It is a great pleasure to have an opportunity to be with you this morning. I am most appreciative for the generous words of your President Gray, and also for the generous words of Mr. George Meany yesterday.
Nevertheless, I don't come before you this morning in any spirit of satisfaction or jubilation. I am not here to report on a job which was either completely finished or satisfactorily finished.
We can be grateful for many of the items which were finally included in the Bill which recently passed the House and Senate, and we can be thankful that many other items in the final version weren't as harsh with restrictive and arbitrary rules as they were in the original Landrum-Griffin Bill that passed the House of Representatives by a vote of three to one.
But the final Bill is not the Bill that I wanted, or you wanted, or more importantly, the Bill that the facts of the situation called for. It contains several unfair, unsound and one-sided provisions that bear little or no resemblance to the recommendations of the Senate Labor Committee.
It contains features inserted by the enemies of organized labor as a means of reducing honest labor strength at the bargaining table, slowing down the organization of many of the unorganized areas of this country, and burdening small locals with unnecessary paper work.
But I think that the basic story of this Bill is not written in the story of any great success in any great victories. It is written on the contrary on the story of three major defeats.
Let us recall these three battles.
The first defeat was the defeat of the Kennedy-Ives Bill in the closing days of the 85th Congress. Had that bill been passed at that time, all of us would have been spared a great deal of the grief and headache, would have been spared an intensive build-up for more restrictive legislation during the current year, and would have been spared some of the harshest provisions of the Bill which has recently passed the Congress.
Had there been a Kennedy-Ives Bill last year, there would have been no McClellan Bill in 1959, no Landrum-Griffin Bill, no Goldwater Bill, nor any of the other Bills designed to curb legitimate labor rights under the guise of punishing a few racketeers.
But the Kennedy-Ives Bill, after passing the United States Senate by a vote of 88 to 1, was defeated in the House of Representatives during the last week of the last session by a vote of 198 to 190, with both Congressman Landrum and Congressman Griffin voting against.
There is not a substitute--but the fact of the matter is that most of the members who voted for the Landrum-Griffin bill during the last month of the session in the House of Representatives also voted against the Kennedy-Ives Bill the year before.
This Bill, the Kennedy-Ives Bill, was bitterly distorted and opposed by the NAM, the Chamber of Commerce, the Associated General Contractors of America, and by all of those who were more interested in an issue than a bill, who weren't interested in an anti-racketeering bill, who would not support it, but instead wouldn't support any bill that didn't include some provisions in it which were anti-labor.
Had these petty politics been avoided, had the President and the Secretary of Labor then supported that bill, effective curbs on racketeering would have been on the books a year ago and all of the setbacks and difficulties and turmoil which surrounded the Bill this year would have been avoided.
So when we consider the restrictions which are in this Bill, which were not in the Kennedy-Ives Bill and when we are considering where the responsibility should fall, let's remember the defeat of this Bill and those who were responsible for it.
It is easy to say, of course, and Mr. Hoffa says it, that none of this would have happened had there been no Kennedy Labor Bill at all in 1958 and that the AFL-CIO and its courageous leader, George Meany, should not have encouraged the passage of any responsible labor reform bill at all.
But remember if you will that this all came up at a time when the only other alternative was the so-called Knowland Bill of Rights and that we suggested in defeating those repressive amendments on the Senate floor in April of 1958, only because Senator Morse and I gave assurances that by June 15 of 1958 the Labor Committee itself would report a bill to the Floor of the Senate.
After the defeat of that Bill last year, we had to start all over again this year to prevent labor's enemies from filling the vacuum and we suggested in reporting out of the Senate Labor Committee with only Senator Goldwater and Senator Dirksen voting against us, the original Kennedy-Erwin bill supported again by the AFL-CIO -- and on which I had the pleasure of working closely with some of your able Washington representatives and attorneys. Hap Gray, Lou Sherman and Bob Connerton, but when that bill came to the Senate Floor we met with your second defeat.
