a considerable time of employment. On the other hand, if he comes up and he is not as direct, he doesn't say, "I want you to get these nonunion men off the job," and he says, "I wish to unionize this job," and he pickets for organizational purposes, then you have the same result.

Mr. TELLER. As a practical matter, do not the unions in the building and construction industry perform a highly valuable, nationally beneficial job of developing skills among working people in the crafts?

Mr. KELLER. In many areas and in many instances, yes. And I think the contractors work with them.

Mr. TELLER. What does your association do to develop skills and craftsmanship among workers? What training program do you have? What schools do you maintain? What do you do about that? Mr. KELLER. They are participating with the unions that have apprentice training programs.

Mr. TELLER. You are participating with the union?

Mr. KELLER. Yes.

Mr. TELLER. You have none of your own?

Mr. KELLER. No, I don't know of any.

Mr. TELLER. After all, our point of view about the building and construction industry should have much to do with our thinking and prevail upon us in our attitudes as Members of Congress. Would you tell me what the employers in this country are doing which is remotely comparable to what the building unions are doing in the field of developing skills necessary for bricklayers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and other skilled craftsmen?

Mr. KELLER. I can cite one example. The Dallas chapter has an apprentice training fund created and established between itself and the Ironworkers Union, whereby they are training apprentice ironworkers and financing it.

Mr. TELLER. These programs of apprentice training in which the employer participates with the union are somewhat like the welfare plans, in which the union compels it through collective bargaining and the employer finances it in part or in whole; is that not true? Are these not really union training programs?

Mr. KELLER. I cannot speak for all of them. The one that I have intimate knowledge of has a joint board of trustees, and they have weekly or monthly meetings in which they pass upon the business at hand, but it is a joint program.

Mr. TELLER. But these joint programs are fairly episodic, compared with the union programs for developing skills which are highly necessary for the Nation's defense effort and, if I may paraphrase a remark which you have here, which are highly important to the armament race with the Reds and the struggle for world trade. The unions, particularly in the building and construction industry, do perform this highly important job of developing skills in a program where there exists no comparable employer's program. Is that not true?

Mr. KELLER. I think that is right.

We

I would like to say I hope you have not misunderstood me. take no stand in opposition to apprentice training programs. We think they are wonderful and a great thing. We participate in them;

we help support them. We realize the source of employment that comes from them, but they have the better and more competent and more able workmen.

Mr. TELLER. In fact, Mr. Keller, the right-to-work laws are in large part completely theoretical in those States which have such laws, when it comes to the building and construction industry, because as a practical matter, the unions create skills, and in order to get skilled people, you have to go to the union, or the union participates helpfully in developing the skills which the employers call upon; is that not true?

Mr. KELLER. In many instances I think that is correct. We still have a lot of trouble with the proposition, separate and apart from apprentice training programs, the arguments between skilled and semiskilled and unskilled employees, why secondary boycott exemption should be applied to the construction industry. We readily agree that the apprentice training program is a wonderful thing. We participate in it. As I say, we have master contracts with unions. We appreciate unions. We appreciate good unions. But we open up a whole area of controversy, disputes, over grievances and minor things, where you can shut down vital civilian and Federal projects for long periods of time.

One thing we have not talked about yet is the tremendous economic loss that is thrust upon a lot of these employees who are pulled off jobs. I have seen bricklayers so mad that they cried, because they needed the money before Christmastime, and they couldn't work because their business agent wouldn't let them cross a picket line, over a minor dispute.

Mr. HOLLAND. Would you yield there?

Is that the reason why you passed the right-to-work bill in Texas, to see that everybody has the right to work at all times, even in depressions and so forth?

Mr. KELLER. As I understand it, sir, the right-to-work law is premised on the basic theory that a man should in this country of freedom either be free to join a union or not to join, as a matter of choicewhich is the keystone of all the Federal legislation for the last 25 years. That is the principle that Mr. Wagner stood on when he got up and introduced his bill: freedom of choice.

Mr. HOLLAND. Of course, there is another thing, too, that we are here for the common welfare of all people.

Mr. KELLER. I appreciate that, sir.

