National Affairs: Instinct Revoked

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In the past four years, Wisconsin's state law forbidding strikes in public utilities has been invoked 43 times to prevent shutdowns in bus lines, streetcar lines, the supply of gas and light. But last week the law was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Under the justices' eye were two cases involving streetcar workers and gas workers who maintained that Wisconsin had no right to require compulsory arbitration as the final step in a utility labor dispute. Chief Justice Fred Vinson and five other justices agreed with them. The justices' reasoning: compulsory arbitration destroys the right to strike, which is guaranteed by the Taft-Hartley Act (frequently denounced by labor as the "slave-labor" act). In a conflict between a federal and a state act, the federal act must be "supreme."

Three justices, in an opinion written by Felix Frankfurter, dissented. Their reasoning: the right to strike is not absolute; a utility strike "so clearly involves the needs of a community as to evoke instinctively the power of government"; the majority decision crippled local government's power to protect themselves.

This week at least ten other states worriedly studied their utility antistrike acts, all of them now facing the same sudden end.