8ec

VI-f. (Source: Congress of the United States. In U.S. 70A Stats. 587, ch. 1041, 84th Cong. (1956))

CONTROL OF TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS IN TIME OF WAR

(United States Code, title 10, ch. 947, p. 9742)

CHAPTER 947.-TRANSPORTATION

9741. Control and supervision.

9742. Control of transportation systems in time of war.

9743. Officers: use of transportation.

9748. Civilian personnel in Alaska.

9748. Motor vehicles: for members on permanent change of station.

89741. Control and supervision

The transportation of members, munitions of war, equipment, military property, and stores of the Air Force throughout the United States shall be under the immediate control and supervision of the Secretary of the Air Force and agents appointed or designated by him. 89742. Control of transportation systems in time of war

In time of war, the President, through the Secretary of the Air Force, may take possession and assume control of all or part of any system of transportation to transport troops, war material, and equipment, or for other purposes related to the emergency. So far as necessary, he may use the system to the exclusion of other traffic.

565

VII. The Taft-Hartley Act, 1947 and Emergency

Disputes

Until the recent major troubles in the railroad and airline industries and the invocation of title 10 of the Railway Labor Act, the emergency disputes provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act were the best known Federal procedure for the settlement of emergency strikes, (item a).

The experience under the Taft-Hartley provisions has been mixed. Sometimes they have worked; sometimes they have not worked; sometimes attempts to settle disputes have succeeded without their use; sometimes they have failed. Presidents have been criticized both for using the act, and for not using it.

The synopsis summarizes the 26 closed cases (as of March 1967) where the emergency disputes provisions have been invoked. (See item b.) The reader may draw his own conclusions about the effectiveness of title II. It is only fair to add that there is no general agreement on this point.

In any event, it is to title II that we must look for the congressional direction to the President and the courts as to how to proceed in handling emergency disputes outside of the railroad and airlines industries. And it is to title II of Taft-Hartley that we must look, in the event of threatened strikes, not only in steel, coal, copper, rubber, automobiles, manufacturing and mining generally, but also in trucking, longshoring, and the other maritime industries.

Currently, substantial use is being made of its provisions in disputes affecting the Vietnam war effort.

In 1966, President Johnson secured injunctions in the dispute involving an aerospace division of General Electric in Evandale, Ohio, and the International Association of Machinists and the United Automobile Workers; and one between the Union Carbide Corp. and the United Steelworkers of America. These two cases were settled while the injunctions were in effect.

In two 1967 cases, still pending and not included in the summary, injunctions are still in effect and settlements have not been reached. These involve a dispute on the West Coast between the Pacific Coast Shipbuilders Association and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and one in the East, at Stratford, Conn., between the sole manufacturer of helicopter engines, Avco-Lycoming Division of Avco Corp. and the United Automobile Workers.

The brief account of the legislative history of the emergency disputes provisions of Taft-Hartley by Frank M. Kleiler (item_c) may be supplemented by some of the items under VIII, below, notably h and j.

In 1959, the United Steelworkers case resolved the question of the constitutionality of the emergency disputes provisions (item d). It also provided clarification of the question of what constituted peril to the "national health and safety." This decision may also be profitably read in connection with the 1959 steel strike crisis, discussed below, but is placed here to round out the documentation of title II of Taft-Hartley.

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