and from the experience of his very important association, which is national in scope-perhaps international-that they knew that the only pool of qualified people by and large was in the union.

If you moved to an area where there was very little construction, the chances were you had to pull people from the union hiring halls, from the appropriate craft, in the nearest area or bring them with you from your hometown, or you just could not construct.

You do not pick up at random men who can operate a crane, or who can lay brick. Many of us in this do-it-yourself age have learned that maybe I can build three rooms and a bath as I once did at the loss of two fingers almost, and I do not know how many pints of blood and aggravation and perspiration and after I computed my cost it would have been so much cheaper to hire a contractor, a union

one.

I am not too sure about that last, but I will let it ride. The skilled crafts are basically in possession of organized labor in the building trades. So it would seem we have no reason to espouse a cause of picketing on a job site for purposes of organizing, not in the face of the extensive history, now public, of men who were not able to secure union membership because their fathers were not members.

I venture to say it is a lot easier to become a lawyer than a bricklayer or an electrician. Certainly an electrician. There are permit men who spend the first 10 or 12 years of their lives as permit men and must make a hard decision as to whether they should live on crumbs, be barred from opportunity to take training for journeyman and leave the industry, or continue on crumbs.

Gentlemen, if you have no basic objective here to foster aid to labor in organizing on a fairplay basis, and it is not there to support this proposed bill, then there is justification, absent perhaps election year pressures of one kind or another, for an attempt to change the law to allow this kind of situation.

The points I have belabored here may have been belaboring the obvious, but what is obvious to me may not be obvious to many of my own principals, who have lived so long in captivity that they love their bonds and they do not know what to do when the door is open.

Even a canary fears the outside when he has been in there long enough. It does not mean, however, that the captivity of management in construction bargaining is something to concern Congress unduly. They are businessmen, they make a good living out of their captivity. But we are concerned with "Is there justification for continuance of accretion of power to organized labor in this trade at this time in the face of the obvious factor that the construction industry has the largest impact of any industry on our economy in terms of inflation or otherwise?"

I am told reliably, I trust, in a report published by Mr. Clawson, the president of the Home Builders Association in Long Island, that a stoppage of a development of 100 small homes loses immediate income to 800 families; that the purchase of a single small house carries with it an average expenditure of $1,685 and some odd cents by that family in the first year of occupancy for all the appurtenances that go with homeowning-lawnmowers, shades, windows, everything manufactured in the economic complex of this country. It is too important.

Our concern at this time perhaps should be in trying to cure the problem of what do we do with stoppages in a runaway period where prices follow labor costs and all the arguments by both sides as to which comes first do not solve the problem of inflation.

We have had an increase which in many companies I represent has indicated an increase of 2 percent currently and 2 percent last June in the cost of living. It is a half of one point percentagewise in the cost of living for the combined cities of the United States.

I would welcome at this point any questions, if there are any questions on the two basic points I have outlined.

Mr. PERKINS. Mr. Wier.

Mr. WIER. He has pretty well covered the waterfront and it is pretty hard for me from memory to follow each one of his subjects dealing with his experience in the building industry, but I did note, which the Congress never has noted, one thing:

I think you made it very plain that the direction of the Congress in enacting the Landrum-Griffin bill was directed at the top level of the trade union movement and to free the rank and file from dictation. I noted that you made reference in many of your so-called negotiations of the impact that occurred, particularly in jurisdictional disputes— and the same thing can be done in a general agreement of wages and conditions citing the case of the pressure from the local union on the local level on the international officers or regional officers who came in to try to iron out the situation.

I have had that experience in trying to get a reasonable agreement without using the strike weapon or the picketing weapon. As you said in these cards that you received from the rank and file of the union involved, there were greater demands than presented by the negotiating committee.

I have often wondered in some of these negotiations whether the people really appreciated the effort that was being made to settle the dispute rather than to battle it out. So in this jurisdictional arena or area, it is back home on the local scene that the opposition arises and it arises from self-preservation, because of the continuing transition in construction materials.

