Westbrook Pegler
Longansport Press/September 20, 1956
Fair Enough
The open-shop laws of 18 states are an anti-trust movement as virtuous as the Sherman law forbidding monopoly in commerce. On the other hand, the two national laws fostering unions as proteges of the national government (first the Wagner Act and now the Taft-Hartley law) have actively helped a few hundred individuals to build up a national job monopoly. Many of those individuals are steeped in European socialism and reject the Republican form of government provided for this country.
Sidney Hillman never quite mastered our American tongue and he was a left wing Marxist.
MANY OTHERS ARE common, low grade native American loafers who acquired sheets of paper called union charters. If. eight bums gather in a back room and get an ambulance-chaser to write a letter to the AFL-CIO applying for a federal charter for a Brotherhood of Gent’s-room Attendants, elect a president, secretary-treasurer and two or three vice presidents from among their own circle and fill in the blanks of a standard form of constitution, they are likely to get their charter, with a gold seal in the lower right corner. They may then go out on the town, and shake down saloons and restaurants, night clubs and hotels and the gents’-room employees thereof. They can throw picket- lines around such premises and, under perfect conditions, can blockade deliveries of food, laundry and baggage and even prevent the employees in other departments from going to work. Payless paydays ensue for them. A standard union contract provides that the employer must maintain “hygienic conditions.” A picket line implies a probability of riots and constitutes bad hygiene.
I ATTENDED A MEETING of The World-Telegram chapter of the newspaper guild at which Heywood Broun and his communist clique were trying to strike the paper, throwing 3,500 people out of work, because Roy Howard did not intend to renew his contract. Broun brought in a speaker named Brown from a combination of the mechanical unions who said any dirty rat, scab, fink who tried to go through the line would be mobbed. That line would be an unhygienic condition.
Eleanor Roosevelt refused to go through a picket line at a New York theatre which was 100 percent union because the racketeers of the Musicians Union demanded that the management pay to the union office a few blocks off the equivalent of the wages of eight musicians in lieu of actual standbys for a phonograph which played a few bars of The Star Spangled Banner.
THE SHOW SOON closed and a lot of actors and other theatrical help were flat on the lot again.
The right-to-work laws are antimonopoly laws.
When the Sherman anti-trust law came up, the states had been unable to cope with monopoly reaching across many states. Obviously this was a job for federal authority. But there was no need for a federal labor relations law and board. The individual states were capable of handling their own labor problems. Many of them had good labor laws already.
BUT ROOSEVELT AND his cabal of union racketeers and Communists saw a chance to establish a terrible, mighty power over the employed people in the country, and shake them down for millions. So they created this monopoly establishing the political proposition that private organizations run by unqualified strangers have rights which the government itself never dared claim for itself. They established courts to assess fines and customs and to banish American citizens from all forms of employment forever in their own country.
This condition never has been quite achieved but that is the objective.
THE RACKETEERS WERE not quite efficient enough but they did establish and the government acknowledged a power to sell job-licenses known as union memberships to all the 65 million Americans now employed.
All American workmen are as much alike as so many corn-flakes, all entitled to the same pay, worst as much as the best.
So the open-shop laws are actually anti-monopoly laws to defeat the monopoly created by Roosevelt for his political ambition under cover of calculated confusion.
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