Mr. HOLLAND. What surprises me is that practically all people from the South, who have been taking some of our contracts up north, for your information, are appearing here. It seems strange that they are all from right-to-work States. I think what you are trying to do is continue your job to put the worker again in such a position that he will not be paid standard wages.

Mr. DENT. Mr. Teller, would you yield on that apprenticeship? Mr. TELLER. Yes, I vield.

Mr. DENT. Mr. Keller, you said you agree with the apprenticeship programs and you think they are wonderful.

Mr. KELLER. Yes, sir.

Mr. DENT. You know that an apprentice works for a period of 4 years in practically all of the journeyman trades, for very low wages. It might interest you to know that when I learned my trade I worked 6 months and was not even allowed to put an oil rag to the lathe, for 12 cents an hour, and after 4 years I was a journeyman machinist.

Do you think that after he has worked for 4 years as an apprentice at real low wages and it might interest you to know that the wages differ as much as, in this particular instance (displaying payroll tickets), $2 an hour, an apprentice in his last year of apprenticeship, as compared to $3.75 an hour for the journeyman. And in the open shop States that you are talking about, they demand and put into effect a journeyman ratio to the apprentice of 5 apprentices for 1 journeyman, whereas the normal rule among the unions would be, in a properly operated organization, 1 apprentice to 5 journeyman. What is happening is exactly what we are trying to stop in this thing. After the man has gone through 4 years and became a journeyman, how can he protect his status as a craftsman and as a journeyman if he does not have the right to strike and to enforce that strike with a picket? And unless you have situs picketing of all the subcontractors affected in a single contract on one particular site, the strike is ineffective and the journeyman loses the value of the 4 years he went through as an apprentice.

An unscrupulous employer will hire an ill-trained, ill-prepared worker for less money; we know that. We are talking dollars and cents. This is a practical question that we are equating here. It is not a situation of, as you put it in your statement on page 14:

As to who actually bears the full brunt of the picket line, ask the plumber, the carpenter, the electrician, * or their wives and children.

This is not a question of sentiment; it is a question of dollars in the pockets of the employers or dollars in the pockets of the employees, the whole base of the thing.

Let me show you something. The rate in the city of Baltimore, the city rate, is $2.57 an hour for a journeyman. That is the city construction rate, which usually runs about a year behind the union rate in the community, because they follow the preceding year in setting up the rates that the city pays, also under Davis-Bacon. And you find that the open shop rate is $1.60 an hour.

In the open shop rate, the journeyman who is in there or rather, the craftsman, in 99 percent of the times has never had any apprenticeship training. He has not had to go through the 4 years of college that you as a lawyer had to go through. You do not allow anybody in on your field of endeavor, and I will bet there are some men that could plead a case before a judge that never went to school, but you will not allow them to do it; and the same situation here. These are craftsmen, trade men.

The whole program is one that you are pleading on the basis of dollars, and I wish you would leave sentiment out of it. I have never known in my entire history of a contractor saying to his men, "Tomorrow I am going to raise your pay, give you unemployment compensation, give you workmen's compensation," unless they did have a strike along the line somewhere. You know that and I know that. It might interest you to know this percentage, too, Mr. Keller: years ago in the city of Baltimore there were 50 general contractors

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that were union contractors. Today, after 10 years of open-shop operation, there are only five union general contractors. The openshop contractor pays $1.60 an hour; the union shop contractor pays $2.75. You talk of coercion? What greater coercion is there in the world than the question of a nonunion open-shop contractor bidding against a union contractor? Yet this same open-shop contractorand here are the pay slips to prove it, sir-who pays $2.57 an hour on jobs that are under the Davis-Bacon Act, and on the same employee, in the same week of employment, in a nonunion open shop, he pays that same journeyman electrician $2 an hour for performing the same work.

That is what you are fighting for in this thing? If you are, I don't blame you. If you were a union lawyer now, I will bet you would make the best plea against this bill that was ever made, because it is your job to get what you can and to work for whoever pays you the most and gives you the best work; the same with the journeyman. But imagine this kind of an incident: $2.57 an hour for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and $2 an hour for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

That is what they are trying to stop here. They are trying to protect their training as apprentices, because they are journeymen trade men today. That is all it is. It does not affect what you have said in your instances here of picketing, secondary boycotting away from the site, of coercing another union not to enter. What greater coercion is there than to break down a union contractor with a nonunion contract or bidding against him on work?