The votes of the so-called McClellan Bill of Rights which passed by a vote of 46 to 45. A supposedly friendly Senate majority defeated us by a majority of one vote.
To prevent the anti-labor forces from completely taking over we went on the defensive. We succeeded in modifying that amendment with the help of Senator Kuchel of California, and other restrictive amendments which were offered, but it was no longer the same atmosphere, and it was no longer the same bill.
The scene then shifted to the House of Representatives Labor Committee which after a long and bitter struggle, succeeded in producing a reasonable bill, the Elliott Bill, but then on the Floor of the House we suffered our third defeat; the vote on the Landrum-Griffin Bill. That was, I believe -- and I say it with some degree of conservatism -- that was, I believe, the worst defeat that the American Labor Movement had suffered in its history.
The Landrum-Griffin Bill in its original form -- and I lived with it for two weeks in conference -- was the most anti-labor bill that an American Congress ever passed in its history. I don't think that five members of the House of Representatives really knew what was in it. It took us two weeks to understand the final reference, which was a cross reference to an obscure bill which would have provided for damage suits against unions, for certain kinds of picketing which have been traditional by the labor movement.
On that vote the real friends of labor stood up to be counted, and there was not enough of them to go around. There was a strong television speech by the President, who I do not believe could have possibly understood what was really in the Landrum-Griffin Bill, and the continued pressure campaign from the organizations previously mentioned, including, of course, the Retail Federation and the A.G.C. led to the House passage of the bill which threatened to turn the labor movement back to the days before the passage of the Wagner Act.
Yesterday in my office I finally got around to answering all the mail I received on the Landrum-Griffin Bill, pro and con. I received ten thousand letters and telegrams in one week in support of the Landrum-Griffin Bill, and I received about one thousand letters against it -- ten to one.
What was true in my office was true in the office of the other congressmen and senators. Congressmen and senators are influenced by their mail, and unless the friends of labor, and unless the labor movement itself is prepared to carry on the same kind of concentrated effort that the employer groups of this country carried on during that one-month period, you can be sure that when minimum wage legislation, and the Situs picketing legislation and educational legislation and housing legislation come before the House and Senate, we are going to suffer the same kind of defeat.
This is a struggle of communication, in a sense. I must say in the Landrum-Griffin Bill, they really covered the water front. You can talk about the firing of General MacArthur and Senator McCarthy, and every other issue which has excited the imagination on one side or another of the people of this country. But I have never received one-tenth as much mail in a week as I received due to the concentrated effort of all of these people.
Yesterday in the Washington Post it related how an employer company sent around its foreman to call on people who lived in a particular congressional district, and those calls alone resulted in 3,000 letters.
I saw a letter which the General Electric Company sent to all its supervisory personnel, telling them to write to the Congress and Senator Kennedy in particular, as a member of the Conference Committee, and to send a copy of the letter that they sent to the head of the personnel department. That was the kind of an effort which resulted in the passage of this legislation.
Now, I will say that the right to picket, even the right to strike, and thus the right to bargain collectively, would have all been drastically reduced by the Landrum-Griffin Bill.
Labor's ability to protect itself from substandard conditions is the ability to appeal through consumer boycotts and unfair goods, its ability to organize new workers in order to protect their standards, its traditional right to refuse to work on struck goods.
These and other rights would have all been eliminated by the passage of the House Bill.
In addition, unions would have been liable to a multitude of damage suits. They would have been cast upon the state laws and the state courts in an increasing number of cases.
Relief from the union-busting provisions of the Taft-Hartley including the right of economic strikers to vote, would have been denied.
Reporting requirements would have been completely one-sided.
There was an exemption for employer reports which we had in the Senate Bill which you could have driven a truck through, and yet the reporting requirements as to the unions in the Landrum-Griffin Bill were tightened up.
The AGC's exclusive provision on pre-hire contracts in the construction industry were included and so was the section which would have prevented your unions from requesting contractors not to subcontract with non-union operators.
No friend of labor could have supported these provisions and no friend of labor did.
