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Show Free Riders BY MAURICE R. FRANKS (EDITOR'S NOTE: Maurice R. Franks is Director of the National Na-tional Labor-Management Foundation Foun-dation and Editor of its official publication, "Partndrs.") The big cry of the labor leaders lead-ers today is directed against those workers who accept the benefits of unionism and yet are unwilling to pay for them through union affiliation. The closed shop is a good example. The labor leaders have been crying their eyes out before the committees in Washington against those "in-grates" "in-grates" who refuse to join a union under the system of the closed shop contract. These leaders take the attitude that it is just not fair for a man to be so selfish as to accept working conditions made possible pos-sible through unionism without paying his way. "Free riders" is the term they apply to these non-unionists. At the rate the legalistic machinery ma-chinery is whirring down in Washington, it won't be long now before the American work-ingman work-ingman will be guaranteed by law everything Tils little heart desires. The labor leaders are working overtime, with the help of their attorneys, to find ways and means of enacting legisla tion that will guarantee q the workers for all tune (q come security from the cradle to the grave. If they are as successful in the future as in the past, it. will be only a matter of timei when there will be nothing left for the unions to bargain for. Everything will have been secured se-cured by government statute. If and when this comes to pass, there won't, it seems to me, be much need for unions and union leaders, I know, as far as I for one am concerned if I were a steel worker or a carpenter and could get by guarantee from my government top wages, short hours, and all-round good working conditions condi-tions that I should soon regard re-gard myself as just a plain darned fool to go on paying union dues for services already rendered me by law: and I wouldn't care a hoot whether they called me a "free rider" or not. Nor is it likely that I'd be alone in my attitude. Unless and until our labor leaders pre content to travel the road of collective bargaining dealing directly with the em-.ployer em-.ployer on all matters affecting the occupation unionism as we know it today will become a dead issue, a thing of the past because there will be little, If anything, left to bargain for. If the government is to be established es-tablished as the sole bargaining agent of the workers, as seems to be the desire of so many of our present crop of labor leaders, lead-ers, the unions will go broke and slip out of the national picture pic-ture for the very simple reason that workers will refuse to pay dues for that which is already guaranteed to them, not by union contract, if you please but by law. union or no union. What the whole thing sums up to is this: Our union leaders, by their over-enthusiasm for governmental gov-ernmental interference with their own legitimate affairs, are simply digging their own graves- |