During last summer's airplane strike, it was popular to criticize both the President and the Congress for hesitating to take decisive action to end the national hardship. But in another context, the President and the Congress and the Secretary made sense, given the dilemma in which they were caught. The dilemma may have been of the President's own making. The aircraft workers' revolt was not unique. But the giant Steelworkers Union voted him out.
Government hesitates to interfere with collective bargaining and strikes for good reason.
It is held to be essential to the private enterprise system that wages be determined by private contract. The strike in our system of industrial democracy is a right. It is the worker's way of asserting that he is not a slave. The fact that the average American worker has more conveniences, comfort, health, and amenities than any other man in all past history is not the point. But no right or principle exists independently of all else.