dustries and in the matter of product-producing industries generally. In my own company, for example, we are engaged in mining and chemicals manufacturing throughout the country. We have 44 union agreements in our company, local agreements, and there are 17 different international unions with which these local unions are affiliated. We believe we have reasonable, profitable labor-management relations with our employees that we built up over the years.

Mr. WIER. At this point, in your manufacturing business you deal with how many internationals?

Mr. THORNTON. Seventeen different international unions with which these 44 local unions are affiliated.

Mr. WIER. Are most of your locals in the chemical business?

Mr. THORNTON. We are in mining, we are in chemicals manufacturing, and we are also in the food industry.

Mr. WIER. What is your mining capacity?

Mr. THORNTON. We are in the phosphate industry, potash, mining industries. We are also in industrial minerals manufacture to go into the oil industry, to go into the glass industry, to go into agricultural chemical industries, fertilizers, and so on. We are broad base actually.

Mr. WIER. You are almost a monopoly?

Mr. THORNTON. Well, I wouldn't say so, hardly that.

Mr. WIER. All right.

Mr. THORNTON. It is very possible that this proposed legislation has some extremely far-reaching effects that were not really contemplated by the drafters of the bill. This legislation possibly goes far beyond the limits of the construction industry alone. Insofar as our own company is concerned I would like to cite a plant to you that we constructed and put into operation some 7 years ago. The plant now is double its size in capacity and more than double in the capital investment.

During those 7 years there has been no single year that we have not had construction going on inside the plant in modification. This construction work is frequently both on the interior of the plant as well as on the exterior; that is, we are modifying the equipment setup and changing it of an imaginative nature. We have consistently employed subcontractors and contractors for construction and we have not had any real difficulty. While we are a producing company, the industrial union was carrying out the production of the plant.

We see, however, the possibility under H.R. 9070 that we could have rather frequent difficulties in this plant in modifying it, in construction, and adding on, because our very plant itself under the definition becomes a construction site within the meaning of the proposed act. Picketing at this particular plant directed at the general contractor or any of the subcontractors on the job is going to have the effect of not closing down the construction work that is being performed, but it is going to have the effect of closing down the entire plant.

That is why I say it is very possible that this legislation has farreaching effects that were never actually intended by those who drafted the bill.

To sum up on this particular point, the stated objective of labormanagement relations legislation is always, I believe you will agree,

to create industrial harmony. This bill will pit union against union, management against unions, and thus create havoc. It, in effect, would declare, and will declare, war on industrial harmony.

I believe I read in the press that Mr. Reuther had some thoughts concerning the matter of trying to settle jurisdictional disputes within the framework of the AFL-CIO, but there has been a delay apparently in their committee making recommendations on the matter of arbitrations internally in settling jurisdictional disputes. Lacking that machinery and having the incentive of a bill like H.R. 9070 to settle these things under jurisdictional secondary boycotting, this could indeed even go much further than has been suspected in this matter of causing industrial disharmony.

I believe, gentlemen, with the statement that we put in the record those are our original comments.

Jack, would you like to add anything?

Mr. THARP. With the Chair's permission, I would like to point out that likewise in our formal statement that we have submitted we have analyzed the cases determined by not only the Board, but the courts with reference to the problem of common situs picketing, and I think that one of our strong arguments likewise is the fact that common situs picketing is not illegal per se under the present law, that the Board and the courts have determined the reasonable rules under which common situs picketing is permissible and, generally, without going into all the citations and boring you with that, the rule has been that, if the picketing is clearly directed to the primary employer and to his employees, the picketing is lawful under the present law and that it only becomes unlawful when the picketing goes beyond the primary employer and is directed to the secondary employer and the secondary employees.

