[Seventy-five years ago, the labor movement suffered its greatest
setback of the 20th Century: the Taft-Hartley Act.]
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SEVENTY FIVE YEARS LATER, TOLL OF TAFT-HARTLEY WEIGHS HEAVILY ON
LABOR  
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Jonathan Kissam
June 23, 2022
UE News
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_ Seventy-five years ago, the labor movement suffered its greatest
setback of the 20th Century: the Taft-Hartley Act. _

A sign at a 1947 union rally at Madison Square Garden calling on
President Harry Truman to veto the Taft-Hartley labor bill., FPG/Getty


 

Despite a valiant effort by millions of rank-and-file workers to
prevent its passage, Taft-Hartley became law on June 23, 1947 when the
Senate overrode President Truman’s veto. Taft-Hartley halted what
had been a remarkable decade of progress for working people, tamed
union militancy, and set the stage for the long decline of the U.S.
labor movement. We are still feeling its effects today.

Counterattack on a Growing Labor and People’s Movement

The Taft-Hartley Act was the centerpiece of big business’s
counterattack against a labor and people’s movement that had, over
the previous decade, won major improvements for working people on
factory floors and in the halls of Congress.

From 1936 through World War II, the new industrial unions of the
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) — UE, the United Auto
Workers, the United Steelworkers, and dozens of smaller unions — had
successfully organized the mass-production industries that dominated
U.S. economy at the time. Like Amazon today, the huge corporations
that dominated these industries — General Electric and Westinghouse
in electrical manufacturing, the “Big Three” auto companies, and
U.S. Steel — were engines of economic inequality. They exploited
massive workforces to generate massive profits for a tiny corporate
elite.

During the 1930s, workers throughout the country fought to establish
“industrial” unions, which would organize all workers in a given
industry, “regardless of craft, age, sex, nationality, race, creed,
or political beliefs,” as the preamble to the UE constitution puts
it. Against the intransigence and violence of the corporations,
workers employed militant and innovative forms of struggle — which
were frequently declared illegal. Famously, this was the era of the
“sit-down” strike in Flint, Michigan which established the UAW in
the auto industry.

Gains in the workplace were complemented by advances on the political
front. In 1932, reeling from the Great Depression, voters had replaced
the Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover with the Democrat Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, who promised the American people a “New Deal.”
But the content of the New Deal was determined less by pronouncements
of politicians than by popular struggle from below, as working people
and their allies demanded jobs, relief, economic security, and justice
in the workplace.

Strikes, popular mobilizations, and political action through
“Labor’s Non Partisan League” helped realign the Democratic
Party towards the interests of working people. These struggles won
enduring reforms including Social Security, the minimum wage, and the
National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which provided for the first time
a legal mechanism for workers to establish unions (at least in most of
the private sector).

During World War II, the mobilization of fighting-age men to serve in
the military created a labor shortage at home. While most working
people supported the war effort, they were not afraid to use the
leverage this labor shortage created to ensure that they were being
treated fairly on the shop floor. As the war effort brought women into
the workforce and created shortages, working people successfully
demanded that Congress provide federally-subsidized child care and
control prices, to prevent corporate price-gouging.

In his 1944 State of the Union Address, President Roosevelt outlined
an ambitious agenda for expanding the New Deal with an “Economic
Bill of Rights.” He proposed that all people have the right to a
job, an adequate income, decent housing, medical care, security in
old age, and education — and that the job of the government was to
help secure these rights.

“An economic confrontation between industry and the organized
rank-and-file workers”

The U.S. working class emerged from World War II well-organized and
confident both on the shop floor and in the political arena — and
eager to claim its share of the postwar economic recovery.

UE’s first Director of Organization, James Matles, wrote in his
history of UE _Them and Us_
[[link removed]]:

Much pressure was building up in the shops and in the homes of working
class families. At war’s end, August 1945, it was inevitable that
there would be an economic confrontation between industry and the
organized rank-and-file workers of the United States, squeezed almost
unbearably by the constantly expanded cost of living. Industry’s
attitude in that confrontation was made explicit in November 1945 at
the White House Labor-Management Conference ... CIO proposals for
immediate wage increases to make up the 30 percent loss in real wages
and a demand for firm price controls across the board, were defeated
by the combined votes of corporation executives and representatives of
the AFL.

Shortly after the failure of that conference, the CIO’s “Big
Three” (UE, UAW, and the Steelworkers) launched national strikes
that shut down the nation’s largest mass production industries.
Other unions struck as well, with close to five million workers taking
part in strike action in 1945 and 1946. A number of cities, from
Oakland, CA to Rochester, NY, saw short general strikes. These strikes
found wide support among local working-class communities, and they
established the pattern of collective bargaining that would bring a
decent, “middle class” standard of living to tens of millions of
working-class people in the middle decades of the 20th Century.

