The Regulation of Union Economic Power

When I was asked to present this paper at this auspicious conference in the fiftieth year of the National Labor Relations Act, I thought, "They have given me the show." Union economic power and the regulation thereof is what our system of labor relations is all about. The rest is peripheral, indeed parasitic. Those initial provocative remarks are premised, I assure myself, on some rock-bottom of speculative analysis. I shall now probe for that rock-bottom.

It has three elements. The first is that the American system of collective bargaining is predicated on economic warfare. The second is that the role of government in such combat is umpire: (a) to protect the right of employees to form a "team" (to organize); (b) to establish and enforce rules for playing the "game." The third, a concomitant, is that we want to protect innocent bystanders from unnecessary involvement. What these three elements boil down to is this: free collective bargaining under a rule of law designed largely to establish the contest and to domesticate the strife.