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The Abuses of Power. Joe had become much concerned about the irresponsibility of organized labor. The way it looked to him, labor under the New Deal had been building up power which threatened to swallow up free enterprise.
He was aware of the background to New Deal labor legislation. He conceded that the abuses of power by employers had brought about the penalties which employers now suffered. He could recall the great Carnegie Steel battle at Homestead, the sweatshops of the Manhattan garment trade. He might have known something of the terror of workers in union-hating plants. But what he saw now was a counterrevolution and New Deal excesses.
The New Deal, he thought, had lined up on organized labor's side and had become an out-&-out partisan of a single segment of U.S. society. The Norris-LaGuardia Act had put labor pretty well beyond the reach of legal injunctions. The National Labor Relations Act insured labor the right to organize. The NLRA in itself was not pernicious. But various interpretations of it plunged boards and courts into a swamp of contradictions. Both acts disarmed management, a fact which labor leaders were able to exploit to the full.
Shocking Climax. The National Labor Relations Board decided cases against management because foremen had reportedly spoken about the union in unsympathetic tones. Jurisdictional fights between C.I.O. and A.F.L. tied boards and courts in knots and left companies paralyzed. Labor power grew so great that even Government could not cope with it.
There seemed to be no way to achieve industrial peace except by giving labor what Sam Gompers once set as labor's chief aim: "More and more." In the spring of 1946 a kind of climax occurred. The great Railway Labor Act, hailed as the model machinery for peaceful settlements, broke down. An anguished and embarrassed Harry Truman demanded, among other things, the authority to draft the striking engineers and trainmen into the U.S. Army. And in the hysteria of the moment, 306 Congressmen agreed to that authoritarian expedient. The Senate, led by Taft, gutted the President's bill and it died. The whole affair ended in a kind of shocked and shamefaced silence.
But something had to be done, most Americans agreed. There was no consolation to be drawn from the fact that unions, in exercising their power, might also destroy themselves, as in the case of the recent 87-day strike of the Newspaper Guild against J. David Stern's Camden Courier and Post and Philadelphia Record. A disgusted Stem sold his papers; 580 strikers were left high & dry.
"Mr. Screwball." In recent months labor had been lying low. But Joe was not fooled. It was with a very earnest intent to do something that Joe Ball wrote his labor laws. There were practical objections to some of them. Some industries, notably the garment trade, believed that industry-wide bargaining and the closed shop had brought peace and stability. In the once strife-torn garment industry there has not been an important strike in 14 years. Union leaders and even some employers predicted that Ball's bills would throw some industries into chaos. They referred to Ball as "Mr. Screwball."
As for the morals of the closed shop, unionists argued that every worker should be required to contribute to a union which presumably worked in his behalf.