Closing the Loophole

When the Retail Clerks Union signed a contract with the Food Fair supermarkets in Florida in 1960, four nonunion workers protested because it included an "agency shop" clause requiring them to pay "service fees" equal to union dues. The dissenters said that this violated the right-to-work law that Florida enacted in 1944. The U.S. Supreme Court last June upheld their argument but left a question open: Is it up to the state courts or to the National Labor Relations Board to interpret and enforce right-to-work laws?

In a unanimous 8-0 decision (former Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg did not take part), the Supreme Court last week held that jurisdiction over right-to-work issues lies with the state courts. "It would be odd," wrote Justice William O. Douglas, "to construe [the 1947 Taft-Hartley Law] as permitting a state to prohibit the agency clause but barring it from implementing its own law."

The decision sealed off the loophole that labor had hoped to use to circumvent the right-to-work laws that have been passed in 20 states. Right-to-work's prime target is the union shop, in which workers must join a union to keep their jobs. To overcome resistance to such compulsory union membership, labor has written agency-shop clauses into contracts covering an estimated 1,000,000 workers. But in 19 of the right-to-work states, the agency shop is now doomed. Among them, only heavily industrialized Indiana specifically permits it, and labor's only recourse in the others is outright repeal of the right-to-work laws. And while labor has managed to repeal such laws in Delaware, Hawaii, Louisiana, Maine and New Hampshire since 1947, Indiana is the only state where it now has even a remote chance of success.

But if labor's prospects of uprooting right-to-work are dim, the prospects of the National Right-to-Work Committee, under its President S. D. Cadwal-lader, a Cincinnati railroad conductor, of planting it in new ground are even dimmer. In industrial states, right-to-work is political poison. Says one A.F.L.-C.I.O. spokesman: "I'd like to see them put it on the ballot."

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