The Power Of Organized Labor

The power of organized labor was not always for the benefit of the public at large.

20th CENTURY
In the early 1900s union membership rose to 6% of the labor force and 2.7 million members by 1913 and the share stayed around 6–7% until 1917. This was the “Progressive Era” of 1900–1918 which “fastened a welfare-warfare state on America which has set the mold for the rest of the twentieth century…because a unique set of conditions had destroyed the Democrats as a laissez-faire party and left a power vacuum for the triumph of the new ideology of compulsory cartelization through a partnership of big government, business, unions, technocrats, and intellectuals.” [7]
WORLD WAR I
Prior to World War I, unionists were still on a relatively short leash. From 1842 onward unions had the clear legal right to exist, and workers could join such “self-help” organizations, but employers were under no obligation to “bargain” with these unions. The courts also tended (ultimately) to restrict union tactics such as threats of violence, violence itself, mob action and interference with voluntary trade. Further, the courts tended to make little distinction between business and union “restraints on competition.” They ruled, for example, that union actions in a boycott organized by the United Hatters of Danbury, CT, against the products of D.E. Loewe and Company (1908) was in restraint of trade under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 and fined individual union members responsible for the union’s acts (unions never incorporated lest they be held liable as an organization for damages they cause). Unionists therefore prominently demanded governmental privilege and mounted persistent and intensive campaigns for favorable legislation.
In 1912 Congress supplied new assistance with the Lloyd-LaFollette Act to compel collective bargaining by the post office and encourage postal union membership. In 1914 Congress passed the Clayton Act with provisions to exempt unions from the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act, restrict the use of court injunctions in labor disputes, and declare picketing and similar union tactics as not unlawful. Samuel Gompers hailed the Clayton Act as labor’s “Magna Carta” but subsequent court interpretations neutered the pro-union provisions.
The “national emergency” of U.S. entry into World War I provided much of the experience and precedent for subsequent intervention on behalf of unionism, as well as other cartel-like policies. Historian William E. Leuchtenburg, for instance, points out, “The panoply of procedures developed by the War Labor Board and the War Labor Policies Board provided the basis in later years for a series of enactments culminating in the Wagner National Labor Relations Act of 1935.” [8] Under pressure of World War I and the government’s interventions, union membership skyrocketed, hitting 12% of the labor force.
The War Labor Board and the War Labor Policies Board, the latter led by Felix Frankfurter and modeled on a directive by Franklin D. Roosevelt who represented the U.S. Navy on the board, proclaimed governmental support of unions and enforced pro-union measures on industry. The boards, for instance, ordered establishment of “work councils” composed of employee representatives and seized defiant enterprises.
The government even created a union, the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen and forced lumbermen to join in its battle against the radical leftist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, known as the “Wobblies”). The Loyal Legion collapsed after the war despite government efforts to keep it alive while others became so-called company or independent unions, subsequently banned by the 1935 Wagner Act.
Just as the War Industries Board led by Bernard M. Baruch and Army General Hugh S. Johnson was the forerunner for the 1933–35 cartelization under the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) administered by Johnson, the War Labor Boards were forerunners to the federal labor boards used to administer Section 7(a) of NIRA and the subsequent National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) created by the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act of 1935.




Now, President Mussobama and his Chicagp-oriented fascistic thugs are trying to turn this country into one big closed shop----at taxpayers' expense.