Dream Bill

All week in the White House Cabinet room, Harry Truman's top labor advisers worked on the Administration's labor bill. Five Cabinet members at one time or other sat in on the sessions. When they were done, A.F.L. and C.I.O. leaders were called in to have a look at it. After all, Harry Truman had made a campaign promise to labor--to kill the Taft-Hartley law, which the unions had branded the "slave labor law." The union men looked over Truman's new bill, and didn't like the provision for federal injunctions, in strikes affecting the national welfare. Harry Truman ordered it out. The union leaders went away happy, with what amounted to an improved Wagner Act. C.I.O. General Counsel Arthur Goldberg called it a "dream bill."

The only question was whether the dream would come true, and in all details.

Labor Secretary Maurice Tobin put the bill in his tan briefcase one evening last week and went up to Capitol Hill to deliver it in person. Of the Taft-Hartley Act provisions it would kill:

P: The bans on the closed shop, on union political spending, on strikes by federal employees.

P: The right to use injunctions against labor, except possibly, in cases of jurisdictional strikes.

P: The non-Communist oath for union officials; the requirement that unions be liable for most of the labor practices that Taft-Hartley had defined as "unfair."

From the Taft-Hartley and Wagner Acts it would keep:

P: The bans on jurisdictional strikes.

P: The ban on unfair labor practices by employers (including refusal to bargain, and discharges for union activity).

As new or modified provisions it would add:

P: A section which would nullify closed-shop bans in twelve states when the product of labor was in interstate commerce.

P: A declaration that it is "public policy" to support compulsory arbitration clauses in labor contracts--but providing for no enforcement.

P: A 30-day cooling-off period for strikes involving the national welfare (such as coal strikes), during which a fact-finding board would make recommendations for settlement. The recommendations, however, would be binding on nobody.

Into the Opposition. Some Congressmen were quick to say they would not buy labor's dream. Louisiana Democrat Allen J. Ellender said that the President's bill would leave the nation defenseless against John L. Lewis. Faithful old New Dealer Elbert D. Thomas, chairman of the Senate labor committee, would try to hustle the bill on to the floor but there it would run into a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats. There were signs that the Administration itself, having made a down payment on its debt to labor, wouldn't mind too much if a few amendments were tacked back on. The non-Communist oath, for example, might be put back. And Harry Truman, who had found the Taft-Hartley injunction a handy weapon to use in four national-emergency strikes, might like to have it around again.

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