The provision that the dispute must relate to "wages, hours, or other working conditions of employees employed at such site" has little, if any, restrictive effect, especially since the Board and some courts have construed the term "wages, hours, or other working conditions" to include nearly any lawful demand that a union may wish to make. For example, demand for a union shop on the grounds that union members will not work with nonunion people has been held a proper subject of bargaining, at least where there is no State right-to-work law in effect, and would doubtless be held to come within the term "working conditions." Likewise, this term might be interpreted to include union demands that only union-made products, materials, and equipment be used because union members will not work with nonunion goods.

The foregoing clause-by-clause analysis indicates briefly how broadly the act might be interpreted to permit secondary boycotts and product boycotts to affect many employers who are neither in the construction industry nor working at the site. Those favoring the bills may contend, however, that such broad interpretation is precluded by the opening clause of the proposed proviso which states "Provided further, That nothing contained in clause (B) of this paragraph (4) shall be construed to make unlawful where not otherwise unlawful," any strike or refusal, etc. Thus they may contend that secondary boycotts and product boycotts are "otherwise unlawful," i.e., prohibited by other sections of the National Labor Relations Act. For example, they might contend, in line with recent National Labor Relations Board rulings, that secondary boycotts and product boycotts restrain and coerce secondary employees and therefore are unlawful under section 8(b) (1) of the act.

It is true that the Board has recently so held with respect to secondary employees in the Alloy Manufacturing and O'Sullivan Rubber cases, 119 NLRB 307 (1957). 121 NLRB 1439 (1958). However, it took a divided Board 10 years after Taft-Hartley to reach this conclusion. Even now, the courts, influenced by the earlier position of the supposedly expert Board, are divided on the question. NLRB v. Machinist Union (Alloy Mfg. Co.), 263 F. 2d 796 (CA 9, 1959), NLRB v. Rubber Workers Union (O'Sullivan Rubber Corp.), 269 F. 2d 694 (CA 4, 1959). It may be many years before the question is fully resolved. Protection against the wholly unjustified secondary boycott and product boycott should not be left in this uncertain state.

It may also be contended by those favoring the bills that secondary boycotts and product boycotts would be "otherwise unlawful" under the hot cargo ban in section 8(e) of the act. That section outlaws any contract or agreement between a labor organization and an employer whereby he ceases or agrees to cease doing business with any other employer or using his products. But the hot cargo contract was merely a device which unions used to evade the secondary boycott and product boycott provisions of section 8(b) (4) (B). Since the present bills would make 8(b) (4) (B) inapplicable under the circumstances set forth therein, unions would no longer need to resort to the hot cargo contract to evade the boycott provisions. Accordingly, section 8(e), which was intended to close the hot cargo loophole, would seem to have no direct bearing on the situs picketing proposals and could not make "otherwise unlawful" the strikes and refusals described in the bills. Where a union can freely engage in a strike or refusal to perform services in order to force an employer to cease doing business with another, it has no need for a hot cargo contract. And when an employer yields to the pressure of such strike or refusal and ceases using another's product, it can hardly be said that he has thereby entered into a "contract or agreement" to do so within the meaning of section 8(e). He has "agreed" only in the same sense that a holdup victim "agrees" to hand over his money.

Thus it seems clear that the bills could be interpreted to permit secondary boycotts and product boycotts. Moreover, as already mentioned in the clause-byclause analysis above, such boycotts are not limited in their effects to employers at the site. There would seem to be nothing to prevent such boycotts from stopping operations of any employer at whose premises the construction, alteration, repair, or painting is being performed. Thus a manufacturer or other employer who is having an addition built to his plant or having alterations made or even having his plant painted could have his entire plant and operations shut down by a construction picket line which is ostensibly directed against an employer on the construction or other work but which all employees refuse to cross.

Similarly, a strike and picket line directed at an employer on the construction site who is using nonunion equipment, materials, or other products, could boycott such products, no matter where or by whom they are made. Thus the effects of

these bills could be felt by every employer who makes any product or furnishes any services that enter in any way into any of the types of work covered by the bills. This would include a large part of the manufacturing industry.

