw any form of closed or union shop. To this one, above all, union leaders were wildly opposed. One goal of all union organizing is the closed shop. Outlawing the closed shop seemed to them like eliminating the baskets in a basketball game.
Ball had had some expert help in drafting his measures. Gerard Reilly, onetime member of the National Labor Relations Board, onetime Labor Department attorney and author of the minimum wage bill, now a Washington attorney and a good friend of Ball, had helped him write the Wagner act revisions. Donald Richberg, onetime labor lawyer and now a corporation lawyer, had helped Ball chiefly with the measure against industry-wide bargaining. Richberg was the man, say labor leaders, who led Ball "astray."
Taken all together, the Ball measures represented such a drastic rewriting of the ground rules passed by the New Deal (and by labor considered sacred) that the astute Bob Taft backed away. Harold Stassen, who came before the committee with a bland legislative pudding of his own, was solemnly aghast at the pungent recipe concocted by his old friend Ball. No more than half of Ball's measures would ever be accepted by the Senate committee. The industry-wide bargaining and closed-shop prohibitions would almost certainly be dumped. The bitter pill would be sugarcoated.
Reilly, a shrewd and skeptical observer, figured that the bill which would finally emerge from committee would contain no more than the following provisions:
A guarantee of free speech to employ—* With Jennifer, Peter and Sara. ers in labor disputes; a denial of the right of foremen to belong to rank & file unions; a measure against the secondary boycott; a federal board to arbitrate jurisdictional disputes; and some provision making it easier to sue a union in federal court for breach of contract.
But Ball was determined to take his fight to the Senate floor, particularly his fight to end the closed shop, which he considered an infringement of American liberties. "I want to hear some Senators argue that out on the floor," he said.