TAFT-HARTLEY ACT

TAFT-HARTLEY ACT (1947). Passed by Congress over the veto of President Harry Truman, the Taft-Hartley Act enacted a number of significant amendments to the NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS ACT of 1935. The 1935 law, known as the Wagner Act, may have been the most radical legislation of the twentieth century, recognizing and giving federal protection to workers' rights to organize, to form unions, to engage in strikes and other "concerted activities," including picketing, and to bargain collectively with their employers. The Wagner Act overturned a vast body of older, judge-made laws, which had enshrined, as a right of private property, employers' freedom to refuse to deal with unions or union workers. Now, the Wagner Act required them to bargain collectively with employees, and it forbade them to interfere with workers' new statutory rights. No longer could employers punish or fire pro-union employees or avoid independent unions by creating company-dominated unions; and no longer could they refuse to bargain in good faith with the unions that workers chose to represent them. What was more, the 1935 legislation created a new federal agency, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), to supervise union elections and bring "unfair labor practices" charges against employers who violated the Act.

The enforcement tools at the Board's disposal were never formidable; nonetheless, the spectacle of federal support behind vigorous industrial union drives both emboldened workers and enraged much of the business community and its supporters in Congress. During the dozen years since Congress passed the Wagner Act, the labor movement had quintupled in size, reaching roughly 15 million members, or 32 percent of the nonfarm labor force. A substantial majority of the workforce of such key industries as coal mining, railroads, and construction belonged to unions. Thus, by 1947 organized labor had become "Big Labor" and a mighty power in the public eye, and the complaints of business that the National Labor Relations Act was a one-sided piece of legislation began to resonate. The Act safeguarded workers' rights and enshrined collective bargaining but provided no protection for employers or individual employees against the abuses or wrongdoing of unions.

Changes after World War II

The end of World War II (1939–1945) saw a massive strike wave, which helped turn public opinion against "Big Labor." Thus, when the Republicans won both houses of Congress in the 1946 elections, new federal labor legislation was almost inevitable. Indeed, in the decade preceding 1946, well over 200 major bills setting out to amend the Wagner Act had been introduced in Congress. These bills had rehearsed the main themes of the complex and lengthy Taft-Hartley Act. The gist of Taft-Hartley, according to its proponents, was to right the balance of power between unions and employers. The Wagner Act, they claimed, was tilted toward unions; Taft-Hartley would protect employers and individual workers. For the latter, the new law contained provisions forbidding the closed shop and permitting states to outlaw any kind of union security clauses in collective agreements. Already, several states, led by Florida and Arkansas, had adopted so-called right-to-work measures, outlawing any form of union security—not only the closed shop, but also contract provisions that required workers who declined to join the union to pay their share of expenses for bargaining and processing grievances. By sanctioning right-to-work statutes, Taft-Hartley did not injure "Big Labor" in the industrial heartland, so much as help thwart union advance in traditionally anti-union regions like the South and the prairie states.

The Taft-Hartley Act Brings Changes

For employers, the Act created a list of union "unfair labor practices," where previously the Wagner Act had condemned only employer practices. Taft-Hartley also greatly expanded the ability of both employers and the Board to seek injunctions against unions, thus undermining some of the protections against "government by injunction" that labor had won in the 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act. It gave employers the express right to wage campaigns against unions during the period when workers were deciding and voting on whether to affiliate with a union. Previous Board policy generally had treated these processes as ones in which workers ought to be free to deliberate and decide free from employer interference. The new law also banned secondary boycotts and strikes stemming from jurisdictional disputes among unions. These provisions chiefly affected the older craft unions of the American Federation of Labor, whose power often rested on the capacity for secondary and sympathetic actions on the part of fellow union workers outside the immediate "unfair" workplace.

By contrast, Taft-Hartley's anticommunist affidavit requirement, like its sanction for right-to-work laws, fell most heavily on the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The statute required that all union officials seeking access to NLRB facilities and services sign an affidavit stating that they were not communists. The requirement rankled because it implied that unionists were uniquely suspect. The law did not require employers or their agents to swear loyalty, but it did demand that the representatives of American workers go through a demeaning ritual designed to impugn their patriotism or they would be unable to petition the Board for a representation election or to bring unfair labor practice cases before it.

Finally, the Act changed the administrative structure and procedures of the NLRB, reflecting congressional conservatives' hostility toward the nation's new administrative agencies, exercising state power in ways that departed from common-law norms and courtlike procedures. Thus, the Act required that the Board's decision making follow legal rules of evidence, and it took the Board's legal arm, its general counsel, out of the Board's jurisdiction and established it as a separate entity.

The CIO's general counsel, for his part, warned that by establishing a list of unfair union practices and by imposing on the NLRB courtlike fact-finding, the new law would plunge labor relations into a morass of legalistic proceedings. Already under the Wagner Act, employers had found that unfair labor practice cases stemming from discrimination against union activists, firings of union-minded workers, and the like could all be strung out for years in the nation's appellate courts, rendering the Act's forthright endorsement of unionization a hollow one.

Since the late 1930s the NLRB itself had been retreating from its initially enthusiastic promotion of industrial unionism. Now, with Taft-Hartley, the Board or the independent legal counsel, who might be at odds with the Board, would have even more reason to maintain a studied "neutrality" toward union drives and collective versus individual employment relations, in place of Wagner's clear mandate in behalf of unionism. The great irony, the CIO counsel went on to say, was that so-called conservatives, who had made careers out of criticizing the intrusion of government authority into private employment relations, had created a vast and rigid machinery that would "convert … [federal] courts into forums cluttered with matters only slightly above the level of the police court."

And so it was. Despite its restrictions on secondary actions and jurisdictional strikes, Taft-Hartley did little to hamper the established old craft unions, like the building trades and teamsters, whose abuses had prompted them; but it went a long way toward hampering organizing the unorganized or extending unions into hostile regions of the nation, and it helped make the nation's labor law a dubious blessing for labor.

TAFT-HARTLEY ACT

Changes after World War II

The Taft-Hartley Act Brings Changes

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