This is a new series of articles where I explain what various terms, catch phrases and various other confusing topics and many secret government projects and agencies are and do. If there are any subjects that the reader is interested in learning about please put them in the comment section.
The federal government implemented various employment laws to help workers during the Great Depression. The New Deal paved the way for workers to form unions. The labor movement gained momentum throughout this period, and organized labor wielded much power. Congress changed federal law following World War II to limit labor unions’ power and rising influence.
One of the most significant labor laws is the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947 or the Taft-Hartley Act.
Legislative History of the Taft-Hartley Act
To understand the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, begin with the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA). The NLRA was part of The New Deal, giving workers or employees the right to form unions and the right to collective bargaining agreements. Collective bargaining gives workers the right to negotiate the terms of their employment.
The NLRA, or the Wagner Act, preceded the Taft-Hartley Act. The Wagner Act was the first significant piece of U.S. labor legislation. The Act gave workers the right to organize. Workers could join labor unions, collectively bargain through their chosen representatives, and strike. The Wagner Act allowed both closed shops and union shops. The Act also established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Then, during the 1946 midterm elections, Republicans gained control of the Senate and the House of Representatives for the first time since 1931. The great strike wave of 1945-46 made many politicians and business leaders feel that labor organizations were too powerful. They wanted to regulate union activities.
There was a growing fear of communist infiltration of labor unions. That, coupled with growth in the membership and power of unions and union leaders, led to an anti-union climate. In response, in 1947, Congress passed the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, or the Taft-Hartley Act, under Senator Robert A. Taft of New Jersey and Congressman Fred A. Hartley of Ohio. The Taft-Hartley Act was widely supported by both the republican party and Democrats. The Taft-Hartley Act repealed significant provisions of the Wagner Act. Both houses of Congress overrode President Harry S. Truman’s veto to pass the Act. President Truman denounced the Act as an intrusion on free speech. Union critics at the time called it the “slave-labor bill,” but the Republican-controlled Congress—encouraged by the business lobby—saw it as necessary to counter union abuses, to end a string of large-scale strikes that broke out after the end of World War II, and to suppress Communist influence in the labor movement.
Key Takeaways
- The Taft-Hartley Act was introduced after several major strikes in 1945 and 1946.
- The Act of 1947 prohibits certain union practices and requires that they disclose their financial and political activities.
- Though the legislation was vetoed by Harry S. Truman, the vote was overridden by both the House and Senate and became law.
- This act is also known as the Labor Management Relations Act (LMRA) and is an amendment to the 1935 Wagner Act.
- The Taft-Hartley Act has had six amendments including more recent updates to right-to-work laws.
The Scope and Influence of the Taft-Hartley Act
Taft-Hartley outlined six unfair practices by labor unions and provided remedies, in the form of amendments, for protecting employees from harm resulting from these practices. Previously the Wagner Act had only addressed unfair labor practices perpetrated by employers. In 1947, President Harry Truman amended parts of the NLRA when he passed the Taft-Hartley Act. This Act created current right-to-work laws, which allow states to prohibit compulsory membership in a union as a condition for employment in the public and private sectors of the country.
- One amendment protected employees’ rights under Section 7 of the Wagner Act, giving them the right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining with employers. This amendment protected employees from unfair coercion by unions that could result in discrimination against employees.
- A second amendment said that an employer cannot refuse to hire prospective employees because they won’t join a union. However, an employer has the right to sign an agreement with a union that requires an employee to join the union on or before the employee’s 30th day of employment.
- A third amendment stipulated that unions have a requirement to bargain in good faith with employers. This amendment balanced the provisions of the Wagner Act, which required good faith bargaining by employers.
- A fourth amendment prohibited secondary boycotts by unions. For example, if a union has a dispute with an employer, the union cannot, under the law, coerce or urge another entity to stop doing business with that employer.
