GOP Labor Reform

As the biannual autumnal electioneering exhibition draws nearer its November denouement, both parties find accuracy less and less requisite in their campaigns. Vice-President Nixon might well be correct in saying, "The public memory is very short," but he and his party are insulting the voters' intelligence in proclaiming that the Democratic Party was responsible for the defeat of the Kennedy-Ives labor reform bill.

Shocked by the investigations of the McClellan Committee, the American public is quite concerned about the extent of labor racketeering in this country. Republican candidates for Congress, especially in the states with right-to-work laws on the ballot this fall, have declared that since the Democrats control Congress and the Kennedy-Ives bill was defeated, the Democrats defeated the Kennedy-Ives bill. This argument entirely misrepresents the issue.

Both Republicans and Democrats thought the Kennedy-Ives bill an effective measure to insure union democracy and to give control of welfare and pension funds to union members. The bill received the overwhelming affirmative vote of 88-1 in the Senate. Before the bill was considered by the House an extensive campaign was launched against it. Life, an unquestionably Republican magazine, attributed this lobbying campaign to the Teamsters, who seem to have a vested interest in racketeering, and to the National Association of Manufacturers and the United States Chamber of Commerce, who seem almost to prefer to keep racketeering in order to use labor as a whipping boy.

Contrary to the wishes of most organized labor, these three Republican dominated organizations conducted their campaign to a group of Congressmen mindful of campaign contributions in the forthcoming election. Seventy-seven per cent of House Republicans voted against the bill, while seventy per cent of House Democrats voted for the labor reform bill. Consequently, the bill did not pass.

The merits of the Kennedy-Ives bill may be debated, but the Republican Party should display a greater concern for the truth than to blame the Democrats for its defeat.