These and other provisions were all added on the House Floor.
The third defeat that we suffered on this matter was the most serious of all. In the Conference Committee between the House and Senate we were faced with a difficult situation.
The House members, including Congressmen Landrum, Griffin and Barden of North Carolina, were stubborn and confident. The Republican conferees on the Senate side led by Senator Goldwater and Senator Dirksen were confident that the Senate, if put to the test, would have supported the original House version.
Certainly it was clear that the original Kennedy-Ervin Bill or even the version that passed the Senate would not have been accepted again by the Senate in the new atmosphere.
But despite these difficulties our success in the Conference was gratifying and it was due in great measure to the devoted work of Senator McNamara of Michigan, Senator Jennings Randolph of West Virginia, Senator Morse of Oregon, and Congressman Thompson of New Jersey, and Congressman Perkins of Kennedy.
We prevented a further turning over to the states of other jurisdictions.
We enabled economic strikers to vote in representation elections.
We required reports from employers equivalent to those that are now going to have to come in from unions.
We eliminated the possibilities of damage suits and we preserved the right of labor to refuse to work on struck goods.
Of particular importance to this organization, we restored our provisions permitting pre-hire contracts in the construction industry, and thus ending once and for all the impossible restrictions which the Taft-Hartley Bill put on your union activities.
We permitted the Building Trades Unions to enter into agreements with prime contractors under which those contractors would not deal with nonunion subcontractors, and that is only simple justice.
We failed in the end, after a long hard fight for it, to attain a provision permitting situs picketing, to remove the present law requiring you to work alongside nonunion labor, but such an amendment is only a matter of equity.
Reversing the Denver Building case would restore the traditional rights, protections that the building trades have always experienced, and those, as I mentioned, we failed to get. We failed to get such a provision in the Conference.
I have introduced last week with Senator Kuchel of California the minority Whip as co-sponsor, and Senator McNamara of Michigan, and Congressman Thompson in the House of Representatives, and I have been personally given assurance by the Speaker of the House, Mr. Rayburn, the Minority Leader of the House, Mr. Halleck, the Majority Leader, Mr. Johnson, and the Minority Leader, Mr. Dirksen, that that measure will be brought to the vote in the House and Senate in the early part of the next session of Congress.
And I wanted to assure you that that commitment is going to be met.
Now, all of this was done, I think in good measure due to the devoted work of your President, Mr. Gray, who lived with this problem as closely as we did during the two weeks of the Conference.
I have heard some charges made, and I noticed Mr. Meany discussed them, that some preference was given to the Building Trades at the expense of other unions.
The fact of the matter is that that is not true. There is nothing in that Bill that has not been discussed for ten years by both Republicans and Democrats as simple equity due to the particular nature of the building trades organizations, and therefore, I think that what is in this Bill is fair.
I think the members of the Building Trades Unions are entitled to it, and I think it has been put in this Bill, as I have said, due to the work that you have done in the past, and due to the particular work that Mr. Gray, and members like Senator McNamara, who has been a member of the Building Trades Unions for much of their working lives.
Despite these gains, and whatever you may think of the Bill as a whole, now I know that the members of this organization, and other unions in the nation, are not going to forget the history and what it means for the future.
It is apparent that real progress will not be made in this field, or other fields of progressive social legislation, unless those who are sympathetic to the aspirations of the working people of this country, those who understand the problems of the trade union movement, and those who are willing to stand up and be counted for progressive legislation, are placed in greater numbers in both the house and Senate, and at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Regardless of whether or not Mr. Mitchell eats his hat, we have some three or four million unemployed workers in this country who receive an average unemployment compensation check of $31 a week.
We have been conducting hearings in the subcommittee on labor legislation introduced by Senator Morse and myself, and Congressman Roosevelt in the House of Representatives, to lift the minimum wage from $1 to $1.25 an hour, and extend its coverage to over seven million people who are not today covered by even $1.