- A fifth amendment prohibited unions from taking advantage of their members or employers. Unions were prohibited from charging their members excessive initiation fees or membership dues. Also, unions were prohibited from causing employers to pay for work that its members did not perform.
- A sixth amendment added a free speech clause for employers. Employers have the right to express their views and opinions about labor issues, and these views do not constitute unfair labor practices, provided the employer is not threatening to withhold benefits or engage in other retribution against employees.
The Taft-Hartley Act allows union members to organize and collectively bargain with employers. It expanded the list of unfair labor practices and required unions to negotiate in good faith, as required by employers. The Act also outlawed closed shops, giving workers the right to decline to join a union. It permitted union shops only if a majority of employees voted for them.
The Act allowed the President to appoint a board of inquiry to investigate labor disputes. The President had the authority to ask the Attorney General for a federal court injunction against a strike if it imperils national health or safety. The Act restricted political contributions by unions. It also required union officers to file affidavits denying any communist affiliation.
The Taft-Hartley Act significantly limited unions’ rights to strike and boycott. Instead, it prefers arbitration. For example, it required unions to give 60 days advance notice of a strike. The Act prohibited union practices, such as certain types of strikes and boycotts. These include:
- Secondary boycotts and picketing: The boycott of an employer with which the union doesn’t have a dispute (also, influencing that employer not to work with another business with which the union does have a dispute)
- Sympathy strikes or boycotts: Workers not involved in a labor dispute striking or boycotting in support of other striking or boycotting employees or unions
- Jurisdictional strikes and boycotts: Strikes and boycotts initiated against an employer as a result of a dispute with another union
The Taft-Hartley Act also authorizes states to pass laws prohibiting union shops or agency shops. Following the enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act, many states enacted such limitations, known as right-to-work laws. At present, 27 states have passed right-to-work laws. Michigan recently repealed its law.
The Landrum-Griffin Act
The Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 (LMRDA) revised the Taft-Hartley Act. LMRDA, or the Landrum-Griffin Act, expanded certain reporting requirements under the Taft-Hartley Act. With widespread corruption and racketeering allegations, LMRDA required more financial transparency from union organizations. Unions must now file more detailed financial statements and expenditures.
Landrum-Griffin established a code of conduct for union members. It also required more disclosures from the union organization. While it prohibited communists and felons from holding union offices, members no longer had to swear an oath that they were not communists.
In February 2021, Congress re-introduced the National Right to Work Act, giving employees nationwide a choice to opt out of joining or paying dues to unions. The Act was also introduced in 2019 and 2017 but stalled. In March 2021, the United States House of Representatives passed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act). The pro-union legislation overrides right-to-work laws and would make it easier to form unions.
1947 Taft-Hartley Substantive Provisions
The Taft-Hartley Act made major changes to the Wagner Act. Although Section 7 was retained intact in the revised law, new language was added to provide that employees had the right to refrain from participating in union or mutual aid activities except that they could be required to become members in a union as a condition of employment.
Taft-Hartley defined six additional unfair labor practices, reflecting Congress’ perception that some union conduct also needed correction. The Act was amended to protect employees’ rights from these unfair practices by unions.
The amendments protected employees’ Section 7 rights from restraint or coercion by unions, and said that unions could not cause an employer to discriminate against an employee for exercising Section 7 rights. They declared the closed shop illegal, but provided that employers could sign a union shop agreement under which employees could be required to join the union on or after the 30th day of employment.
The amendments also imposed on unions the same obligation to bargain in good faith that the Wagner Act placed on employers. They prohibited secondary boycotts, making it unlawful for a union that has a primary dispute with one employer to pressure a neutral employer to stop doing business with the first employer.
Unions were prohibited from charging excessive dues or initiation fees, and from “featherbedding,” or causing an employer to pay for work not performed. The new law contained a “free speech clause,” providing that the expression of views, arguments, or opinions shall not be evidence of an unfair labor practice absent the threat of reprisal or promise of benefit.
