78-03-B1
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Labor[edit]
Transcript[edit]On January 25th the Senate Human Resources Committee reported out and sent to the floor of the Senate the so-called labor Reform bill which is a high priority item on organized labor's agenda. The President has pledged to George Meany and Company his support of this bill. While it is called a labor reform bill it is, in fact, a measure wherein government will give labor special advantages in its effort to recruit members and to organize workers in nonunion plants. Management will be given no c0mparable rights. The AFL-CIO has been declining in membership in recent years and has 500,000 fewer members than it had last year. It's ironic that the hierarchy of labor seeks this government recruiting help because just possibly their partnership with government may be the cause of their shrinking membership. Back at the time of the AFL-CIO merger, the late Walter Reuther, the CIO leader, influenced the leadership of the newly formed alliance to get things from government which, heretofore, labor had tried to win from management at the bargaining table. Maybe their success has made them less necessary to workers now. Opinion polls suggest that rank-and-file members find the leadership too powerful and too involved in politics. Whatever the reason, there is a growing desire on the part of many workers, both in and out of unions, to have freedom to choose. Faced with a loss of power, the union chieftains have come up with Senate bill 1883, and House resolution 8410 which they call mere technical amendments, but which in reality would make significant changes in the National Labor Relations Act. An enlarged National Labor Relations Board would, undoubtedly, have more power and a definite pro-labor, anti-management bias. Today, only one of every five workers is in a union and unions have been losing more than half the elections conducted under government supervision even though 80 percent of them aren't contested by management. Perhaps today's union bosses should go back and read again the words of the great labor stateman who created the American Federation of Labor. Samuel Gompers, in his last speech to a labor convention, said, "There may be, here and there, a worker who does not join a union of labor. That is his right no matter how wrong we think he may be. It is his legal right and no one can dare question his legal exercise of that right." Gompers said, over and over again, there could be no real strength in a union unless the members had freely chosen to join out of personal conviction. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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