The Eleventh Commandment

The public was quick to denounce the selfish, greedy Railway Brotherhoods who were willing to sacrifice the welfare of a nation to achieve their own petty aims. The press leaped to the attack; scalding front page Philippics placed the curse of God and the fourth estate on the heads of the striking unions. Yet public and press alike have been unwilling to recognize the transcendent issues which the strike has spotlighted-issues whose ramifications extend far beyond the points of contention in the recent strike.

A dispute ever a few cents an hour pay raise or the provision of ice water in freight train cabooses is a matter of momentary concern. The fundamental question is "Where is the dividing line between private rights and public responsibility?". This nation has recognized labor's right to negotiate with management through the medium of collective bargaining; but collective bargaining becomes no more than a meek petition unless labor can back its requests with a strike or the threat of a strike. It is tyranny for the government to say "Thou shalt not strike" to workers in a private industry operated for private gain even though that industry be the railroads. Trainmen and engineers considered their grievances so serious that they were willing to strike. Their judgement is open to question, but by what right ought they be forbidden to strike?

Yet the railway strike endangered the welfare of the whole nation; in a week it would have drained the life blood from our industrial system. The cost of every day of the strike was the lives of thousands of Europeans who are depending on grain which last week lay useless in American freight cars. The strike could not continue and under great pressure the President took drastic action which scared the Railway Brotherhoods back to work. As a strictly temporary stop-gap Mr. Truman's program is barely tolerable, and as a permanent policy it is unthinkable.

The tense situation in the coal fields and the imminence of a strike by the Maritime Union give the nation little reason to hope that in the next few months it will be immune from strikes in essential industries. For the government to interfere in every strike which it considers inconvenient is for it to adopt the philosophy of Fascism.

How then are the people's welfare and the rights of the workers to be reconciled? Legislation pushed through in fury will not meet the immediate needs of the nation and can only serve to widen the already dangerous breach between labor and management. Rather the government's primary job is to guarantee the bare minimum of industrial operation urgently necessary to national and international welfare. To this end it should present the strike-bound industry with a plan for partial operation during the strike, and exert its full pressure to force acceptance. It is likely that even without governmental pressure management and labor would be willing to carry on absolutely essential production, reserving the main issues of the dispute to be thrashed out by collective bargaining. Government allocation would insure proper distribution of the reduced production. Should government recognize this as its legitimate sphere of influence in labor-management disputes, strikes might soon lose their threat to the whole people and again become simply an effective means of implementing collective bargaining.