LABOR: Broken Monopoly

There was no doubt that domineering, salt-crusted Patrick J. McHugh had tight control over Massachusetts’ fishing fleet. The 4,200 members of his independent Atlantic Fishermen’s Union manned practically every sizeable trawler, dragger and gill-netter that sailed out of New Bedford, Gloucester and Boston. The union had its own selling rooms in Gloucester and New-Bedford, and dictated who could and who could not buy there.

When prices dropped after the war, and with them the fishermen’s take-home pay (based on a share in the profits), McHugh ordered each boat to limit its catch, in an effort to bolster the market. Crews that disobeyed were fined, or kept on the beach. The Federal Government refused to interfere, citing the exemption of unions from prosecution for trade monopoly under the Norris-LaGuardia Act. Then the union went a step further, ordered crews to refuse to sell fish for less than the former OPA prices.

Last week McHugh and his union found they had run hard aground on a submerged legal rock. The man that put them there was State Attorney General Clarence A. Barnes. Barnes, at 64, still has the bearing (and the crew haircut) of a Yale athlete*(class of ’04), still thoughtfully putts golf balls around his office when mulling over a problem. Twice married and the father of nine children (the oldest, 40, the youngest, two), he has had a distinguished career as a lawyer and a militant Republican. His bill requiring labor unions to account publicly for their funds was the country’s first to be approved by voters (in a state referendum last year).

Determined to break Pat McHugh’s stranglehold, Barnes charged that the union constituted an illegal monopoly under the state’s laws. Superior Court Justice Edward T. Broadhurst agreed. The dispute, he found, was not a labor dispute between the union and employers, but a business matter between the union and the buyers. Last week Broadhurst issued a permanent injunction preventing the union from fixing the price or artificially limiting the supply of fish in Massachusetts markets. Henceforth the union would have to take its chances in the open market.

*Remembered by Yalemen as “Home Run Barnes” because of a hit that won a baseball series from Harvard.