MANAGEMENT: Blindman’s Buff

“The U.S. community cannot permit collective bargaining to be merely a game of blindman’s buff. . . . The day is long past when collective bargaining can be carried on in the atmosphere of a David Harum horse trade. . . .”

Both labor and management were thus taken to task last week by the Twentieth Century Fund’s Labor Committee. In a scholarly and timely study of collective bargaining, the committee reminded both sides that there is always a third party to consider, the consumer. High prices are just as dangerous as artificially high wages. Said the committee: “Both management and union must be aware of the danger of pricing themselves out of the market. . . . The consumer doesn’t sit down to approve the price; but he may reject it later when he does his own kind of ‘bargaining.’ He may refuse to buy. . . .”

Too much bargaining, the committee found, is now carried on in a fog of misrepresentation. The wide use of unbiased committees of economists, engineers and sociologists whose facts would be acceptable to labor & management would go a long way toward clearing the air.

Managements and unions were also urged to explore the advantages of market-wide collective bargaining. As a start, the committee suggested that the auto industry (which has often roundly condemned the idea) bargain as a unit with the C.I.O. Automen would then “think as an industry for their industry . . . achieve uniformity in wage rates . . . perhaps develop an annual guaranteed wage.”

U.S. employers might also set up a bargaining organization similar to Britain’s National Confederation of Employers’ Associations. But the committee recognized one inherent danger in this. In cahoots with organized labor, “it could degenerate into a peculiarly vicious kind of a protective tariff, safeguarding undue profits and undue wages. . . .”

Over & over the committee stressed the truism that big business and labor are now extragovernmental powers in themselves. Said the committee: “It would be a very starry-eyed government, indeed, that refused to expand sufficiently to cope with the concentrations of social power embodied in giant corporations and giant labor organizations.”