Then it does become unlawful, because it is truly a secondary boycott at that particular point, but as long as it is conducted within the governing rules relative to primary picketing and is not secondary in nature, common situs picketing right now is lawful, and we think that rules that have been determined as a result of these Board and court decisions are certainly fair and reasonable and that there is nothing unequivocal about the law, as the unions currently contend. Mr. VAN AKEN. I think I would like to add one additional point to this. It is a little bit of repetition of what Mr. Thornton said, but I would like to expand it just a little bit, in view of the fact that Mr. Wier was asking some questions of Mr. Fry right directly in this area, and that pertains to the so-called special problems of organizing in the construction industry. The Denver Building Trades case was a case in which there was a nonunion subcontractor on the site, as you gentlemen undoubtedly know, and what the unions did there was to set up a secondary boycott picket against the primary employer and the subcontractors to force them to cease doing business with the nonunion subcontractor.

I submit that the construction unions can organize employers in the construction industry in the same way that other unions organize employers in industry generally. If this bill is intended for the purpose of forcing all nonunion contractors in the construction industry out of business or to force them to unionize their employees, then this bill is flying right in the face of the National Labor Rela

tions Act to which this is supposedly an amendment. There is a procedure set up in the National Labor Relations Act for determining the majority status of a union with a particular employer. If this bill is designed to force employers, such as the subcontractor in the Denver Building Trades case, then you are putting into this act a provision which is inconsistent with the other provisions of the act.

It will force employees who possibly do not want to belong to the union to belong to it or force their employer to force them to belong to it, which is the same thing.

That, incidentally, is an unfair labor practice under another provision of the act. Beyond that, if the employer does not force his employees into the union and if the employees do not choose to be forced into it either by their employer or by the secondary picketing which would be permitted by this bill, then they have the alternative of going out of business. Mr. Fry here gave a very good example of what could happen to a small contractor on a construction job.

He says that within a matter of a few hours or days he would be put out of business if construction unions are permitted to secondarily picket jobs which he has done. I submit that this will happen throughout the construction industry if this bill is passed, and that is contrary to the meaning and the spirit of the act as it now stands and I see nothing in here that would repeal the other provisions, so this bill would create absolute havoc on the theory by which employees are supposed to select unions.

This Congress doesn't have to go beyond its own records to see exactly what can happen by the use of this secondary boycott tactic for the purpose of organizing employees. The Carpenters Union, for example, has a long history of engaging in secondary boycotts virtually wherever it can.

After the Wagner Act was passed, which first set up the majority vote for union representation, the carpenters continued to engage in secondary boycotts. The CIO set up a Woodworkers Union, as you probably know, which organized a great many mills in the Northwest and the carpenters just refused to install the products which came from those mills. The result was the mills couldn't sell anything and they either had to go out of business or force their employees out of the Woodworkers Union and into the Carpenters Union, which is exactly what happened in wholesale lots, and those companies, history shows, did not regain their business until they did exactly that.

There are 166 pages of testimony in connection with the hearings that preceded the 1947 amendment to the National Labor Relations Act which deals solely with the secondary boycott activities of the Carpenters Union which was directed solely along this line. Incidentally, they are still engaging in similar activities, but nowhere near as widespread a scale, because of the fact that they do constantly run into trouble with the act as it now stands.

However, if this bill is enacted, they will be able to go right back to the same tactics that this historically employed and which was the real basis and the real reason why Congress enacted the secondary boycott provisions in 1947.

It has been stated, I understand-I was not here-in previous testimony that the Construction Trades Union did not intend to use this

bill, H.R. 9070, for the purpose of enforcing product boycotts. I don't know what the basis of this statement was, but I am sure that the man who made it is not in a position to control all of the many locals and internationals which are representing employees in the construction industry.

However, just in a very brief check I found two rules of various locals and district councils of the Carpenters Union which indicate to me that they do intend to do exactly this. For example, the Nassau County District Council of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters in section 51 provides: "No member will use, handle, install, or erect any material produced or manufactured from wood not made by members of the United Brotherhood."

That is in existence now. It is very difficult to enforce now because, wherever interstate commerce is involved, they can run into a secondary boycott charge. With this bill they wouldn't. All they would have to do would be to picket and say "We want you to cease doing business with this employer," and that would be the end.

