Mr. MAHIN. It has been suggested to me, you may have this in mind. Suppose the low bidder was a nonunion contractor. With this bill, with him brought onto the construction site, let us assume there is no union labor in the community, the only thing you would have to have to close the job completely down would be for one trade union to demand a contract with one contractor containing the 8(e) clause. Demand that the one contractor sign with him a clause that only union contractors can be employed on the site. That would automatically close down the project. And make the performance of the bid by the nonunion contractor impossible.

Mr. GRIFFIN. I have no further questions.

Mr. PERKINS. Are there any further questions?
Thank you very much, Mr. Mahin, for appearing.

Mr. MAHIN. Thank you. I appreciate your time and courtesy. Mr. PERKINS. The committee will stand in recess until 10 a.m. tomorrow. We have no further witnesses today unless there is somebody who wants to make a statement.

(Whereupon, at 11:30 a.m. the committee was recessed, to reconvene at 10 a.m. Thursday, February 18, 1960.)

CONSTRUCTION SITE PICKETING

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1960

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON LABOR-MANAGEMENT RELATIONS OF THE
COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND LABOR,

Washington, D.C.

The subcommittee met at 10 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room 429, House Office Building, Hon. Carl D. Perkins (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Mr. PERKINS. The subcommittee will come to order.

Mr. Rains, will you come around, please? The clerk tells me that you do not have a prepared statement, so you just go ahead and proceed in any manner you wish.

As I understand, you are representing the Building Trades Employees Association; is that correct?

STATEMENT OF HARRY H. RAINS, BUILDING TRADES EMPLOYERS ASSOCIATION, MINEOLA, N.Y.

Mr. RAINS. Employers Association of Long Island. If I may read my representation into the record and beg your indulgence to supplement with a formal statement, actually I did prepare a very lengthy statement and I had it mimeographed.

Mr. PERKINS. If your lengthy statement has been prepared, just give it to the clerk and let it be inserted into the record.

Mr. RAINS. It will have to come in as a supplement through the mail.

Mr. PERKINS. It will be inserted at a later date.

Mr. RAINS, Thank you.

I did want to say that the delay is due to my own concern and consideration for the committee. I had made extensive deletions after studying the voluminous testimony that had been adduced before this committee last year on the Landrum-Griffin bill. I do not believe in cruel and inhuman punishment, and to inflict upon this committee a voluminous statement of that kind, which is repetitious and in great detail, and would serve no purpose.

However, I am mindful of the fact that the General Contractors Association has had able spokesmen here before and are scheduled to appear before this committee now. I am familiar with Mr. Rooney's presentations, so I am not too concerned about a detailed statement or an attempt to acquaint this committee with the nature of operations in the building trades.

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If this committee has read, and I am sure they have, the many exhibits and the thousands of closely printed words that appear in five copies of the record of the hearings last year, their ignorance is a great deal less than my own.

We experts like to talk about expertise, but really it is just a difference in the degree of ignorance. When a hearing committee has had opportunity to hear from so many different types of speakers, including individual workers and management spokesmen and lawyers for unions and union heads, there is very little left about the building construction industry or the whole subject that we are here involved with that this committee is not thoroughly informed on.

It would seem to me the only experts that really are left are the members of the committee themselves, who have had this opportunity for exposure from every segment of industry and labor.

However, this morning in my own claim for some right to speak on the subject, I would like to mention my name is Harry H. Rains.

Mr. PERKINS. I think you will agree, Mr. Rains, that this so-called picketing statute, since the Denver case was handed down by the Supreme Court, that this committee has heard voluminous testimony on this subject.

We are now holding extensive hearings to be concluded on the 29th of February. You will agree that the hearings will be ample and that we are having extensive hearings, will you not?

Mr. RAINS. Since I have had the opportunity to scan the hearings of last year, and the membership of this committee is not so substantially changed as to think you have forgotten what you heard last year and what you are hearing this year, that you will have more than ample testimony to thoroughly know the ramifications as to whether you want to, in the interest of the public, disavow the Denver case or continue its restrictions upon the building trades insofar as common situs picketing restrictions are concerned.

The few points I will make here once I have gotten over the hurdle of my interuction and who I speak for, I can discuss informally, if I may.

I am an attorney in Mineola, Long Island. I have been a member of the bar for some 28 years, and I have had the dubious distinction of limiting my entire professional career within the framework of practicing labor law as a management representative.

Of course, there have been some years in war service, and even there, half of that period was spent as a labor relations officer in the Army. There have been some years in government service, and even there, I was with the Department of Labor of the State of New York.