What I had done yesterday and the field I learned my trade in yesterday is now going into another area. Immediately, because of that transition or improvement, I am going to lose that field that I have always been employed in. So I have resisted it for self-preservation and employment back home. I want to fight for that employment that I have had. The internationals try to work these out.

Mr. RAINS. Mr. Wier, I am aware of the fact that the further you get from the firing line the more objectivity and more statesmanlike your viewpoint may be. I have never found that the true professional in the labor movement has been unaware of all these things or has really attempted to the best of his ability to accomplish a fair resolu

tion.

I did make mention of the fact that you picked up, if you resort to straight so-called democratic procedures of turning to a group of children and saying "What do you want?" and they all want candy or pie in the sky, and if you are a parent and you turn around and give it to them, you are no longer a parent.

If you are a labor leader responsible at the bargaining table and you simply take this mass of demands and mimeograph as that industry did and send them out to the employees, "This is our new contract terms," those who did not remember anything else besides the 26 items at that meeting-I was not there, I am told-sent post cards. It said "Take the self-addressed post cards and add something." They added something. At the bargaining table for 2 days we were trying to find out what they meant in the six post cards. We finally had to junk them because we could not understand them. That was the first big concession we got at that bargaining table.

There was a thought which I think could bear a little stressing. Because of the transitory nature of employment in the construction trades, which you are very well familiar with, there is a very overworked and hardworking guy who is called the business delegate. I suppose this is one of those jobs I would not want to wish on anyone. He presumably polices the multiemployer bargaining contract for a whole area. To cover the job he really has to be out in the field all day, every day. Presumably wherever he goes he can find a violation, unwitting, imagined, or real. I must confess that many a time I have been unable to distinguish which of the three categories the violation falls in.

But he has the sole power, as far as his men are concerned, to stop the job then and there. If one trade pulls out, they all pull out, when they are working. You go to the next higher level, and he may not be available for a day or two.

Let us face the fact that the captivity I speak about in the construction trades is engendered, it develops, and is there because of the pressure of time. If a job has to go up today, you are fighting with one delegate about one little thing, and it is going to tie up the entire timetable, and God knows how many sunny days we have in that particular month-you give in.

This is the practical approach. It is taken by the contractor, and I myself must bear with that and advise it on occasion because the practicalities control. Because there is that level of operation at that point by a professional delegate, it is that much more vital to curtail such a tremendous weapon as a picket, because most industrial union delegates carry in their back trunk of their car a big pack of picket signs.

There is no reason why a construction delegate could not do the same once he is given carte blanche to use the picket card. It would be a dangerous thing to do, and I urge that this Congress do not entrust this weapon without sound reason, and that there is no sound reason for entrusting it at this time.

Mr. Wier, you made several other points in a general way, which I am wholly in agreement with. I do not talk at all about internal union operations covered by the first six articles of the LandrumGriffin Act because I have never been on the inside of the labor movement as a worker and I have no experience that amounts to anything on a firsthand basis.

For me to know any more about it would probably be an unfair labor practice in itself, as a management spokesman. So I cannot talk about that. I do not know what its impact will be. I know that my concern is with the end result at the bargaining table. If it leads to

more responsible bargaining, fine. I am in favor of it. If it leads to an atmosphere of reason and a recognition of the stake of the public at the bargaining table, I am in favor of it.

But I have avoided that aspect of the problem because it is specifically outside of the ken of the employer and his representative. But we are concerned with the quality of direction from the top. We are concerned with its effectiveness at the bottom.

In the building trades, there is no time for the transmission through normal communication channels of the well-considered, carefully planned decision rendered at the top down to the bottom where the building is going on at the moment of the dispute.

The damage done by stoppages is irrevocable because I know of no devise to recapture lost time. If I did, I would be 25 years younger than I am today.

Mr. WIER. I will make one more observation, right or wrong, and that deals with your first introductory statement of the relationship in this field.

I have listened attentively to you for your 1 hour of presentation, and I remember you made some reference to the fact that when you use your prerogative as an interested party in attempting to sit in on negotiating meetings, you are challenged. You would not have any knowledge of why you are challenged, would you?