The bills have an emotional appeal based on the long-standing and wellpublicized claim of construction unions that they should be permitted to boycott any and all employers working on a single project at a single site. It is true that successive stages of work on construction contracts are generally performed by different employers, a fact which may be due in part to the organization of the industry on a craft basis by unions. But, in any event, this factor of successive work by different employers on a single product is not unique to the construction industry. The mining company which produces iron ore, the steel company which converts it to steel, and the automobile company which makes it into cars, all work on the same material at successive stages.

It may be answered that in the construction industry there is a further factor— that the employers are performing successive stages of work on a single integrated project. But neither is this factor unique to the construction industry. In the lumber industry, logging and successive mill operations ending in the finished product have been recognized even by the National Labor Relations Board as of such integrated nature that craft severance should not be permitted. Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, 87 NLRB 1076. Yet it could not be reasonably contended that where these successive operations are performed by different employers, as is quite often the case, such employers should be subjected to secondary boycotts.

Thus the present bills are nothing more than special interest legislation on behalf of construction unions to permit them to use secondary boycotts and product boycotts despite the national labor policy outlawing such boycotts. The Congress recently experimented with special interest legislation of a similar nature by granting certain special privileges and immunities to construction unions and garment workers unions when it amended the Taft-Hartley Act in 1959 to outlaw "hot cargo" contracts in section 8(e). The natural foreseeable and immediate result has been for other unions to contend that Congress should accord them the same privileges and immunities, and that it is engaging in favoritism until it does so. In one of the first cases to reach the courts under the 1959 "hot cargo" amendment, the AFL-CIO Lithographers Union attacked this section of the act on this very ground.

Pointing to the language of section 8(e), which makes the exemption applicable where different employers are "performing parts of an integrated process of production" in the garment industry, the Lithographers contended, in the words of the court, "that the garment industry and the lithographic industry have similarly integrated processes of production; that, therefore the lithographic industry should be granted the same exemption as the garment industry; that to the extent it is denied such exemption, section 8(e) is unconstitutional as a violation of the due process clause of the fifth amendment to the Federal Constitionu." Brown v. Lithographers Local 17, F. Supp. - 45 LRRM 2577 (U.S.D.C. Northern District of California, decided Jan. 13, 1960).

It is apparent, therefore, that unions themselves recognize that there is no real and valid distinction to justify special interest legislation which grants special privileges and immunities to some unions and thereby discriminates against others. Such legislation would inevitably result in urgent and persistent demands by other unions upon Congress to grant them the same privileges and immunities, and until those demands were granted, it would create dissatisfaction, unrest and dissention within organized labor.

Moreover, this special interest legislation for construction unions would permit secondary boycotts and product boycotts in the very industry where the abuses and evils of such boycotts are perhaps worse than in any other. It is well known that construction projects involve high overhead once they start and the work must be performed promptly on tight schedule if excessive costs are to be avoided. Accordingly, secondary boycotts which can stop an entire project put intolerable pressure upon the employers to yield to whatever demands a union may make. This has notoriously resulted in high construction costs and, before the Taft-Hartley ban on secondary boycotts, in virtually a closed shop and monopoly union control over employment in the construction industry. Thus, even if the pending bills were limited wholly to the construction industry in their effect, they would nevertheless be in direct conflict with national labor policy as determined by the Congress and would represent a backward step toward the uncontrolled union abuses that existed before the Taft-Hartley Act was passed.

In view of the foregoing, we respectfully urge that this subcommittee reject the proposals embodied in H.R. 9070 and similar bills designed to weaken and make ineffective the secondary boycott protections afforded by the National Labor Relations Act.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, Washington, D.C., February 29, 1960.

Hon. CARL D. PERKINS, Chairman, Subcommittee on Labor-Management Relations, Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, Washington, D.C.

DEAR MR. PERKINS: I wish to report to you promptly the active support of the Chicago Building Trades Council for H.R. 9070, and respectfully ask that such support be included in the record of the hearings.

Sincerely yours,

MARGUERITE STITT CHURCH.

STATEMENT OF MILES K. AMENT, VICE PRESIDENT OF DILLER PLANK, INC.,

LANCASTER, PA.

Our firm is now completing a 3-year building project on a large addition for the St. Joseph's Hospital in Lancaster, Pa. The contract was awarded to us as an open shop general contractor; many of the prime contractors and subcontractors were union firms.