So I do feel my working career has been entirely within this realm. It has been even augmented by some 10 to 15 years of experience as a teacher. I was a professor of industrial relations at Hofstra College. For some 9 years I headed up an institute of labor-management relations, making it difficult for me to appear in the neutral role of a chairman, and we augmented the public debates of labor in the Long Island area on all phases of current labor problems from year to year. I have also written rather extensively for the labor law journals in this field on jurisdictional disputes in the building trades, multiemployer bargaining and the use and abuse of power in collective bargaining by labor, and more recently in November 1959 in the Com

merce Clearing House Labor Law Journal a management viewpoint on the new Landrum-Griffin bill.

But most importantly, if I speak this morning at all on the segment and the specific issue before this committee, it will be on the basis of the best of all experience, personal experience with individual cases, some of which are at this very moment being processed through the National Labor Relations Board.

I do speak officially for segments of the building construction industry in Long Island. It is an important area. It is an area where a great deal of building has gone on, of which I ask the committee to take judicial notice.

Nassau and Suffolk Counties are the fastest growing counties in the country. Nassau has had the large volume of construction. A great deal of it has been in homes and a great deal in commercial building.

I appear as spokesman and labor counsel for the Long Island Building Trade Employers Association, who include in their membership all of the major contractors in commercial construction, such as schools, public buildings, and the like.

Then there are various subsections such as lumber, ready-mixed concrete contractors association, whom I represent, and other individual contractors and related building suppliers in the industry.

I deem it fortunate that my own practice includes a great many manufacturing entities so that my experience is not limited to just the construction industry and I am able to follow some of the argument, where there is an argument, on an attempt to equate the differences or similarities between general manufacturing or general labor conditions in industries other than building trades and those that pertain to the building trades.

I also appear in another capacity in behalf of the Long Island Association, which is a chamber of commerce for Nassau, Suffolk, Queens, and Kings Counties. The Long Island Association has some several thousand members who are companies engaged in manufacturing enterprises and service industries in the four counties I have mentioned.

They have a governmental affairs committee with a labor panel of which I am a member, and we have given consideration to the bill before this committee and appear in unanimous opposition to any relaxation of secondary boycott restrictions presently contained in the Landrum-Griffin bill or any further exceptions to be made in or about the construction trades.

With due deference to your kind permission to include my prepared statement which has been delayed, and which will reflect all deletions of material which you are thoroughly familiar with, would basically follow several points that I here wish to discuss informally, with your permission.

I think there are some points that are perhaps worth your consideration because either they have not received adequate treatment in any of the hearings I have read reports on at the Senate committee or this committee, or because they are so basic and so simple that they may have been overlooked in passing.

Perhaps I may be accused of belaboring the obvious, but one of the very first points that occurs to me is a review of the basic objectives of labor legislation in general.

In my entire career and my connection with labor law, it has been well hammered home that the basic objective of the original Wagner Act, and all the legislation that has followed has concerned itself with the necessity to preserve industrial peace.

To that end, the public policy of this country with regard to labor law has been to develop the growth of organized labor, and that was very effectively done under the Wagner Act. It was only after that growth had become so great and the powers had accreted to such an extent in the hands of organized labor that the Government, following its traditional policy of attempting to equal the balance of powers between these two segments of our economy, passed the Taft-Hartley amendments which created restrictions upon organized labor similar to the prohibitions and the proscribed type of activity that was set forth in the original Wagner Act under section 8(a).

It is most significant that after another 12 years, further changes were made in the Landrum-Griffin bill. Here again I think all the changes that were made or could be made then and now and in the future must follow the basic policy: Does this change of law implement the established policy of eliminating, or curtailing or cutting down industrial disputes?

Will it preserve or better the opportunity for peace in collective bargaining?

I do not want to go into semantics unnecessarily, but I cannot help it because I am a lawyer and I find that words are a necessary evil, but the word "peace" in today's time cannot be divorced from some abuses of peace.

We are only too familiar with Premier Chamberlain's experience in Europe. There is such a thing as peace with honor. There is such a thing as peace which is a cessation or an absence of friction at a cost that is not practical on a long-term basis and that is not honorable.

We have a lot of peace in the construction trades. In fact, I have a feeling that all too often-and I am very frustrated in this regard because I must confess that lawyers, as lawyers, at the bargaining table in the construction trades are still very, very much a novice or the absentee.

It is not uncommon in the year 1959 in a major industry to be told across the bargaining table by a Teamster Union, and the Teamster Unions are still affiliated with the 18 trades, "Who are you?"

"I am Mr. Rains. I represent these 30 committeemen who represent the entire concrete mix industry."

"You are a lawyer, aren't you?"

"Yes, I am a lawyer."

"We don't talk to lawyers."

I have never been ashamed of being a lawyer, but I will tell you frequently in the construction trades I find myself on the defensive for no other reason than I am a lawyer. We spent 2 full days-not quite; I think I should correct that; a full day and a fraction-arguing whether I had a right to be at that bargaining table because these assorted employers hired me for that purpose.