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Understanding The Dollar Crisis
activities.... I t . . . required employers to bargain collectively with the union so certified. 3 And it is not only in official circles that we find this fallacy. Here is a quote from one of the last great old-time liberals of America, who passed away in 1964 at the age of 93. He was one of the most respected men of our legal profession, Roscoe Pound, the last of the old liberal Deans of the Harvard Law School. Since his retirement as Dean in 1936, a saying has become popular about people who go to Harvard: it is that you enter Harvard and then turn left. But this gentleman was one of the old school. In his little pamphlet, Legal Immunities of Labor Unions, written in 1957 when he was 86, he reiterated this popular error when, in this otherwise fine work, he said: "In an era of huge incorporated industrial enterprises there had come to be gross inequality of bargaining power between the incorporated employer and the individual workingman . . . . Traditional sanctity of property restricted effective employment of collective action in case of strikes . . . . Traditional ultratechnical judicial procedure resulted in a legal system which put the worker in a condition amounting almost to subjection. Reaction was inevitable." 4 This general lack of economic understanding extends throughout the Western world. In the lectures that follow I shall touch somewhat on this problem in England, and how it contributes to the financial problem there. Union Policies Need to be Analyzed Questioning the virtues of organized labor today is like questioning or attacking religion, monogamy, motherhood, or the home. In public opinion, the test of whether one is for or against labor, the workers, or the poor in general is one's attitude toward labor unions. One simply cannot argue that certain union policies hurt labor, and expect to be taken seriously. The fact is, of course, that union policies have hurt 3. The Workers' Story, 1913-1953 (U.S. Dept. of Labor, 1953), pp. 78, 79, 87 & 90. 4. Published by the American Enterprise Assoc, Inc., p.2.