Early in the building operation we were requested by several nonresident unions to permit on-the-job membership solicitation of nonunion workers. We granted this permission. No progress was made by the union organizers, the job proceeded without interruption, and the solicitation effort was dropped, inasmuch as the would-be organizing unions could not legally picket the job nor involve union prime contractors or subcontractors in a secondary boycott. Under the Taft-Hartley Act, this incident is routine. But consider the same set of circumstances with secondary boycotts permissible under the KennedyThompson type of legislation. The legitimate union organizing effort could then go into the picketing stage; union workers on the job could have closed it down; the end result could have been a total lack of legal recourse and a badly needed structure delayed and becoming costlier every day. The workers do not "win" in fights of this kind; nobody wins except union officialdom.

A second case which points up the threat of the proposed legislation of secondary boycotts under the Kennedy-Thompson bills may be found on a building project on which our firm is operating as an open shop general contractor in the nearby city of Lebanon, Pa. The low-bidding masonry contractor is a union firm. He made his estimate on the basis of an agreed-upon union wage scale for the job, established at the time of the bidding.

His union now demands a substantial wage increase, which will not only make this particular job unprofitable, but may cause permanent financial damage to this contractor's firm. Under present labor laws the union could picket the masonry contractor with whom he has a quarrel. It could not embroil all other innocent, neutral contractors on the job, a situation which could result if the present bars were let down.

STATEMENT OF MELVIN H. PETERS, PRESIDENT OF D. S. WARFEL ASSOCIATES, INC., LANCASTER, PA., PRESIDENT OF THE KEYSTONE CHAPTER, ASSOCIATED BUILDERS & CONTRACTORS, INC., LANCASTER, PA.

I am professionally engaged in the contracting business as president of D. S. Warfel Associates, Inc., general contractors of Lancaster, Pa. We have operated as an open shop firm for many years.

I am also president of the Keystone Chapter, Associated Builders & Contractors, Inc., headquartered in Lancaster, Pa., an organization composed of general contractors, prime contractors, and subcontractors in all branches of the industry, and suppliers of building materials and equipment. Our membership is confined to southeastern Pennsylvania.

The construction industry in this area consists predominantly of open shop firms. It is variously estimated that 80 to 85 percent of all construction is done by open shop contractors and builders. Many of our building trades are unionized locally, and traditionally work freely and in complete harmony with our nonunion workmen.

The Kennedy-Thompson legislation would create labor trouble and contention in an area where there has been labor peace and harmony for generations. The basic reason for the large population of nonunion workers in all categories of the construction trades in this area is the will of the workers themselves. Our construction industry here is characterized by a large number of small contracting firms, many of them second- and third-generation companies. There are no large pools of either skilled or unskilled workers which can be tapped when a contract award is secured; our contractors-be they excavators, plumbers, electricians, masons, plasterers, roofers, or the like-must for the most part maintain year-round, stable work forces, whether or not the firm has a maximum workload on the books.

In addition to the permanently employed specialty skilled workers to be found on the payrolls of most of our firms, there are also multiskilled employees who can be kept busy at a wide variety of different jobs, thus creating a versatile work force receiving 52 pay checks a year. These firms-and these workerscould not exist under union restrictions and inflexible union job classification rules.

The Kennedy-Thompson legislation would give the unions a free hand to literally wipe out of existence hundreds of these small contracting firms through the power of a legalized secondary boycott. Their thousands of employees would be downgraded, or thrown into the unemployment ranks. It is demonstrably a fact that these steadily employed nonunion workers take home more wages per year than the union worker who is sporadically employed because of rigid union work rules. Fringe benefits are comparable or identical, and in some instances greater for the nonunion employee.

I should like to recount one experience of our firm which illustrates the effect unlimited secondary boycott power could have.

In the fall of 1957 we were awarded the general contract for a large addition to the Lancaster General Hospital. Conditions were very critical, owing to severe overcrowding of existing hospital facilities in this area. Corridors and sun porches were used for emergency bed space and implicit in the award of the contract was the necessity to carry on the job without delay throughout the winter months.

