Labor Experts Claim NLRB Extends Regulation too Far

The National Labor Relations Board is extending its regulations of the bargaining process too far, Archibald Cox '34, professor of Law, and John T. Dunlop, associate professor of Economics, declared in an article in this month's Harvard Law Review.

Too many problems, they said, have been moved from the area of collective bargaining to that of government rulings. This creates confusion over the question of what is part of compulsory collective bargaining.

Inland Steel Case Cited

The Inland Steel case and the pension issue was used as the primary example of the NRLB's compulsory bargaining decrees. The Board ruled that pensions should be determined by collective bargaining.

The authors said that instead of this arbitrary ruling, collective bargaining should be used to determine "whether a specific term or condition of employees (1) should be established by the collective agreement; or (2) should be fixed periodically by joint management-union determination . . . or (3) should be left to management's discretion or individual bargaining without the intervention of the bargaining agent."

The only alternative, the article said, is to have the line sharply drawn by the NLRB and the courts.

"The choice . . . is essentially a choice between pragmatic private accommodations and Government rulings whose formulation, however carefully considered, must be somewhat theoretical, and whose application must be uniform, rigid and doctrinaire."