The Connecticut labor news., 1924-07-19

the fast growing use of injunctiOns i'll labor disputes, Senator George Whar- ton Pepper of Pennsylvania strongly upheld the contention of organized la Dor that injunctions menace liberty and infringe the rights of the workers, i'll ] an address here before the American l Bar Association.
 Directing attention to the hostility of the workers toward the Federal courts, Senator Pepper virtually declared that | the hostility was deserved and that the Federal courts had only themselves to | blame for the attitude of labor. Abuse of the injunction, he said, is arouslng a revolutionary spirit and is regarded by the workers as tyranny for which l there is no excuse.
 | Con fdence iH Courts Essential to Na- | ti0n
 "Under such a system of government l as ours," he added, "the maintenance of well-nigh universal confidence in the 1 judiciary is pretty nearly essential to national safety. Is 1t not worth while to place elsewhere than upon our Fed eral judges the burden of solving for us our legislative and executive prob lems?
 E'To maintain such confidence. must we not confine the courts to the sphere in which the creators of our constl- tutional system intended them to live and move and have their being?"
 Comparing the British and American attitude toward organized labor, as re- fected in legislation and legal policy Senator Pepper said that Great Bri- tain recognized peaceable picketlng as legitimate concomitant of strike and had trained the guns of criminal procedure upon conduct which treatens breach of the peace or invasion of pri vate right.
 Picketing Defned As SeIf-Defense
 Picketing, Senator Pepper declared, might be regarded as 'protective action of a great social group who feel out ragged at what seems to them the be- traya1 of their class by its own mem bers''
 The thing called picketing," he con tinued, may be regarded as much more than an effort to persuade or intimidate non-union workers.
 "In a community which soon con ceives of it, picketing is not thing to be stopped by injunction. It is rather thing to be domesticated along with the strike Attending at or near the plant | or near the non-union mans house for l the purpose of persuading him to ab- stain from working, becomes normal and inevitable course of conduct. If you object that such conduct may easily l lead to violence, the answer will be made to you that the administration of 1 criminal law must in that event be re- l lied upon for protection.
 l Emgland LegaHSes Pickering by Strikers
 "When you observe attentively what is going on in. given community you will find it possible to decide whether i'll that community picketing has come to be recognized as the self-protection of social class in strike time or Is
 still generally regarded as something which can successfully be outlawed in the warfare between employer and en- ploye.
 'I suggest that 1t is in this connec- l ton that you will find an instructive contrast between the English industrial
 situation and ours. If you read the Trades Disputes Act you will find III section a definite statutory declara-
 ton of the legality of some of the l very things from which the striking shopmen were enjoined eighteen
 months ago by the United States Dis
 trict Court for the North ern District of
 Illinois. This means that in England
 picketing has been recognized as inevi-
 table class self-protection, while with
 us it is still treated as a preventable offense against the rules of industrial war"
 Injunction Tyranny Grozviug, He ,Sh0zvS Reviewing the use of injunctions ii labor disputes, Senator Pepper remind
 ed his audience that it was in 1888 tha ! state court first issued an injunction
 in labor case. The first by a Fedora court was in 1891. Today, he said, in functions have become a recognizes \ function of the Federal courts. ! Study of these orders, he said
 showed that injunctions had becom
 more and more comprehensive unti
 they had eliminated in the railroa ' shopmen's injunction order. He de
 clared that during the shopmen's strik
 of 1922, nearly every one of the %
 Glass r railroads applied for an i'll
 juntions and that no application wa
 denied, nearly 300 orders being issued