I had no way of knowing at the time, but in the early 1950’s I might have been part of one of the last legal secondary boycotts by trade unions. The action took place one morning at a huge construction project outside Detroit. I worked at the mill near the main gate, where lumber was cut to size, assembled into door and window frames and hauled below to the construction site. Not long after we started work that day, I spotted a large group of other construction workers walking toward the mill and the main gate. They were carrying their lunch pails and some were toting toolboxes.

For a long time after, I remembered that scene, likening it to one in a movie about Welsh coalminers. In my mind’s eye it’s still a stirring sight, several hundred carpenters and laborers, led by our stewards, cheerfully heading for the gate and home. Those of us at the mill quickly joined the procession, barely paying attention to a steward’s explanation that we were walking out because the contractor had brought scab doors up from Georgia. The beef was settled by the time we showed up the next morning, the nonunion doors long gone.

The use of so-called secondary boycotts was key to the storied Teamsters organizing victories and the union’s rapid expansion during the Depression years, a strategy that James R. Hoffa later utilized to put together the national master freight contract. Secondary boycotts include efforts by one union to get another union to put pressure on the employers of the second union’s members, in the expectation that such pressure will cause that employer not do business with the original union’s corporate opponent. For example, bakery drivers might seek to get a supermarket not to accept bread from a struck bakery, or face labor problems with its unionized workers. Put another way, a secondary boycott by workers is a sort of united front against bosses, an act of workers’ solidarity.

I didn’t know then that I’d never again be part of a job dispute, settled so quickly and decisively in labor’s favor, as happened on the construction job. For about two decades I was a chief steward in a bottling plant and won and lost my share of grievances, but not once was I allowed by the union to use the leverage of withholding our labor power to back up a grievance. Instead of walking out, we filed grievances and sat through hearings and arbitrations, when we were deadlocked. I wasn’t alone. Union reps across the country were doing the same thing, even on construction jobs. In part that was because what we did that day on the Michigan construction job was outlawed; the right of unions to use their concerted power to refuse to handle unfair products—we called them “hot products”—was made illegal.

That came about under a provision of the infamous Taft-Hartly Act of 1947, for years called a “slave labor act,” by many union officials. Within a year of the law’s passage, Democrat President Harry Truman secured 12 anti-strike injunctions, though he failed in his attempt to break a national coalminers strike.

Since 1947, there have been still more legal restrictions on organized labor by all three branches of the government. I shouldn’t have been surprised, therefore, to learn recently that in 1975, the Supreme Court ruled that unions did not have the Constitutional right to a jury trial on charges of violating an injunction issued by the national labor board. Of course, as we know, corporations have a right to a jury trial, though lately some tobacco companies might wish they didn’t.

The other day, an administrative judge with the National Labor Relations Board, charged with enforcing the nation’s key labor law, ruled that union banners, lettered “Shame on Cymer,” and similar banners that carried other employers’ names were illegal under the nation’s secondary boycott law. It seems a San Diego carpenters union local has a beef with a nonunion drywall contractor hired by Cymer and others. The union rightly believes that it has a First Amendment Right to inform the public that the companies in question use the nonunion contractor. The NLRB “decision overturns at least a decade of previous NLRB policy that accepted the banners as an expression of free speech,” reported the San DiegoUnion-Tribune (May 14).

It might help the carpenters’ case that a federal judge refused to back up the NLRB, though the judge didn’t bar the NLRB from going after the carpenters. In any event, the carpenter’s local reportedly is refusing to take down the banners. I’ve got to applaud the union local for standing up for its First Amendment Rights and the rights of other unions that sometime might be in the same fix.

Unfortunately, organized labor has not been vigilant in protecting its rights, especially with regard to the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act and the anti-labor restrictions that followed. Though it took several years, eventually all unions capitulated to the Taft-Hartley dictates and “learned to live with it.” That included John L. Lewis who split with the AFL for a time, urging it not to capitulate, saying, “At least once in your lives you should do your duty by your membership.”

The Taft-Hartley Act provided for a non-Communist oath for all union officials. That oath added a tremendous amount of firepower to the labor bureaucracy’s determination to drive out of the labor movement all radical oppositionists, Communist and socialist or just plain militant trade unionists. The lack of an organized national workers’ opposition to the many defeats and retreats by labor in the past three decades can be traced to the largely successful extirpation of labor’s anti-bureaucratic left-wing, aided by the Slave Labor Act.