New Right-to-Work Law

Waving placards and shouting "Veto!", some 7,500 wrought-up Indianans marched into the Statehouse in Indianapolis last week to protest against a "right-to-work" bill passed, after long debate, by the Republican-dominated state legislature. After huddling with union delegates, Republican Governor Harold W. Handley, a protege of Indiana's Senator Bill Jenner, told them that though he disliked the bill himself, he would let it become law without his signature. When the crowd got the word, boos thundered in the Statehouse corridors, and demonstrators tried to push past the cops guarding the governor's office. Handley himself slipped away through a side exit.

It was predictable that organized labor in industrialized Indiana, 18th state with a right-to-work law, would oppose a bill that bans the union shop (by forbidding employers to fire any worker for refusing to join a union). More significant, as a sign of how U.S.-style enlightened capitalism looks at labor-management relations, was the unpublicized opposition, while the measure was in the legislative mill, of several Indiana big businessmen. Among them: executives of Radio Corp. of America, Seagrams (liquor), the Allison Division (turbojet engines) of General Motors, and Cummins Engine, which manufactures half the diesel engines that propel U.S. trucks.

Sturdiest big-business foe of the bill was Cummins' Board Chairman J. Irwin Miller, 47. "The classic argument against the union shop," Miller told a gathering of Dartmouth College students last year, "is the right-to-work argument. The average American manager feels that there is a character known as the 'loyal employee,' and this is a fellow who is supposed to figure that joining the union is a fate worse than death. Well, this man is in the same category, in my opinion, as the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. I've never found him."

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