Several significant changes were made for representation elections. Supervisors were excluded from bargaining units, and the Board had to give special treatment to professional employees, craftsmen and plant guards in determining bargaining units.
Congress also added four new types of elections. The first permitted employers faced with a union’s demand for recognition to seek a Board-conducted election. The other three enabled employees to obtain elections to determine whether to oust incumbent unions, whether to grant to unions authority to enter into a union shop agreement, or whether to withdraw union shop authorization previously granted. (The provisions authorizing the union shop elections were repealed in 1951).
Changes to Union Elections
The Taft-Hartley Act also made changes to union election rules.1 These changes excluded supervisors from bargaining groups and gave special treatment to certain professional employees.
The Taft-Hartley Act also created four new types of elections. One gave employers the right to vote on union demands. The other three gave employees the right to hold elections on the status of incumbent unions, to determine whether a union has the power to enter into agreements for employees, and to withdraw union representation after it’s granted. In 1951, Congress repealed the provisions governing union shop elections.1
Why Was Taft-Hartley Act Passed?
The Taft-Hartley Act’s purpose was to regulate labor unions and restrict what unions can do during periods of national emergency, The act prohibits unions from engaging in several unfair practices.
What Did the Taft-Hartley Act Make Illegal?
The Taft-Hartley Act made a number of different union practices prohibited. These practices include jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, political strikes, solidarity strikes, and secondary boycotts. It also outlawed discrimination against nonunion members by union hiring halls and closed shops.
Is the Taft-Hartley Act Still In Effect?
The Taft-Hartley Act was vetoed by President Harry S. Truman in 1947. Still, the act was enacted by the 80th U.S. Congress after receiving support from both congressional representatives from both the Democrat and Republican parties. The act continues to be strongly opposed by many, though the act remains in effect.
The Bottom Line
Enacted in 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act was intended to protect employee rights by unfair practices by unions. The act prohibits unions from performing certain practices and requires disclosure of certain activities. The act has many detractors who feel the act has hurt labor laws and decrease worker rights.
Labor has opposed Taft-Hartley for decades. Here’s why it’s time to repeal it.
On June 23rd, 1947, the United States Senate—following the House of Representatives—voted 68-25 to override Harry Truman’s veto and enact the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, better known as Taft-Hartley, into law.
By doing so, Congress—over the vocal objection of working Americans—set in motion a generations-long offensive by American employers against labor’s hard-won gains for American workers. Taft-Hartley has cast a long shadow over American labor relations, and one which stretches to our present moment—a moment in which less than 7% of private sector workers belong to a union, and organized labor is in a fight for its life. With high stakes and the glimmers of a resurgence of labor militancy, we should re-examine the road that led us to this point and consider how to fix the road ahead.
To begin, we must reclaim labor’s demand to repeal Taft-Hartley.
Taft-Hartley’s passage ended the twelve year experimentation with the labor regime created by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935. The NLRA was an ambitious bill that, for the first time in American history, created a (nearly) all-encompassing path to unionization for workers in the private sector. Instead of pitched battles, recognition strikes, and violent pickets, the American state would intervene in labor relations to—as the NLRA put it—“diminish the causes of labor disputes burdening or obstructing interstate and foreign commerce[.]” No longer, it was hoped, would American labor relations be among the most violent in the industrial world.
The NLRA contained things that would be envied by unions today. The original Act provided little restriction upon the rights of workers; instead, it was based on the idea that employers inherently have a power advantage: leveling the playing field would require placing restrictions on the bosses. The Act and its subsequent interpretation and administration required employers to remain neutral in union elections, allowed for unions to engage in secondary pickets and boycotts (picketing or boycotting a corporation that did business with the primary employer of striking workers), and allowed for “closed shop” agreements requiring employers to hire union members.