We have moved this bill out of the subcommittee to the full committee. It is coming to the Floor of the Senate in the early part of the next session, and yet this Administration has opposed lifting the minimum wage even one cent.
Yet, the average wage paid to laundry women in the five largest cities in the southern part of this country is sixty-five cents an hour for a forty hour week, and they are not covered by the minimum wage, and they will be if this legislation can be passed.
We are also going to bring to the floor of the United States Senate in the next session of Congress a bill which provides for the Davis-Bacon Act, so that these new increases in public construction are not merely for the benefit of the unstable and un-standard operators.
Senator McNamara had to get up on the floor of the Senate two days ago and make sure that the Davis-Bacon Act was applied to some $80 million, an $80 million bill which was going to apply to construction, and it passed the House of Representatives and yet it was stricken out of the Senate Bill.
The point that I am attempting to make this morning is that this is going to be a long and continuous task. It is going to require the continuous and vigilant attention of all of us, if we are going to make sure that progressive and worthwhile and responsible legislation is passed during the next session of the Congress; if we are going to pass a new school bill, if we are going to pass an airport construction act, that will really bring us up to date in the jet age, and this Congress cannot go home in the next session, veto or no veto until it has passed and the President sings a comprehensive housing bill, a housing bill with particular emphasis on urban renewal and slum clearance.
If we can obtain a Congress and a President who are alerted to the needs and growth of this country, then your future as a union and as individuals, and the future of your families are secure.
For in the days ahead, if our population doubles in the next 40 years, we will need more schools and more highways and more dams and more homes, and more hospitals, and more airports and bridges and buildings, than ever before.
However, we cannot sit back and wait for these wonders to come to pass. We will have to fight not only to move ahead, but to keep from falling back. It is already clear that there will be more attempts to pass more restrictive legislation, to elect more unsympathetic Congressmen, and to try in more states to put in the so-called right-to-work laws at the polls.
I want to make clear once again my complete opposition as a member of the Labor Committee of the House and Senate for 13 years, and as a member of the so-called Select Committee, that I am unalterably opposed to the passage of so-called right-to-work laws in any form at any level, both state and national.
Gentlemen, we are blessed in this country with a strong labor movement. Its strength is in the important contribution to the public good. I know it has been used to eliminate industrial terror and sweatshop working conditions.
I know, from 13 years of close association with the members of this union, and its leaders, that it has used its strength for legislation that went far beyond its own vested interests. I know the constructive roles that the American labor movement has made around the world in helping the unions of other countries to rid themselves of Communist leadership.
I know its dedication to the cause of equal rights for all Americans. It is because I am aware of these things that I was pleased yesterday to place in the records of the Congress of the United States a brief statement on this theme by President George Meany.
In this pamphlet, "Power for What?" Mr. Meany says:
"The record shows beyond contradiction that from its inception the trade union movement has consistently used whatever power it had to raise the American standard of living, to promote the interests of all the American people, and to enhance the power and prestige of the nation as a whole."
Those of us who have had any responsibility to expose any wrongdoings of the Hoffas have a particular responsibility to make the record complete. The Hoffas and the Becks and Dios should not cause us, and the American people, to modify our basic respect for and appreciation of a great patriotic American labor movement.
Lincoln once said:
"All that serves labor serves the nation — all that harms labor is treason to America. No line can be drawn between the two."
If a man tells you he loves America, yet he hates labor, he is a liar. If a man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor, he is a fool. There is no America without labor, and to fleece the one is to rob the other.
This is not the time for oratory in this country's history, but the time for action. This is not the time for halfway measures or inertia or inaction. It is a time to move ahead, to meet the challenge of the future, to remember the words of Justice Holmes:
"That when we sail with the wind or against the wind, we must above all set sail and not drift or lie at anchor."
Thank you. (Standing ovation)
Speech source: Papers of John F. Kennedy. Pre-Presidential Papers. Senate Files. Series 12. Speeches and the Press. Box 904, Folder: "Convention of the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department, San Francisco, California, 11 September 1959".