Word: hartleys
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...worried about heat & light. The steel industry had reason to fear a complete shutdown. With 370,000 miners out on strike, the nation was down to a meager two-week supply of soft coal. Much as he disliked it, Harry Truman finally had to invoke the Taft-Hartley...
...Privileges, No Contract. In a federal court in Washington Judge Richmond Keech slapped an injunction on Lewis, ordered him not to ask for certain arbitrary privileges in a coal contract until the NLRB could decide whether such demands were unfair labor practices under the Taft-Hartley law. Lewis hadn't specifically made such demands, but for more than eight months negotiations had been stalemated because everyone knew that Lewis wouldn't sign unless he got them. The privileges were: an illegal union shop; limiting of the miners' welfare fund to members of the U.M.W.; a clause saying...
Then Lewis was ordered to appear before a Taft-Hartley fact-finding board which Harry Truman, in the shadow of the crisis, had reluctantly appointed. The board asked Lewis and the coal operators to sit down and give them a sample of their bargaining. In a room in the Labor Department, at a crowded open hearing, Lewis and Pittsburgh-Consolidation's President George Love promptly obliged...
Said Lewis scornfully: "We knew the operators had no intention of making a ... bargaining agreement because ... they believed they only had to refuse until they got themselves a yellow-dog injunction under this damnable Taft-Hartley...
That left Harry Truman no alternative. This week, with 372,200 now on strike, he invoked the machinery of the Taft-Hartley Act, a law which Harry Truman sometimes finds useful but also useful to hate. A three-man board of inquiry was ordered to make its report within seven days. An 80-day injunction was the next step. John L. Lewis had dared the President to do his worst: "To use the power of the state to drive men into the mines ... is involuntary servitude ... It is questionable whether one could postulate that such mass coercion would insure enthusiastic...