POLITICS: The Labor Issue

Working as a team, Ohio’s Republican Governor C. (for nothing) William O’Neill, 46, and Senator John Bricker, 65, crisscrossed the Buckeye State last week in an aggressive new bid for votes. Boomed

O’Neill: “Fear has spread over Ohio. There is use of power to instill fear. I deplore the thought that Ohio citizens should be afraid.” Roared Bricker: “If ever there was a clearcut call for non-partisan action, it was for protection of the union rank and file against the abuses of labor racketeers, the embezzlers, the professional goons, the Hoffas and the Becks.” So saying, O’Neill and Bricker plumped unequivocally for a hotly debated Ohio right-to-work bill on next month’s ballot. Explained a G.O.P. strategist: “We’re taking a chance on it helping the party. But there are many crosscurrents to right-to-work and we know it.”

Flood of Registrations. Crosscurrents swept in and out of the whole issue of labor bossism as the 1958 election turned its final leg. In the unionized East, with the exception of outpost Vermont, most candidates carefully paddled clear of the rip tides. But westward from Ohio, the revelations from Senator John McClellan’s Washington hearing room combined with drives for right-to-work laws* to produce a major issue.

Right-to-work propositions are on the ballot in five states besides Ohio: California, Washington, Idaho, Colorado and Kansas. They have produced floods of new registrations; most of it is probably Democratic; in California, only one of each four of 457,000 new voters registered Republican. But angry questions at political rallies, letters to editors, earnest debate at many a saloon and street corner indicate that even union rank-and-filers—not to mention farmers and white-collar workers—are seriously disturbed over Big Labor’s evident excesses.

Watch the Backlash. Even so, no Democrats—and precious few Republicans—have grabbed hold of the issue with the firmness of Ohio’s O’Neill and Bricker. Notable exception: the nation’s most stubborn right-to-work man, William Fife Knowland, California’s Republican candidate for governor, who had set a horrible example by splitting his already-squabbling party asunder over the issue.

National G.O.P. leaders, who had once hoped that the unsavory record of labor racketeering would rub off on labor-oriented Democrats, all but gave up trying to hang failure of the Kennedy-Ives labor bill on the Democratic 85th Congress. No less a campaigner than Vice President Nixon warned that the issue would get all mixed up, could easily backlash to brand the G.O.P. as antiunion. Bigwig Democrats meanwhile whistled merrily, predicted a pro-labor vote that would swell the Democratic landslide. Fact was that the labor bossism issue was a sleeper and much of the whistling was in the dark. Many a candidate would not sleep peacefully until election night when he saw how the crosscurrents had moved and who had been carried off as flotsam.

* Right-to-work laws forbid union membership as a condition of employment, thus outlaw union shops, thereby go one step beyond the federal Taft-Hartley Act’s no-closed-shop provision. Eighteen states, mostly Southern and Midwestern, already have R.T.W. laws.