All of our subcontracts were awarded strictly on the basis of the low bidder and the ability of the firm, without regard to its union, nonunion, or open shop status. Early in October 1957, after all subcontracts had been let and the work was started, we were approached by the president of the Building and Construction Trades Council, of Lancaster, Pa. (an affiliation of a group of local building trades unions), with a request to sign an agreement to use only union labor on the hospital job. We explained that the job was proceeding satisfactorily and that all groups of workers were satisfied with the wage rates and were working in complete harmony. His expressed reason for desiring 100 percent unionization of all workers was that he wanted to "control the hospital job." The mandatory requirement for the use of union labor only, would have called for unjustified contract cancellations with possible penalties; it would have worked hardship on a number of the smaller subcontractors working on the job; it would have caused incalculable delay, where expedition of the work was of the essence; it would have involved substantial additional costs on a project financed by community funds; moreover, and most compellingly, the agreement offered by the Building and Construction Trades Council was in violation of the Taft-Hartley Act.

Our firm refused to sign. The council thereupon set up picket lines covering all approaches to the jobsite. For several days, trucks operated by members of the Teamster's Union refused to cross the picket lines. However, the picketing became ineffective and was stopped when all the following facts became fully known to all the groups concerned: There was no strike; there was no disagreement with any union represented on the job; unionized workers were responsible for approximately 70 percent of the total construction; and the TaftHartley Act was clearly violated. The successful defense against the secondary boycott was set against the backdrop of the Taft-Hartley Act and its interpretations.

Now, with the so-called Kennedy-Thompson legislation in force, the use of the secondary boycott doubtless could have shut down the job; our firm would have been powerless to protect the work rights of the men employed on the job; substantially increased costs would have been incurred; the community would have been dangerously penalized because of delay in the availability of a

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critical health facility; and open shop contractors would have been unfairly discriminated against.

The business community and the private citizen can only suffer through enactment of legislation of the Kennedy-Thompson type, for in legalizing the secondary boycott it gives the building trades unions the power to eliminate the free enterprise open shop firm from the competitive American construction industry.

STATEMENT OF WILLIAM H. BAUMGARDNER, TREASURER, JOHN H. WICKERSHAM ENGINEERING & CONSTRUCTION, INC., LANCASTER, PA.

We have operated as an open shop firm since our organization in 1905. The ever-present threat of the secondary boycott has penalized our firm in numerous instances, for in considering bid proposals we have followed the policy of advising the owner and/or the architect in advance that we plan to do the work on an open shop basis. We are frequently advised that our firm cannot be considered because of the owner's fear of union reprisals in other areas of supply, production, or transportation, even though such retaliatory action is clearly illegal under present labor laws. The building trades unions would, in effect, be given a "hunting license" to completely eliminate our type of operation under the proposed Kennedy-Thompson legislation.

We have had several recent experiences where the mere shadow of the now illegal secondary boycott was used by the unions most effectively.

The first of these occurred during the construction of a recently completed factory building for an open shop manufacturer with numerous branch plants throughout the country. The structural steel work was planned for our own mechanics, having been bid on that basis. When this point in the job was reached, our building site was visited by a group of belligerent union steel workers just completing a nearby job, who categorically demanded that they be hired. These demands were backed up by threats of physical violence made individually to our workmen. Picket lines were established at the jobsite.

The manufacturer-owner's operations are wholly dependent upon daily deliveries of raw material, and daily shipments of finished goods, by members of the Teamster's Union. He became alarmed at the threat of secondary boycott action by the Teamsters, and at considerable cost to him, instructed us to use union labor for the steel work. This type of incident could become a commonplace should the Kennedy-Thompson bills become the law of the land.

A second example of the shadowy power of the secondary boycott was on a recent construction job involving excavation, masonry work, carpentry, and other trades. The Carpenter's Union threatened secondary boycotts involving all subcontractors unless our firm immediately unionized our carpenter force. We successfully resisted these efforts only at a punitive amount of additional cost to our firm, and with the cooperation of a second union which was currently at odds with the Carpenter's Union.

These and other experiences have clearly shown us the almost unlimited monopolistic power which the unions could gain should the secondary boycott become a legal and freely used device in the construction industry.

CARPENTERS LOCAL UNION No. 384, Asheville, N.C., February 25, 1960. North Carolina 12th District Congressman's Office, House Office Building, Washington, D.C.:

Please be advised that the Carpenters Local Union 384, Asheville, N.C., wish to pass our views to you on the situs picketing, bill H.R. 9070. We feel that Congress should pass this bill. It will benefit the employers and employees of our section of North Carolina, Also other sections of the country too.

Sincerely,

FRED LYTTLE,

Business Manager Local 384.