Mr. RAINS. I think the challenge is a compliment, sir. The challenge is a compliment because the one thing that the labor union is guilty of, to their credit, we do what is best for us. What is best for us is to keep the lawyer away from the bargaining table. Wherever we can, let us keep him away.

I give him credit for that. Why let your opponent have a helper who can help him? I venture to say that if management in many of the small industries that cannot afford a lawyer, although I do not think it is a luxury-I think it is a necessity-many of the small employers come to the bargaining table, they are intelligent men, they are college graduates, they know how to run a business which is frankly more than I know how to do and they survive. They must be bright; they are making money.

Yet they come to that bargaining table and they are children as against the experienced, possibly uneducated union representative, who does every day what this man does once every 2 years, and who can give him aces and spades in this game and take him every time.

So if you try to balance the powers a little at the bargaining table, a smart union says you have no right to be here; get out.

Mr. WIER. Mr. Rains, let me say this is the one thing you and I have in common.

Mr. RAINS. I hope there was more, Mr. Wier.

Mr. WIER. All through the thirties and the early forties I had the same experience of organizing a couple or 300 or 400 employees in a plant and then sitting down and setting up a contract, and then because of my leadership in the organization I am requested to go with the negotiating committee they pick out.

Upon my entrance into the plant and asking for the management, I tell them on behalf of the employees here who have just recently had a representation election, I am here to sit in on the negotiating committee, "Well, you do not work for this plant, you have no business here. I will deal with my bargaining agent that works in the plant."

Mr. RAINS. There is a smart employer just like a smart union man. You were too good for him. He didn't want you there. The problems at the bargaining table are important to every citizen of this country, because on the whole the outcome of that bargaining is either a stoppage, an economic force, with its cost in terms of lost man-hours in production and wages, and the like, or an increase that perhaps is not justified by increased productivity and the inflationary effects. So we are interested. I like being a labor lawyer, because it is one field you can't bore anybody with. You talk to your friends and neighbors and they are interested, because it is in the papers, and because it concerns them.

It is also a field fraught with tension. It is a field where emotion and controversy are the norm. I don't envy those who have to make a living in this field day in and day out. Their return financially may be more than adequate, but either they like this kind of life or they should not be in it.

Mr. WIER. It is full of adventure.

Mr. RAINS. That it is. It was just an accident that I was not a union organizer myself. I worked on ships when they paid $25 a month, and where you got one bedsheet a voyage for 6 months, and there were other conditions that were crying for correction. A quarter of a century later I read that the union has written contracts that are thicker than the Senate hearing reports, and they specify the grade of toilet paper the men use, and everything else, and you can even have a grievance committee with the captain. I think that is wonderful that labor has been able to accomplish so much in my lifetime. But accident and fate steered me to a management role and I want to play that role whether labor likes it or not, and I am entitled to be there at the bargaining table, and I will fight for that privilege. All I have to do is find enough clients who are not addicted with the old problem that the union delegate has, What did you do for me lately? I know that no matter what a union accomplishes today, a week or 2 months later the rank and file have forgotten it. But I want them to know that I have the same problem. The clients also have very short memories, and we manage to survive because we keep punching.

Mr. WIER. Mr. Chairman, Mr. Griffin here might want to ask some questions, and you have another witness on the program. I would like to carry this on with you, but time won't permit.

Mr. RAINS. Thank you, sir.

Mr. PERKINS. Mr. Griffin.

Mr. GRIFFIN. I think this has been very interesting and delightful testimony, and much more educational than that of many of our witnesses.

Mr. WIER. We should have heard him before we passed the Landrum-Griffin bill.

Mr. GRIFFIN. Because of your experience in this field, Mr. Rains, I would like to have you comment on an aspect which I don't think you touched on. An argument is advanced in support of this bill to the effect that the rule in the Denver building case discriminates against building and construction trade unions because common situs picketing is permitted, for example, at a large industrial plant where employees in different departments are represented by various unions.