Dismantling NLRB

IF YOU think the class struggle is dead, read Barron's Business Weekly. "National Labor Relations Board Must Go," muses their September 23 front page. Not by chance did the same article appear in the Wall Street Journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Charlotte Observor, the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Reader's Digest.

What is emerging from the woodwork is a heavily financed campaign to weaken the Federal Labor Act and abolish the National Labor Relations Board.

Long dormant plans to scuttle the Board were revived three years ago by three anti-union allies: the National Association of Manufacturers, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and Republican conservatives. In 1965 the NAM and the CC appointed a "blue ribbon" committee of management lawyers to research Labor Board "violations" of management rights. Their report launched broadside attacks against the procedure and integrity of the Labor Board, accusing it of blatant pro-unionism. "Legislative remedy," it said, "should be aimed at the chief offender--the NLRB itself."

In 1967 the NAM circulated the report nationally, along with well-named "ripper" amendments. Hill and Knowlton, a public relations firm versed in conservative causes, joined the campaign. (Hill and Knowlton formerly represented such clients as the gun lobby, the tobacco lobby, and the steel industry during the 1937, 1952, and 1959 strikes.) Under their direction, pamphlets of anti-labor research material were sent to newspaper writers around the county to encourage anti-NLRB editorials.

THE CONSERVATIVES' strategy was unveiled this September. The Chamber of Commerce announced to its members that the November election has "particular significance for labor law reform." Employers "have much at stake," it said, "and the time to start protecting that stake is now."

First, business must arouse anti-union feeling among the public. "Before we can take action to introduce legislation seeking major labor law reform," said an NAM vice-president, "it is necessary to create the kind of favorable public climate which resulted in the Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin Acts." According to plan, the public support and efforts of Congressional conservatives will push through the Congress a bill to abolish the Labor Board, which a Republican President will then sign into law.

A conspiracy to destroy a Federal agency sounds farfetched, but the political climate is dangerous. Most people believe that unions are disruptive and already too powerful. The dollar-an-hour wage of the grape workers belies this, but the recent strikes by teachers, telephone workers, and government employees have done little to help.

Further, a wide range of groups angry with the Supreme Court might, presumably, join in any attack that sets the precedent of stripping the Court of any part of its jurisdiction. (The "reformers" also propose to end the Court's power of review over NLRB findings.) Finally, though the "new" Republican Party is avowedly not the party of business, a Republican Congress will show little sympathy for the union movement that is its economic antagonist and the backbone of the Democrats.

PUTTING CHAMBER of Commerce "labor reforms" into law would be similar to putting George Wallace in charge of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. The Labor Board is essential to union growth and to labor's power to bargain. It provides the only impartial supervision for the organizing elections that decide if a plant is to become union. Without a watchdog, unions could hardly win an election, for an employer's mere suggestion that if the union came in he might close down business is often enough to keep workers from voting for the union.

Other seemingly trivial practices such as forbidding workers to pass out union publicity on company premises can cripple an organizing drive. Yet Federal legislation has never specifically defined an "unfair labor practice." Without a policy-making organ like the NLRB to decide what is specifically prohibited, injustices will flourish without remedy.

The abolition of the Labor Board will also restore turn-of-the-century government by injunction. At present, most complaints of unfair labor practices are settled by an NLRB field office informally, without adversary proceedings. Complaints that do require decision are represented without cost by the Board's legal staff.

If the assault succeeds, labor's prospects are grim; pro-business legislation is notably hard to repeal. Without the NLRB, unions will be hard-pressed to maintain current wage levels and to keep shops from "running away" to the non-union South. The drive to organize badly paid agricultural, hospital, and Southern workers will be smothered, for unskilled replaceable workers are easily intimidated by the mildest "unfair practice."

It is possible of course that without its comfortable berth in skilled trades and the Democratic Party and harrassed by an anti-labor law, the labor movement might regain the urgency it lost in the '30's. Labor might then become a suitably militant ally for blacks, students, and the poor. But more likely, with growth stifled, and membership yielding to automation, an already tired trade union movement will simply wither.