The Public Interest in Labor Dispute Settlement

Abstract

It is difficult to conceive how, in the long run, the interest in the settlement of labor disputes can be successfully distinguished from the common interests of labor and management. The welfare of the nation is dependent on the success with which the worker and the employer, fulfill their respective functions. No policy, regardless of how it is labeled, can effectively serve the interest which does not serve the interests of democratic trade unionism on the one hand and the system of private enterprise on the other. Nor can a policy succeed that does not contain within itself respect for the economic and personal liberties of all citizens, regardless of the side of the table at which they sit. Consequently, when, in the language of the policy makers, we speak of the public interest, we have-under discussion not a system of devices designed to protect one autonomous group of the population from attack by two others, equally independent, but a program that must be calculated to promote the interests of both workers and employers, for to one of these categories most citizens belong. And so this paper will not discuss a program designed to immunize nonparticipants against the consequences of labor disputes. Instead, the discussion will be based on the premise that the interest will best be served by'the formulation and acceptance of a program devised to serve the common aspirations of industry and labor to promote industrial peace without sacrificing basic concepts of economic and personal liberty. I I doubt that during the eighteen months following V-J Day there occurred a single major labor dispute that did not end up with editorial demands for amendment of the National Labor Relations Act. The authors of these demands appear to have accepted what seems to be a misconception of that statute. They have assumed some necessary casual relation between the Act's provisions and the inability of a particular company and union to agree on the terms of a collective bargaining contract1 There is, of course, no such immediate or direct relationship. The National Labor Relations Act was neither conceived nor enacted, nor could it