As Matles wrote, “The solidarity of workers and their allies among
the people gave industry pause, to put it mildly.” Industry was not
about to let this kind of working-class power continue.

The Corporations Strike Back

[Cartoon drawing of a congressman coming down the steps of the U.S.
Capitol with a briefcase reading Labor Baiters and a placard reading
Smash Labor Unions. A man labelled U.S. Trusts is behind him with his
hand on the congressman’s shoulders. Behind them is a drawing of
German Trusts behind Hitler, in the same pose, with Hitler also
holding a placard reading Smash Labor Unions.]
Fred Wright cartoon likening Taft-Hartley to Hitler's efforts to smash
unions, from the UE NEWS.
In 1946, the Republican Party retook control of Congress, amidst an
unprecedented advertising blitz by the National Association of
Manufacturers and other employer groups designed to convince people
that “communists” lurked everywhere and that price controls
(approved of by 75% of Americans earlier that year) were
“un-American.” Unions were the next “un-American” institution
in their sights.

GE CEO Charles E. Wilson spoke for all of corporate America when he
declared in 1946 that “The problems of the United States can be ...
summed up in two words: Russia abroad, labor at home.” Breaking
labor’s power was central to their project of restoring corporate
control of society, and legislation introduced by Congressman Fred
Hartley and Senator Robert Taft was their weapon of choice.

Recognizing that the public would not accept a wholesale repeal of the
NLRA, these wealthy and influential corporations instead sought to
portray unions as too powerful and “communist-dominated.” They
described their legislation as an even-handed effort to “correct
abuses” and restore balance between workers and bosses.

The nation’s union members saw through this. They recognized that a
bill which put restrictions on labor’s most effective tools, made
unions financially liable for strikes initiated by the rank-and-file,
allowed states to enact so-called “right to work” laws to weaken
unions, and required that elected union leaders sign loyalty oaths,
was not a restoration of balance, but instead was a “slave-labor
bill” designed to break their unions’ power.

Millions of workers signed petitions and postcards opposing
Taft-Hartley. CIO delegations — including many rank-and-file members
who were Republican voters unhappy about the men they had voted for
attacking their unions — visited the nation’s capital. And many in
the labor movement agitated for action that would take the fight
directly to corporations.

In April of 1947, CIO unions in Iowa declared a “labor holiday” on
Monday, April 21, as the state legislature was considering a “right
to work” bill. Tens of thousands of workers rallied at the state
capitol while the packing houses and farm equipment factories stood
idle. UE Director of Organization Matles recalled, “In 1947 while
the Taft-Hartley bill was before Congress, the three officers ... went
into the CIO Executive Board, and we had the unmitigated gall to
propose, while the bill was still going through Congress, that the CIO
recommend to all affiliated unions that they take the referendum to
shut it down. Take a vote first. Do it in a democratic way but shut
down every plant in the country.”

“A constant, day by day fight”

Despite opposition from the rank and file of the labor movement, the
bill passed Congress with significant support from Democrats.
Democratic President Harry Truman vetoed the bill, calling it a
“dangerous intrusion on free speech,” but enough Democrats joined
with Republicans to override his veto.

In an editorial following the bill’s passage called “How We Must
Fight,” the UE NEWS outlined a struggle “on two broad fronts”:

* We must carry on in the shops and in the local unions a constant,
day by day fight to close and unite our ranks as a union for the
protection and enforcement of our collective bargaining contacts.
* We must ... [carry] forward the broadest possible battle on the
political front, not only for the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, but
to break the grip of reaction on the policies of government and to
move forward along the path whose beginnings were outlined in the
Economic Bill of Rights by President Roosevelt.

The editorial further noted that “the Democratic failure [to sustain
Truman’s veto] makes the question of third party one that the labor
movement will have to consider.”

While most of the labor movement mouthed agreement with these
sentiments, behind the scenes too many labor leaders quietly made
their peace with Taft-Hartley. As historian George Lipsitz describes
in his study of labor and culture in the 1940s, _Rainbow at Midnight_,
many CIO leaders who were more concerned with amassing union
treasuries than aggressive struggle against the employer saw in
Taft-Hartley’s prohibition of “wildcat” strikes an opportunity
to discipline an unruly rank and file.

Even worse, some saw it as an opportunity to raid other unions.
Although all of the CIO unions initially took a principled stand
against signing the Taft-Hartley loyalty oath, UAW President Walter
Reuther broke ranks in order to attack the smaller and more militant
Farm Equipment Workers (FE). Since FE leaders had refused to sign the
oath, their union was unable to appear on the NLRB ballot when the UAW
raided their largest local in 1948 — and as a consequence they
immediately lost a quarter of their membership. The UAW also began
raiding UE, and soon other CIO unions joined in the raiding.

