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10 A New Labor Policy Taking Industrial Democracy Seriously New Labor Polley Choices For eight years, the Eisenhower Board had deregulated employer opposition to unionization and collective bargaining and intensified the regulation of unions' use of economic weapons, particularly organizational picketing. McCulloch, Brown, and Fanning quickly set about reversing Eisenhower Board policy, just as the Farmer Board had done to the Truman Board's doctrines in the early 1950s. Almost immediately, the new Board greatly increased restrictions on employer speech and lessened restrictions on union economic weapons, including organizational picketing. The new Board also issued early decisions changing existing rules governing the appropriateness of bargaining units in ways that increased the likelihood of unionization. Those and other Kennedy-Johnson Board decisions-placing limitations on management rights; applying new and extraordinary remedies; facilitating union organizing in various ways, including ordering employers to recognize and bargain with unions on the basis of signed authorization cards rather than secret ballot representation elections; and disallowing certain management bargaining strategies-became rallying points for employer opposition to the NLRB. As one administrative law expert put it at the time, "policy-making is politics ."l This axiom applied to both the Kennedy and Farmer Boards. Each chose among possible policy alternatives concerning unionization and collective bargaining . For the next eight years, the Board chose policies favorable to unionization and collective bargaining. Organized labor was getting nowhere in its attempt to repeal Section 14(b), despite Kennedy's election, and had no hope of legislatively reforming TaftHartley or Landrum-Griffin. Consequently, organized labor counted on receiving substantial help from the new Board in strengthening its hand at the bargaining table, rebuilding unions' sagging membership, and particularly, opening 163 164 Chapter 10 the South to union organizers.2 At the same time that organized labor was foundering on both organizing and legislative fronts, employer spokesmen were portraying unions publicly as mighty economic monopolies with powerful political influence on legislators.3 Whether these public warnings about union power were employers' true perceptions or were exaggerated deliberately to persuade the public, the Kennedy Board majority considered them the railings of a marginal group of extremely conservative employers and not representative of the mainstream of major corporations, which the Board believed had accepted unions and collective bargaining. The new Board was seriously mistaken on both counts. Reversals of Eisenhower Board Policy Picketing and the Landrum-Griffin Amendments In late February 1961, only a few weeks before Frank McCulloch and Gerald Brown joined the Board, the Eisenhower Board issued its first interpretations of the Landrum-Griffin organizational and recognitional picketing amendments to Taft-Hartley.4 In a series of landmark decisions the Eisenhower Board interpreted the new amendments to prohibit a union from picketing for more than thirty days for recognition even though it was picketing to protest an employer 's unfair labor practices,' to outlaw recognitional picketing after thirty days even when it caused no stoppage of deliveries and truthfully advised the public that an employer was non-union and did not have a union contract,6 to define even small-scale interferences with deliveries as sufficient to make publicity picketing unlawful/ and to prohibit picketing to force bargaining as well as recognition.8 Only six weeks after the Eisenhower Board announced these decisions, McCulloch , Brown, and Fanning agreed to reconsider them at the requests of the unions involved and over the objections of Leedom and Rodgers. The new Board majority offered several reasons, some more persuasive than others, for the urgency with which it set out to revise Eisenhower Board doctrines: to meet the demands of a constantly changing industrial economy, "outside prompting" from the Pucinski hearings and report, and new guidelines resulting from the Supreme Court's reversal of many Eisenhower Board decisions.9 Put more accurately, the new majority would not accept and apply decisions with which they fundamentally disagreed. Ironically, they found ample support for their reversals of Eisenhower Board policies in the statements of Guy Farmer, the first chairman of an Eisenhower-appointed Board, who said pointedly: A New Labor Policy 165 My job is to interpret the law as I read it, not as somebody else who preceded me thought that it should read. I would not be so foolhardy as to blandly disregard the opinions of my predecessors, but I took an oath to administer the Statute, not someone else's view as to what the statute means. I would not have taken the job, and I certainly would not remain in it, if...

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