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the people of the State that is meaningful
and that has long been neglected.
The amendment which the minority will
propose to you will read as follows: "Em-
ployees shall have the right to organize
and bargain collectively through represen-
tatives of their own choosing."
The concept of the right of employees to
organize and to bargain collectively has
evolved painfully through many years. At
the time that our last constitution was
composed, quite the opposite view pre-
vailed and it was felt that the employer
had the absolute right to do what he
pleased with his property, including his
employees.
I would like to read to you one para-
graph which I took out of the Dred Scott
case which was decided in 1857, just ten
years before our present constitution was
written, in which Chief Justice Taney, in
that very famous opinion, said: "That the
right of property in a slave is distinctly
and affirmatively expressed in the Consti-
tution, the right of traffic in it, like an
ordinary article of merchandise and prop-
erty was guaranteed to the citizens of the
United States and the government in ex-
press terms has pledged to protect it in all
future times if the slave escapes from the
owner."
Contrast that, if you will, with the opin-
ion of the same Supreme Court of the
United States, eighty years later in the
case of National Labor Relations Board v.
Jones & Laughlin in which the Supreme
Court held constitutional the National La-
bor Relations Act and in which Chief Jus-
tice Charles Evans Hughes said that a
single employee was helpless in dealing
with an employer, that he was dependent
ordinarily on the daily wage for the main-
tenance of himself and his family, that if
the employer refused to pay him the wages
that he thought fair, he was nevertheless
unable to leave the employer and resist
arbitrary and unfair treatment, and by
that pronouncement the Supreme Court of
the United States held that the federal
government was within constitutional pre-
rogatives to enact a law regulating the
relationship between employers and em-
ployees and giving employees the rights
which otherwise would have been denied to
them to bargain, to organize one with the
other, and to bargain collectively.
In the course of the succeeding years
since Jones & Laughlin, and since the time
of the National Labor Relations Act and
the recognition that the state should and
must afford this fundamental right to
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working people, a number of states have
recognized this right and have both con-
stitutionally and by statute effectuated the
right. The New York Constitution, the
1938 Constitution prior to the National
Labor Relations Act, contained a right to
organize and bargain. We in Maryland
have done very little or nothing, as a
practical matter, to guarantee the rights of
our working citizens to organize and bar-
gain collectively.
Historically, I think it is interesting to
note — because I am sure that many
members of the Committee will want to
know how this recommendation fits into
the context of the Declaration of Rights
which we have been discussing the last
several days — that the previous edition
of the model state constitution published
in 1945 and re-issued through to 1959,
contains a right to organize. I will not
read it all to you, but it is very similar to
the proposal which we make to you today.
The present model state constitution con-
tains no such provision; however, I would
like to read to you the reasons the authors
give for not recommending the inclusion
of the right to organize and bargain col-
lectively in the current constitution, be-
cause I think it will be of great interest to
the people of this Committee who are
having one hundred years to catch up with
in preparing this new constitution.
The National Municipal League says
after having discussed a number of other
things they feel belong in or out of a
Constitution: "Certain other rights, such
as, for instance, the right to bargain col-
lectively, or the provision that labor is
not a commodity were not included because
under present constitutions they appeared
to need no separate constitutional reflection.
"It is recognized, however, that in some
jurisdictions there may be need for inclu-
sion of such provisions and their ommission
here is not intended as an expression of
opposition to their inclusion on substantive
policy grounds."
We still do need a right to organize and
bargain collectively in the basic law of the
State. We need it because nearly half a
million of our working citizens do not to-
day have any protection whatever in this
regard.
The National Labor Relations Act to
which I earlier referred covers only those
people in interstate commerce who are
employed by employers of some size and
substance.
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