The Taft-Hartley Act

Charles

In 1947, President Harry S. Truman  vetoed legislation sent him by Congress. The bill, known as the Taft-Hartley Act , re-organized the relationship between labor and government that had been established in 1935. Congress overrode Truman's veto, and Taft-Hartley became law.

Taft-Hartley was named for Sen. Robert Taft, R-Ohio, and Rep. Fred A. Hartley Jr., R-N.J. The bill aimed to modify the labor law that had been effected in 1935 as the Wagner Act . Taft-Hartley scaled back the ways union workers could strike and ways they could organize at the workplace. Taft-Hartley defined unfair labor practices committed by unions, where prior laws had defined unfair acts by employers. The Act gave individual workers room to decline union membership if they chose—making it easier to pressure workers one at a time, whether union or anti-union pressure.

That Wagner Act was a New Deal  action that recognized labor unions and allowed them to organize openly, to strike legally and non-violently, and to participate in policy-making through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) .

Workers had struggled since the 19th century to get a bigger piece of the political and economic pie. Of course, workers and management have always needed to work together, but after the Civil War America changed dramatically with industrial production and the rise of big corporations. Everyone felt the rapid change, and workers organized to protect themselves. Strikes and violent reprisals were the order of the day. Labor gained some respectability by the 1910s, only to lose it again after the first World War .

The Wagner Act responded to the Great Depression  and big strikes in Minneapolis  and San Francisco . The New Deal let labor "in" with the Wagner Act, and ordinary workers enjoyed a real political importance. But many conservative people were uncomfortable with the New Deal; they felt it came dangerously close to the huge state-ist governments that were on the rise in Europe. After World War II, conservatives won Congress and began scaling back the New Deal.

Truman and others cursed Taft-Hartley as a "slave-labor bill" that would make things worse for workers and return labor to the dark ages of the 1890s. Many historians, economists and others agree . However, the opposite opinion  held that Taft-Hartley smoothed relations between workers and bosses because New Deal programs had weighted everything in favor of labor. In a peacetime economy, balance was necessary, and that meant shifting things back to the center—labor had to give up some things to make everything 50-50.