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60 Years of Taft Hartley, Facts and Fictions

By Norman Markowitz

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June – July 2007

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6-14-07, 9:33 am

Sixty years ago the Republican 80th Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, perhaps the most important and negative single piece of domestic legislation enacted in the post World War ll era. Although most Americans have not even heard of the Taft-Hartley Act, and many of those who have only understand vaguely that it hurt labor, its causes and long-term effects deserve careful analysis.

First, the labor movement, under left and Communist leadership had grown from under three million to over fifteen million between 1933 and 1947 and the number of workers in trade unions had increased from well under ten percent to a third of the work force. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, establishing the NLRB, itself the product of militant trade union organizing and strikes, had been an important force in bringing about this development.

The National Association of Manufacturers, the Liberty League, and other anti-labor groups at first believed that the NLRA would be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. When that failed to happen in 1937, they began to organize around a series of “amendments” to the act that would weaken the power of unions to strike, revive anti-strike injunctions, and give states the power to enact anti-union shop legislation, which big business and conservatives called anti-“closed shop”legislation or “right to work” laws for propaganda purposes.

A number of these amendments (those restricting the right to strike) were passed over Franklin Roosevelt's veto in the War Labor Disputes Act (1943). These restrictions were confined only to war's duration, and the trade union movement generally, including its powerful left and Communist leadership groups in the CIO, supported the wartime No Strike Pledge in exchange for War Labor Board support for expanding the union shop collective bargaining to all businesses with war contracts for the duration of those contracts.

The immediate postwar period brought about a major strike wave that anti-labor reactionaries attributed to “Communist conspiracies,” using the developing cold war to contend that militant trade unionists were pro-Soviet saboteurs.

The Truman administration in effect aided these forces by advocating in 1946 legislation that would break the strikes and draft coal miners and railroad workers into the army. Although the strikes were not broken and the unions survived and in many cases made initial minor gains, Truman's actions deeply alienated all sections of the labor movement and strengthened the enemies of labor, who were also domestically the enemies of his administration, however they might support his cold war policies.

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Also, consumer goods shortages and inflation (both related to business attempts to eliminate continuing Office of Price Administration price controls and push back labor) were blamed on striking workers under radical leadership.

The result was a sweeping Republican victory, pushing the Truman administration to the right on cold war and domestic civil liberties issue, and the enactment in 1947 of the Taft-Hartley law, a compendium of the anti-labor amendments that business and conservative forces had been developing for a decade.

It is true that Harry Truman vetoed the bill and made opposition to it a major part of his 1948 presidential campaign. But Truman was well aware that his veto would be over-ridden by the Republican majority in alliance with conservative coalition Democrats. His major domestic advisor, Clark Clifford, realizing that the disastrous defeat in 1946 was largely the result of Truman's abandonment of labor and failed leadership on a variety of progressive issues, developed a strategy for Truman to campaign to revive the New Deal in the 1948 presidential election. This meant repealing Taft-Hartley and enacting national health care legislation, federal aid to education, federal public housing, and other polices which were part of the New Deal's postwar political agenda. The strategy was also aimed at defeating former Vice President Henry Wallace, who would mount in 1948 a third party campaign (the Progressive Party) with broad left and CPUSA support to end the cold war and enact the New Deal's postwar program, of which he had been a controversial symbol during WWII.

At the same time, though, Truman enacted a “federal loyalty program” which appeased the House Un-American Activities Committee which, under Republican leadership, had launched a high profile “investigation” of Communist influence in Hollywood in 1947. Truman's foreign policy initiatives, committing the U.S. in principle to a global anti-Communist anti-Soviet foreign policy under the Truman Doctrine, intervening in the Chinese Civil War to provide aid to the Chiang K'ai -shek dictatorship, and “rebuilding” Western Europe under the Marshall Plan to “save it” from Communism, all strengthened the domestic anti-Communist campaign of those who enacted Taft-Hartley. All of this was part of the larger context for Taft-Hartley.

A leading fiction concerning Taft-Hartley is that red-baiting was not really essential to its enactment or its effect.

The fact is that the clause in the legislation that barred Communist Party members from holding any union office from shop steward on up was used by the mass media generally and all anti-labor mass organizations to “sell” Taft-Hartley even though this clause was opposed by the labor movement in general, including many anti-Communist conservatives business unionists, who understood that it would be used to establish witch hunts and bust unions. In 1946, in a very famous pamphlet, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had contended that “Communism Abroad and Labor at Home” were the “two enemies” that the nation (by which they meant of course their class interests face). Eliminating some of the most disciplined and most experienced activists from the trade union movement's leadership ranks would in itself have a devastating effect on the movement, as the forces of reaction understood much better than various anti-Communist liberal and left elements.