That is all it is. It is nothing other than that. The 50 contractors are down to 5 in a period of 10 years, and in the period of the next 5 years there will not be 1 left in the city of Baltimore.

That is all I have to say.

Mr. TELLER. I have no further questions.

Mr. PERKINS. Mr. Griffin?

Mr. GRIFFIN. I would like to pick up from what Mr. Dent has just said.

It is hard for me to understand the gentleman because he seems to be saying that what a majority of the employees in a given bargaining unit may desire, whether they want to join this union or that union, does not matter. Apparently, the gentleman is advocating that they must belong to whichever union seeks to organize them; is that what he is saying?

Mr. DENT. No, no. I don't think I said that at all, Mr. Griffin. Mr. GRIFFIN. Well, is that not about what it comes down to, though? Mr. DENT. No; it does not come down to that at all, sir. It just comes down to this: that if a nonunion contractor bids against a union shop contractor, he gets the jobs. The coercion, then, is placed against the union contractor to limit unions in order to bid and compete with the nonunion contractor.

Mr. GRIFFIN. What does the gentleman want to do? I would guarantee the employees of the nonunion contractor, who receive lower wages, the right to join a union and to bargain; and they have that right and we should protect it. What do you want to do? Mr. DENT. I do not want to do it the same way you do.

Mr. GRIFFIN. Would you want to force them to join a union?

Mr. DENT. NO; I have never forced anybody to join any union. But I will say that when a nonunion contractor puts a plumber to work doing pipefitter's work, he is in a better position to bid against a contractor who has plumbers doing plumbing work and pipefitters doing pipefitter's work. When he then, in competition in a bid with a nonunion man, attempts to use his pipefitters to do the plumbing work, and the plumbers go out on strike, I want those plumbers to have the right to picket against the pipefitters doing their work. That is all.

Mr. GRIFFIN. Well, I would agree with you on that, sir.

Mr. DENT. You would? Then vote for the bill. That is all we are trying to do. There is nothing different.

You show me where in this bill I am saying that a man has to join a union. Show me.

Mr. GRIFFIN. It is difficult for me to get any other conclusion from the statement made a few moments ago.

Mr. DENT. If you will read it back and point out to me where I said that this bill would give the right to a contractor to force everybody to join a certain union, I will apologize, because I did not mean it that way.

Mr. GRIFFIN. Let us use the United Mine Workers, district 50, as an example. What if it does not have the same apprentice training as the building and construction trades department? That is what you were concerned about a few minutes ago. What do you do about it?

Mr. DENT. I would not do a darned thing about it. If they had a contract on the job, it would be their right to picket the job that tried to take their job from them.

Mr. TELLER. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. GRIFFIN. Yes. I am just trying to figure out what the gentleman was saying.

Mr. DENT. You have been figuring since last year.

Mr. TELLER. Do I understand you to contend that this bill would be unfair to other unions?

Mr. GRIFFIN. Yes, I do, Mr. Teller.

Mr. TELLER. I would like to see that developed.

Mr. PERKINS. That is an important question; and let us, in listening to the discussion, be as quiet as possible. Go ahead.

Mr. GRIFFIN. Let us suppose, Mr. Teller, that the Christian Labor Organization, for example, has obtained a collective bargaining agreement under the prehire section, which was enacted for the building and construction trades last year. Let us say there has not been an election-and this would be true in many cases where employers recognize unions in building construction cases. So, until there has been an election and certification, a question of representation under 9(c) can be raised.

Mr. TELLER. Despite the fact that there is a contract?

Mr. GRIFFIN. Yes.

Mr. TELLER. Then, what happens to the amendment, Mr. Griffin, which you had inserted in the Landrum-Griffin bill, and which became law? I say to you that you are not giving sufficient scope to the very law which you hoped to pass last year; because under that, if

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