Collective bargaining law

I think I must have mentioned, at some time, the feeling of visitors to this country – and even of Americans who've been off in Europe or Mexico or wherever – that they turn on the evening television news and get the impression that everything is doom, disaster and trickery.

Part of this, the trickery part, is due to the honourable obligation – at least of two of the networks, one commercial, the other the public non-commercial network – their obligation, which is unsleeping, to expose, and I mean night after night, some deceit or corruption in what pass for public institutions. I'm not thinking about what we call big, national debates. Should we go ahead with the B-1 bomber? Is it right to cut back on nuclear power and go after more coal? Should more, or less, of the national budget go on social welfare or national defence? All those massive and complicated problems that are now piling up on the desks of the president and Congress. 

I'm thinking of the sort of routine television reporting we get on how somebody in Chicago is making a mint out of a series of medical clinics that provide very dubious medical service indeed. Or, a month or two ago, the National Broadcasting Company did, on three or four successive nights, a series of tailpieces to the main, nightly, half-hour news bulletins, attacking one of the most vital of the national trade unions, the Teamsters, for the alleged corruption of its leaders – and 'vital' is not a casual journalistic word in this context. 

The Teamsters are the truckers who have displaced the railroads as the carriers of all the goods that sustain the life of the nation, or the main carriers. Well, this little series of nightly exposés must reach an audience of, I don't know, 20, 25 million. It was hair-raising in its charges and, whether by coincidence or example, a committee of Congress is now looking into the structure of the Teamsters' leadership and where the money from the members' dues goes, and so on. 

And there was a piece a few weeks ago which would up as a national survey of nurses in American hospitals, which produced the gruesome statistic that something just less than a third of all nurses would not want to be patients in their own hospitals because they thought the care was sloppy or casual or otherwise incompetent. Only one friend of mine in the past year has said when he was over here, working with me every day and then knocking off for a drink and the seven o’clock news, 'My God! I wonder what would happen if on a national network of ours, we had regular evening reports going after similar things in my country!' 

Well, that's one side of it. The trickery part. And I, for one, would begin to get worried the day the best of the television reports, or newspaper reports for that matter, stopped asking themselves, 'Are things really as smooth and blameless as they look on the surface?' 

Now, the doom and disaster part. Aside from what has become a universal phenomenon in the past decade or so – terrorism, hijackings, public bombings, kidnappings and the like – apart from that, the danger is to equate the United States with any one country in Europe, instead of with the whole European continent. What I mean is this. Ah, Pennsylvania, as a handy example, is just about the size of England. Suppose our nightly, half-hour's news concentrated wholly on Pennsylvania. Of course, there'd be some crime somewhere. A month ago, the big story would have been the... the snows, the closing of every school in the state, the proclamation by the president that Pennsylvania must be listed as a disaster area – and that's not a bit of rhetoric, by the way, it's an official order which entitles a declared disaster area to receive federal funds for assistance – then you'd have something about what was going on in the state legislature. Admittedly, Pennsylvania doesn't house the national government. Still, whichever state you cared to restrict your news coverage to, including the non-state of Washington DC, where the national government has its being, there would be a proportion of disasters, I should think, equal to what you'd get in England, or France, or Spain. 

But we have 50 states to cover and from Anchorage, Alaska to Key West, Florida is the distance from London to Bangkok, about 6,000 miles. So, if a man goes berserk with a rifle in Phoenix, Arizona and the schoolteachers of New York go on strike, they're pretty certain to get into that half-hour's national news, along with a bridge collapsing over the Missouri River and the biggest of America's industrial labour leaders saying he's not going to tell the White House what wage increases his men want ahead of negotiations with the owners. Then, in mid-afternoon, the news comes in that some lunatic in Oregon, 3,000 miles away from the New York studio, has taken over an airplane and ordered the pilot to fly to Cuba. Some of these items come in too late to receive more than an announcement read from a script by the newsreader, which is the most poverty-stricken form of television news. 

