A Tiger by the Tail

Author:F.A. Hayek [F.A. Hayek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-93355-040-4
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
Published: 2009-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

Changed Character of the Problem

Most people, however, have so little realisation of what has happened that they still support the aspirations of the unions in the belief that they are struggling for ‘freedom of association’, when this term has in fact lost its meaning and the real issue has become the freedom of the individual to join or not to join a union. The existing confusion is due in part to the rapidity with which the character of the problem has changed; in many countries voluntary associations of workers had only just become legal when they began to use coercion to force unwilling workers into membership and to keep non-members out of employment. Most people probably still believe that a ‘labour dispute’ normally means a disagreement about remuneration and the conditions of employment, while as often as not its sole cause is an attempt on the part of the unions to force unwilling workers to join.

The acquisition of privilege by the unions has nowhere been as spectacular as in Britain, where the Trade Disputes Act of 1906 conferred

upon a trade union a freedom from civil liability for the commission of even the most heinous wrong by the union or its servant, and in short confer[red] upon every trade union a privilege and protection not possessed by any other person or body of persons, whether corporate or incorporate.3

Similar friendly legislation helped the unions in the United States, where first the Clayton Act of 1914 exempted them from the antimonopoly provisions of the Sherman Act; the Norris–La Guardia Act of 1932 ‘went a long way to establish practically complete immunity of labour organisations for torts’;4 and, finally, the Supreme Court in a crucial decision sustained ‘the claim of a union to the right to deny participation in the economic world to an employer’.5 More or less the same situation had gradually come to exist in most European countries by the 1920s, ‘less through explicit legislative permission than by the tacit toleration by authorities and courts’.6 Everywhere the legalisation of unions was interpreted as a legalisation of their main purpose and as recognition of their right to do whatever seemed necessary to achieve this purpose—namely, monopoly. More and more they came to be treated not as a group which was pursuing a legitimate selfish aim and which, like every other interest, must be kept in check by competing interests possessed of equal rights, but as a group whose aim—the exhaustive and comprehensive organisation of all labour—must be supported for the good of the public.7

Although flagrant abuses of their powers by the unions have often shocked public opinion in recent times and uncritical pro-union sentiment is on the wane, the public has certainly not yet become aware that the existing legal position is fundamentally wrong and that the whole basis of our free society is gravely threatened by the powers arrogated by the unions. We shall not be concerned here with those criminal abuses of union power that have lately attracted much attention in

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