UE, FE, and other unions that were being subjected to raids appealed
to the CIO to intervene, but to no avail, and in 1949 UE suspended
dues payments to the CIO. At their 1949 convention the CIO expelled UE
and FE under charges of “communist domination”; they would expel
nine other unions, including the International Longshore and Warehouse
Union (ILWU) the following year. While UE and the other expelled
unions carried out the day to day fight to enforce their contracts as
best they could, this disunity in the labor movement was a death knell
for the broader political fight to repeal Taft-Hartley and advance
economic rights.

Their muscles, wearied by the ever-increasing speed-up, told of the
law.”

The loyalty act provisions of Taft-Hartley turned most of the U.S.
labor movement into a compliant “junior partner” to corporate
America, one that would fight for higher wages and benefits for its
members but not question the broader direction of society. The
bill’s other provisions established a restrictive legal framework
that has hindered working-class advances for the past three-quarters
of a century, and which too much of the labor movement has come to
accept as simply the way things are.

Prior to Taft-Hartley, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) would
frequently certify unions based on a procedure now widely known as
“card check” — after verifying that a majority of workers have
joined the union, the NLRB would require their employer to bargain
with them. Taft-Hartley gave employers the option of demanding an
election, leading to the long, drawn-out process workers have to go
through today.

It also enshrined in law employer’s right to oppose the union —
the original NLRA had required employer neutrality during a union
organizing drive. Together with the provision allowing employers to
request (and litigate the outcomes of) elections, this gave rise in
the 1970s to the modern union-busting industry.

In addition to crippling the labor movement’s ability to organize
new workers, Taft-Hartley put sharp restrictions on the ability of
organized workers to engage in struggle against their employers. As
Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais wrote in _Labor’s Untold Story_
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passage of the law “an employer could break a strike through
injunctions against picketing and other standard strike procedure. He
could refuse to bargain collectively, even by shutting down his plant
to prevent negotiations. He could destroy union treasuries by suit …
[and] circumvent union democracy by charging any effective trade
unionist with being a Communist.”

Of the effect on workers in the immediate aftermath of the bill’s
passage, Boyer and Morais wrote, “As the cost of living rose to an
all-time high some 16,000,000 trade unionists daily felt the law in
their pockets and sometimes in their bellies. Their muscles, wearied
by the ever-increasing speed-up, which always follows weakened unions,
also told of the law.”

The Legacy of Taft-Hartley

As described in the UE booklet “Them and Us Unionism,
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Taft-Hartley:

The mainstream of the labor movement embraced the idea that workers
and bosses share common interests, became even more tightly joined at
the hip with the Democratic Party, and ceded the right to make all
decisions about the economy and foreign policy to employers and the
government.

When the employers ditched any pretense of a “labor-management
accord” and launched all-out attacks on the labor movement in the
1970s and 80s, the mainstream of the labor movement had little idea
how to respond. Without an accurate analysis of capitalism, or the
ability to formulate an alternative vision, unions were unable to
respond effectively or build public support for any kind of fightback.
The only response many union leaders could muster was to offer deeper
concessions.

The legacy of Taft-Hartley can be seen not only in the timidity of
much of the U.S. labor movement, it can also be seen in the eagerness
of the government to intervene in labor disputes on the side of
employers, such as when President George W. Bush invoked the
legislation during the 2002 lockout of ILWU members by their
employers. Or the injunction issued against UE Local 506 during their
2019 strike against Wabtec — an injunction that is still in effect.

Taft-Hartley’s long shadow is also present in the unwillingness of
the government to enforce labor law against employers. Before
Taft-Hartley, the mission of the NLRB was unambiguously to protect
workers rights, and for the most part the board acted relatively
swiftly to enforce the law. Now, the board allows employers to drag
out organizing campaigns into endless legal battles, even going so far
as to overturn its own elections
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based on frivolous company charges.

In recent years a new militancy has emerged among the working class,
especially among younger workers — a militancy that was on display
as 4,000 trade unionists gathered at the _Labor Notes_ conference in
Chicago this past weekend
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If it continues, this new militancy will almost certainly put our
labor movement on a collision course with the legal framework
established in large part by Taft-Hartley, and perhaps, after
three-quarters of a century, labor will once again be prepared to lead
a society-wide fight for economic rights for all.

About the Author: 

[jonathan-kissam's picture]
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Jonathan Kissam has been UE's Communications Director and editor of
the UE NEWS since August 2017. Prior to that he was a rank-and-file
member of UE Local 203 in Burlington, VT. From 2002-2004 he served on
UE's General Executive Board as the secretary-treasurer of what was
then UE District Two.
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* Taft-Hartley Act
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