I should like to state with respect to this doctrine three not very startling or novel propositions. There is really not much basis either in logic or experience for believing that an unimpeded economic struggle among large interest groups will lead to socially acceptable results. Government can, in fact, go rather far in limiting the acts of unions in pursuit of their interest without substantially damaging the collective bargaining process. The view that a free enterprise economy implies no constraint of the self-interest pursuits of economic units has as little validity for labor as it has for business.
There are some, of course, to whom the struggle of large groups means competition. "I have seen the suggestion made," said Justice Holmes sixty years ago, "that the conflict between employers and employed is not competition. But I venture to assume that none of my brethren would rely on that suggestion. . . . it is plain from the slightest consideration of practical affairs, or the most superficial of industrial history, that free competition means combination, and that the organization of the world, now going on fast, means an ever-increasing might and scope of combination. . . . Whether beneficial on the whole, as I think it, or detrimental, it is inevitable. . . ." Justice Holmes was a very great man but his ideas on the nature of competition, I confess, have always struck me as being rather peculiar. The stricture that unions should act only in their own interest is really not very much of a stricture, as experience since the Hutcheson case has shown, and, despite the writings of my colleague Galbraith, I do not really believe that there is an historic law to the effect that the appearance and use of power will be inevitably checked by the appearance of a countervailing power. The historic forces may have to be nudged and assisted by action of the state designed to moderate the action in their own interests of economic groups. This has been found desirable, in this country at least, with respect to business enterprises and there is no reason to believe that the self-interest of labor groups is any more closely identified with the public interest than that of General Motors.
Nor do I think that government intervention to limit unions in the pursuit of their interest means the end of collective bargaining. One does not have to be a supporter of Taft-Hartley to hold that after eight years' experience under that law American workers are not yet slaves. After all, as McCabe has pointed out, "The Wagner Act took unions out of the category of private clubs in which the Supreme Court found them in Adair v. United States and Coppage v. Kansas." And they have never returned to that category. There is a view, vigorously expressed by various labor leaders in Hearings on Taft-Hartley, that any public interference with the self-interest pursuits of a union is incompatible with the operation of a free enterprise economy. But, in the words of Justice
Holmes, "I venture to assume that none of my brethren would rely on that suggestion." We must, of course, recognize that in the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries public policy in effect sets little or no limit to the self-interested action of trade unions. If we had time, and the cornpetence, it might be useful to speculate on the lessons of this experience for the United States. Certainly on one definition of "good labor relations" it might be said that in these countries labor relations are better than they have been over the last two decades in the United States. But this definition appears to exclude from the meaning of "good labor relations" certain adverse effects on consumer interests and, in England at least, some considerable part of the good relationship between labor and management seems to have been purchased by effective collusion against the consumer. In certain of the Scandinavian countries, notably Norway, the management of labor relations appears to have required a large step toward the application of a public wage-price policy as an essential element in the administration of a planned economy. I am very far from contending that even this cost of attaining good labor relations is necessarily excessive. But, if these are the costs, they should be recognized and, in the political process through which public policy gets determined, they should be compared with the supposed advantages that might accompany an unimpeded pursuit of self-interest by organized labor.
There is, furthermore, the question whether institutions and policies that work in a certain way in another country would function in the same fashion in the United States. In this connection I am impressed by the words of Judge Amidon in Great Northern Railway v. Brosseau. After pointing out that Section 20 of the Clayton Act was pretty much copied from Section 2 of the British Trades Dispute Act of 1906, he emphasizes the enormous differences in the application of these two sections in the two countries and concludes, "The contrast between the situations in England and the United States presents an impressive example of how differently the same statute works in countries whose habits of life are different." The facts cited here refer, of course, to the early 1920's when labor relations in this country were vastly different from now. But the observations of Judge Amidon are still revelant to the question whether in this country an unlimited pursuit by trade unions of their own self-interest would tend to produce the same kind of labor-management relations as in England, with or without the presence of a Sherman Law.