The Act wasn’t perfect. Like most legislation of the time, it was strongly influenced by the white supremacy permeating American society. Some of the most vulnerable and precarious workers, who were then (and are now) predominantly people of color, had their rights as workers denied. Domestic workers and agricultural workers—sectors dominated by black and Latinx workers, particularly in the South—were prohibited from using the newly made path to unionization in order to appease Jim Crow Democrats that were part of the New Deal coalition.
But it provided a baseline: a place from which millions of working Americans could, for the first time, exert power on the job and power in society with less fear of the boss. Union membership skyrocketed from approximately 10% of the workforce to 25% by the beginning of World War II, with rapid gains by unions like the United Auto Workers of America in the emerging auto industry. Strike activity increased with new organizing, as well: according to a 1986 retrospective published in the Stanford Law Review, during the first few years of the NLRA “roughly 50 percent of all strikes centered on issues of organization and union recognition.” Per a study published in The Journal of Political Economy in 1941, the vast majority of “organization strikes” were for union recognition, distantly followed by strikes over the closed shop and discrimination. By providing clear legal support for the right to organize and using state action to curb the influence of the boss, the NLRA provided power and leverage to working Americans.
It wasn’t to last, of course.
Employers were opposed to the NLRA from the start. A 1936 article in Political Science Quarterly observed that “The new labor law was received by employers with open hostility; the findings and decisions of the National Labor Relations Board and its predecessors were generally defied; and the Board and its agents tied up in litigation.” Companies flatly refused to comply with the law on constitutional grounds: a question only settled in a 1937 5-4 decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, affirming that labor relations fell under Congressional authority to regulate interstate commerce. Even then, American business was far from content to settle in to the new regime of labor relations.
Only the onset of World War II and the wartime no-strike pledge paused the employer offensive: an uneasy armistice that ended with the war’s conclusion. With returning GIs looking for good jobs, women in the wartime workforce seeking equal rights at work, and the end of the no-strike pledge, unions went on the offensive. Labor launched the biggest strike wave in American history, seeking secure wages and a say on the job for millions of American workers, including many newly returned from Europe and the Pacific.
Enter the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947, or Taft-Hartley.
There was little illusion about the purpose of Taft-Hartley. As noted in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review in November of 1947, its goal was plain: “to regulate and restrict various devices through which labor makes effective the economic power-potential it has gained through organization and combination.” In other words, the potential power of organized workers, ably demonstrated by the post-war strike wave, motivated bosses and their political allies to move quickly to bring American workers to heel.
Taft-Hartley did away with the idea that the boss has the advantage and introduced a slew of restrictions on workers under the guise of “fairness.” For the first time, “employer free speech”—in reality, the right to utilize their bully pulpit to oppose unionization—entered into law. Unfair labor practices, once restricted to employers, were extended to workers as well. The Act banned secondary strikes and boycotts, banned closed shops (which allowed significant union control over hiring), removed union eligibility for supervisors (like foremen), allowed the President to halt strikes deemed to be harmful to national interest, sharply restricted union campaign political expenditures, and required all union officers to file affidavits stating that they did not support and were not affiliated with the Communist Party.
In other words, the Republican Congress took one look at the political power displayed by organized labor and working Americans in the post-war strike wave and kneecapped it.
The ramifications of Taft-Hartley have been wide-reaching. Decades of case law that progressively curbed the rights of workers were built on Taft-Hartley’s back, and expanded public sector bargaining rights in the 1960s and 1970s were largely modeled on the Taft-Hartley regime (or structured even more restrictively). The NLRA—labor’s “Magna Carta”—is no longer recognizable as what labor hoped it would be: a permanent power shift toward American workers and away from the vested interests that crashed the American economy, sinking the world into a global depression.
Decades of attempts to repeal or amend Taft-Hartley have been unsuccessful. Truman never made good on his promise to repeal it, and no subsequent President—even those elected because of union money and union votes—ever obliged to do so. Over time, labor’s demands have moderated from full repeal of Taft-Hartley, instead prioritizing minor “fixes” intended to increase union density. But even those moderate measures—recently, the Employee Free Choice Act in 2009—failed, thanks to opposition from neoliberal Democrats like Dianne Feinstein and strife within the labor movement itself.