Of course, the anti-Communist clause was also a crude “bill of attainder” singling out CPUSA members and denying them equal protection of the law even though the CPUSA remained a legal organization in the United States. Eventually, the anti-Communist affidavit provisions of the legislation were the only ones that were ever eliminated, but not before there were a few show trials and imprisonment of trade unionists for “falsely signing” such affidavits. (Ben Gold, for example, the longtime trade union leader of the Fur and Leather Workers and open CPUSA member was “tried” for “lying” about his formal resignation from the CPUSA in order to be in compliance with the act.)

Also, the anti-Communist provisions of the act stimulated purges in the CIO and other unions as they helped create the mentality that “we have got to get rid of the Reds, whatever we think of them, or Taft-Hartley will get rid of us.” In perhaps its most important immediate effect, Taft-Hartley and the division it caused within the CIO led the CIO in 1948 to abandon its Southern Organizing Drive, which was the great hope of the postwar labor movement to bring millions of African American and white workers into the labor movement.

Truman won the 1948 election running on what was in effect a left-New Deal program, but one that spurned the Communist-led and influenced left, which had contributed so much to the success of the New Deal itself. Very little of Truman's program, called the “Fair Deal,” was ever implemented, even in a watered down fashion, not national health insurance and certainly not the repeal of Taft-Hartley, even though Democratic convention platforms called for repeal of Taft-Hartley from 1948 to 1988.

The enemies of labor began to take advantage of the legislation almost immediately after its passage to break strikes and weaken unions. Under a little known aspect of the law, employers could more easily employ scabs and have them keep the jobs of striking workers after strikes (so-called “permanent replacement workers”). Southern employers began to do this in important instances after the act was passed, although it was not used widely until the 1970s, when against the background of a “stagflation” economy employers mounted more extensive union busting campaign. Then the AFL-CIO sought unsuccessfully to change the law to prevent “permanent replacement workers” under the Carter administration, but failed and has not succeeded on this for the last 30 years.

Taft-Hartley from its enactment had significantly strengthened the power of the NLRB to weaken unions and punish unions for striking. The relative strength of the labor movement had acted to deter the NLRB even under the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations, from acting in such a way, but when NLRB decisions began to turn significantly against trade unions, the AFL-CIO once more tried, unsuccessfully during the Carter administration to amend Taft-Hartley (and the Landrum-Griffin act of 1958, which further amended the NLRB in an anti-labor way) in a pro labor direction.

Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency in 1980 brought to power the most actively anti-labor administration since the days of Coolidge and Hoover. And Taft- Hartley was around as a weapon to advance “de-unionization” policies which today, if one discounts unionized public employees, has set the labor movement back in percentage of non-agricultural workers in unions nearly back to where it was in 1933.

The anti-union shop “right to work” states laws are perhaps the best known provisions of Taft-Hartley today, and have helped to “contain” the labor movement in nearly half of the states in the U.S., turning those states into the strongholds of conservative and today right-wing Republican politicians (the so-called “Red States” as hey are now called to add insult to injury, of the South primarily and areas of the plains and mountain West).

What Taft-Hartley did here was to give corporations a huge incentive to move to states like Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, to get cheap non-union labor before they began to go abroad to get even cheaper non union labor. In the process, wage and benefit rates generally were held down and, as states like Florida and Texas grew in population and power, union shop states like Illinois, New York, Michigan, and New Jersey suffered a relative decline in both economic and political power.

Lyndon Johnson advocated repealing the “right to work” provisions of Taft-Hartley in 1964 but even with his huge victory, that was buried against the background of an escalating Vietnam War which eventually destroyed his administration and its great society program.

Even though the trade union movement has been successful in blocking conservative attempts to enact “right to work” laws in Missouri, Colorado, and other states in recent decades, the effects of those laws in the states where they were enacted half a century ago in dividing the working class and strengthening anti-labor reaction remain enormous.

For example, virtually all Taft-Hartley “right to work” states voted for GW Bush in 2000 and 2004 and most of the union shop states, with the important exceptions of Ohio and Missouri, voted against Bush. If the labor movement were as powerful in the Southern “right to work” states alone as unions with all their losses remain in the Northern union shop states, the number of workers in unions would probably double and the political power of the Republican right in Congress and in Southern state legislatures would be broken.

Although Harry Truman was no real friend of labor, not to mention the left, the position that he forcefully ran on in 1948, complete repeal of Taft-Hartley, should be the position that labor and the broad left rallies around today. It remains the best hope for labor to become once more a powerful and progressive force in American life. It should be an important part of the 2008 elections.

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.

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