Jurisdictional disputes in the motion-picture Industry : hearings before a special subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, Eightieth Congress, first-session, pursuant to H. Res. 111 (1948)

436 MOTION-PICTURE JURISDICTIONAL DISPUTES am going to hear the next union come to the stand and give the next union the devil, and so on down the line. When we take all the subdivisions of all these unions up here and the labor leaders, when the testimony is written in the book, you will have debased nobody except the labor movement and the unions in America. You are not going to hurt me. I am sitting there trying to be an impartial listener, merely gathering evidence. That is my charge here. But you and the witnesses that the attorneys call, and you as individuals, are going to get up there, rightfully so, and pour out your heart into the testimony as to what is happening in this jurisdictional dispute, and under oath, and so when the papers come out, and the press has been fair, as I have said here, they have been very fair — when they come out, however, they will say this individual says this about another individual and another individual says this about that individual, and who reads it? The public. And what is the impression of the public when they read it ? Let me take you back to Washington during the full hearing; over 2,000,000 words of testimony. We had all the big men in labor there and a lot of the big men in industry, and those labor leaders came in to defend their unions, and they did a fine job of it. They went so far as to say that the Wagner bill was the greatest piece of legislation written since the Constitution of the United States of America. I remember Mr. Green holding it up and saying that that was it, that he helped write it; Mr. Bittner the same way; all of them; and yet the reason the Wagner bill did not stand up is because why? The Wagner bill was abused by the ones who wanted it enacted. It goes back to the word "abuse" in there, not full consideration of the concept of the bill, and so then after listening to all that testimony we sat as a committee and we wrote new legislation. If you don't think that took hours and hours of study and work, trying to be fair to both sides. I only had one thing that I wanted in that bill. I wanted freedom of speech. I wanted freedom of both sides in this picture of industry and labor, and I say I would be just as critical of anj' industry that does not live under the provisions of this act, even though my brother may be the president of that industry, as I would any labor group that would defy it, but I do feel that as an employer in America I have that right to know my men that work for me, I have a right to talk to the men, and I believe that the union would have just as much a right to say the boss was right or he was wrong, and I think the employer should have the guts to get up before his men and admit when he was wrong and say, "I didn't do right by you boys and I would like to do this or the other thing," and I think that would help the employers. Now, every man that was on the Labor Committee is supposed to be against labor, and I would like to stand here in defense of the group that I belong to, and that is the Labor Committee of the United States House, and I would like to speak for the majority and the minority, for every one of those members fought just as much for provisions that they thought protected labor as for the management. We didn't all win. We didn't all succeed. We didn't all succeed, lots of times, and I wish that each and every one of you would get the testimony of that full hearing of that committee, it is all there