Legislation Ahead

Back in Washington after campaigning for governor through his native California, Republican Minority Leader William Knowland last week added his voice to the growing legislative murmur promising action in Congress next session to restrict irresponsible and corrupt labor-union activity. Knowland's theme: unions must be made more "democratic."

Knowland has reason to believe that he is on the right track. In liberal, freewheeling California, where Republican Governor Goodwin J. Knight boasts heavy labor support, Big Bill has bluntly been running for the gubernatorial nomination on a right-to-work platform as well as a seven-point scheme for tightening of federal labor laws. Although he plans no federal right-to-work statute, Knowland's federal proposals are aimed at other specifics, e.g., restrictions on uses of union funds, guarantee of a secret ballot in union elections and strike votes.

Already Bill Knowland has plenty of company on Capitol Hill. Maryland's Republican Senator John M. Butler announced that he wants to make organized labor subject to existing antitrust laws. Massachusetts' Democratic Senator John Kennedy, chairman of a labor subcommittee on remedial legislation, is at work directing a crew of experts who are examining a bookful of possibilities, such as tighter pension and welfare fund rules, strong laws defining conflict-of-interest deals, a federal commission similar to the Securities and Exchange Commission, that would protect the public interest against corrupt union activities just as SEC clamps down on abuses in business financing. Arkansas' Democratic Senator John McClellan will doubtless offer a series of proposals growing out of his labor-rackets committee investigation.

Well aware that their time has come, respectable union leaders such as A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany have drastically revised their matter-of-principle opposition to new labor laws, are willing to help legislative committees work up proposals that they think labor can live with. In any event, honest union leaders realize that the corrupt Dave Becks and Jimmy Hoffas, snorting their contempt of public opinion, have done more to hurt the workingman's cause than any outside antilabor crusade in history. With Congress on the move, they can only hope that the pendulum of public indignation will not swing them back to the miseries of their beginnings.

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