Another one from the bylaws and working rules of the District Council of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters provides in rule 28: No member shall erect or place any non-union-made mill or cabinet work under penalty ***.

Rule 29 provides:

No member will handle, use, or install or erect any material, produced or manufactured from wood, not made by the members of the united brotherhood.

Both of these rules that I have read to you also provide for penalties for members who violate the rules, so I would like to submit that, although it has been stated here that it won't be used for this purpose, there is very strong evidence to the contrary in the working rules of the construction trade unions now, in the history of the way they behaved before the secondary boycott provisions were passed.

Mr. PERKINS. Mr. Wier.

Mr. WIER. Briefly, with the thousands of skilled workers employed in the building and construction industry, this first appears to be the groundwork for the open shop with which these building trades workers will now be confronted, and I wouldn't want you to think that they are happy with this law today. They are biding their time, of course, and it will be remedied throughout industrial disputes but I don't think it can be denied that in the past, now, or in the future the general contractor who is directly responsible for about six of the trades could start the progress of a major job. A hole has to be dug with laborers, hoisting engineers. Cement has to be layed, some brick, and then come the carpenters, and if there is steel in the building, the steel workers. Those are his employees that he is responsible for, so in those crafts the general contractor is the boss of the situation, but then he goes on to let the subcontracts to the electricians, the painters, the sheet metal workers, as best to his workers, the plumbers, the fitters, and there might be about 10 or 12 subcontracts let. So the experience has been and is today that a contractor from out of State, many times an irresponsible contractor, comes in and he has one or two of his men direct the job and then pays what the market will afford to the laborer that he operates on the open market.

You can't shut your eyes to a man that is trying to make a living at his trade, can't shut your eyes to that threat, and it is a threat. In my city where we have had a very good construction program for the last 2 years we have only had one occasion where that has happened and that happened on a Federal project.

Mr. VAN AKEN. What happened, Mr. Wier?

Mr. WIER. Where that has happened, bringing in a nonunion roofing contractor from New Jersey. That happened on a Federal project where the Government accepted his contract. He came into our city and proceeded to hire roofers as he could find them, directed of course, by his superintendent. There was no level of wages. He paid what he could get the men for that he thought could do the work. That is a threat to not only the roofers of my city, but it is a threat to every other one of the subcontractors. I have always contended, and it has been proven in recent years, at least in our part of the country, that the general contractors know this problem and they are always pretty careful to see that the subcontractor operates in accordance with the general contractor's policy.

In the year of 1959 to my knowledge the only dispute that we have had in the construction industry has been on this Federal project, over which we had no control. This was just this fall. The roofing contractor has been having a lot of difficulty, but the roofing company that came into Minneapolis from New Jersey swung this law into effect right after it was passed and the President signed it, which slowed down the activity on the job.

I have to concede as a member of the trade union movement that this would be a threat to my industry because we have in this Nation today a lot of contractors scattered around the country that do move into the cities and bid on jobs, and they come in knowing that they are going to operate on the open-shop basis and pay whatever they wish to pay. You don't expect the workers in my city to be happy with that situation, do you?

Most of

Mr. VAN AKEN. Mr. Wier, I would like to answer all your remarks, if I may. You say that the position that we are advocating here is going to lead to the open shop. It is very clear that that is not true. We are only advocating that you maintain what you have now. You don't have the open shop in the construction industry now. the construction industry is organized and many of the unions have closed shop agreements which are illegal. The Landrum-Griffin bill passed a prehearing provision. They can make prehearing agreements, so this is not the open shop.

You say there are going to be unorganized contractors on construction sites. That is true. There have been in the past. This is not a problem that is peculiar to the construction industry.

Virtually every manufacturer in this country, unless he has a complete monopoly, has nonunionized competitors. There is a good answer to that. They have to compete with those. We have always felt that competition was healthy for this country. I still think that it is, but in the metal fabricating industry there are hundreds of thousands of nonunionized metal fabricators who compete with unionized employers. What happens? If their wages and their benefits get too low, then they are ripe for organization on a legitimate basis by a