Senator Bernie Sanders has offered the most recent attempt to unrig American labor relations in the form of the “Workplace Democracy Act”—impressive legislation that goes well beyond the Employee Free Choice Act and repeals crucial sections of Taft-Hartley. The bill is the gold standard of current legislation addressing American labor relations, and no other Presidential candidate—or any politician in recent memory—has offered anything comparable. But it, too, stops short of full repeal, leaving intact significant problems—such as weak penalties against employers that violate the law, the “bothsidesism” of applying equal regulation of unfair labor practices to employers and workers, and the power of the President to enjoin strikes (most recently exercised by George W. Bush against longshore workers). We should dread the moment someone tells Donald Trump that he can order a strike’s end.
In candor, the damage caused by Taft-Hartley won’t be fully undone by repeal. Employer “free speech” has entered into constitutional law, and in many states the concepts of Taft-Hartley have been codified into public sector labor relations. The bosses can be expected to fight repeal—and well after repeal—with every weapon in their arsenal; they’ve fought hard against far less. They realize the stakes presented by strengthening organized labor’s ability to fight for American workers. In some ways, some of the evils are already out of Pandora’s Box.
For the first time in decades, however, we are living in the midst of a strike wave. Much of it is the consequence of decades of deteriorating labor conditions, skyrocketing inequality, a frayed social safety net, and unaccountable plutocrats and their political allies that hoard wealth at the expense of working families. It is also the consequence of increased expectations: the 2012 Chicago Teachers’ Union strike, the 2015 Verizon Strike, the 2015 Seattle Education Association Strike, and the post-2016 resurgence of the strike weapon—especially in West Virginia and the historic United Teachers’ of Los Angeles strike in January—have created the expectation that we can fight for more and win it. Rather than settling for the scraps left by capital, working people should demand the value of their labor.
At this moment, more than any other, we need bold demands that push the boundaries of what’s considered politically feasible. We need to expand organizing rights to domestic and agricultural workers, and all workers should be secure in their organizing rights whether documented or undocumented. We need to demand an easier path to union recognition and a first contract, and we need an end to boss retaliation. We need more secure federal sector union rights for government workers, and we need an end to anti-worker “Right-to-Work” laws.
Fighting back against rigged laws and leveling the playing field between bosses and American workers starts with finally sending Taft-Hartley to the pearly gates.
One of the things it does is make the workers go back to work, kind of as a cooling down period. However, as became apparent with the recent strike of the longshoreman and comments made by Harold Daggett, the president of the International Longshoremen’s Association said and this is not an exact quote, because I can’t find it on the net and am relying on my memory. So here goes. He said that sure you can make us go back to work under the Taft-Hartley Act and normally we would load/unload 30 boxes per hour, now we might only do 8 boxes an hour. What he meant is that they can be forced to got back to work temporary, but they can’t force his workers to work up to their capabilities. I think the term is called “Goldbricking.” (Goldbricking is the practice of doing less work than one is able to, while maintaining the appearance of working.)
Resources
findlaw.com, “Taft-Hartley Act Overview.” By Amy Vandervort-Clark, J.D.; Nlrb.gov, “1947 Taft-Hartley Substantive Provisions.”; investopedia.com, “What Is the Taft-Hartley Act?” By Adam Hayes; thestrikewave.com, “Labor has opposed Taft-Hartley for decades. Here’s why it’s time to repeal it.” By C.M. Lewis;
What Is? Postings
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2024/07/12/what-is-agenda-47/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2024/07/16/what-is-project-2025/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2024/08/27/what-is-project-blue-beam/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2024/09/03/what-is-project-mogul/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2024/10/15/what-is-the-taft-hartley-act-and-how-does-it-affect-us/