But when, in the morning or early afternoon, the word comes over the ticker that somebody's taken a pot-shot at a governor of a western state, that the fishermen of Massachusetts are going to start dumping their catch overboard as a protest against the threatened pollution of an offshore oil well, that an early flood in Ohio is threatening a town of 20,000, that a town of 10,000 has just been devastated by a tornado in Arkansas and that Mrs Trudeau was the only woman at last night's state dinner to wear a short frock. Well, by some miracle I never understand, the network has been with cameras out in Oregon and Ohio, and Phoenix and Arkansas, and (Missouri) and Massachusetts, and we see it. 

Now the miracle, any pinched broadcasting organisation may well point out, is money. It does take lashings of money to bring these pictures in every night from a few hundred, a thousand, three thousand, or whatever, miles away. And on top of that, there'll usually be two or three items from Europe and the satellite costs a whacking lot more. Still, if you were a television news editor, you couldn't exactly say, 'Well, there's always a tornado destroying some town, or some nut is always rushing into a hospital or a supermarket and going crazy with a gun!' 

Before television, you could choose to read or not to read what we wanted to from the widest, the most conscientious spread of news. Nowadays it comes at us before we can say, 'Hold! Enough!' And if you don't give it a second thought, the impression you get is of unprecedented gloom and doom. I believe if we'd had television covering the empires of the nineteenth century, I believe we might have gone into a much profounder depression from the nightly revelation of brutality and wars and disease and poverty. 

Well, having said that, I'm sure I'm going to be held just the same to my impossible assignment to say what is on the minds, or the conscience, of Americans. In quotes, 'all of Americans' not living there, since nobody lives in 'all' of America, I simply cannot say, but there are two things, more likely than most, this week, I think, to be picked up by papers or television stations in most parts of the country. 

The first is a political item which I believe will be of interest to anybody who works with his or her hands. It's the first, big row now developing between President Carter and labour. It's no secret that organised labour, which, remember, is not, in this country, a political party, labour has always believed it could get a better deal by doing comparison shopping between the bargain basements of both parties. Organised labour decided last November it was more likely to get a sympathetic hearing from Mr Carter than from Mr Ford and if it's true that voters come in blocks, the labour block and the block of black voters certainly put Mr Carter in the White House. 

Well, now the president recently sent to Congress a message which recommends, among other things, that both industry and labour of their own free will inform the government before negotiations of any price increases or wage increases each side is proposing. The message was followed by a strong hint from one of the president's economic advisors that the administration is thinking of drafting a law which would make it compulsory for industry and labour to say what increases they sought. 

Well, Mr George Meany, who is the titan of organised labour in this country, the president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, he said, with admirable plainness, 'We are absolutely opposed to it, we will not cooperate, it would destroy collective bargaining.' 

The president’s position is that it would not destroy, but anticipate a cooler atmosphere in which collective bargaining could proceed. It's worth, I think, more than a passing thought by industry and labour anywhere. 

Talking of atmosphere, the weather men have come up with yet another theory about the Arctic invasion in January. Solar physicists at an annual convention say that there have lately been fewer sunspots and that produces slower solar wind and the sure sign of excessive cold in the eastern states, as well as excessive drought in the west, is the appearance of – wait for it – tree rings of high levels of carbon-14. The expert who advanced this theory says when you look at the record of tree rings (if you're very long-lived, from the time of the Crusades to the dustbowl here of the 1930s, up to this year's polar freeze) quote, 'the correspondence between fewer sunspots, the evidence of tree rings and extremely cold weather is a one-to-one correspondence that is so good, I don't want to believe it.' 

Anyway, the outlook is for at least another year or two of ghastly cold in the east and continuing drought in the west. California is now in its eighteenth month of a brutal drought and they're beginning to ration water in the north of the state. I'll let you know what that feels and looks like when I get out there in a couple of weeks or so and play golf, as we did in England last summer, on concrete.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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