Taft-Hartley Labor Act

Taft-Hartley Labor Act 1947, passed by the U.S. Congress, officially known as the Labor-Management Relations Act. Sponsored by Senator Robert Alphonso Taft and Representative Fred Allan Hartley, the act qualified or amended much of the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act of 1935, the federal law regulating labor relations of enterprises engaged in interstate commerce, and it nullified parts of the Federal Anti-Injunction (Norris-LaGuardia) Act of 1932. The act established control of labor disputes on a new basis by enlarging the National Labor Relations Board and providing that the union or the employer must, before terminating a collective-bargaining agreement, serve notice on the other party and on a government mediation service. The government was empowered to obtain an 80-day injunction against any strike that it deemed a peril to national health or safety. The act also prohibited jurisdictional strikes (dispute between two unions over which should act as the bargaining agent for the employees) and secondary boycotts (boycott against an already organized company doing business with another company that a union is trying to organize), declared that it did not extend protection to workers on wildcat strikes, outlawed the closed shop, and permitted the union shop only on a vote of a majority of the employees. Most of the collective-bargaining provisions were retained, with the extra provision that a union before using the facilities of the National Labor Relations Board must file with the U.S. Dept. of Labor financial reports and affidavits that union officers are not Communists. The act also forbade unions to contribute to political campaigns. Although President Truman vetoed the act, it was passed over his veto. Federal courts have upheld major provisions of the act with the exception of the clauses about political expenditures. Attempts to repeal it have been unsuccessful, but the Landrum-Griffin Act (1959) amended some features of the Taft-Hartley Labor Act.

Bibliography: See bibliography under labor law.

Taft‐Hartley Act, 1947 labor law passed over President Harry S. Truman's veto.A series of attacks on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), particularly the hostile investigation of the board conducted by the Virginia congressman Howard Smith in 1939–1940, created public distrust of the agency and support for amendments to the 1935 National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act, to restore a balance of power between labor and management. A series of postwar strikes in basic industries such as coal, steel, automobiles, and railroads reinforced the public view that unions had become “too powerful.” Charges of union corruption; racial discrimination; and, in some cases, communist domination heightened the antilabor climate. A Republican victory in the 1946 congressional elections gave critics of the Wagner Act sufficient power to change the nation's labor policy. Senator Robert Taft, chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, and the New Jersey congressman Fred Hartley, the new chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, offered separate bills that Senate and House conferees combined into the Taft‐Hartley Bill.

Taft‐Hartley expanded the NLRB from three members to five and created an independent NLRB general counsel as the agency's prosecuting arm, replacing the general counsel who had functioned as part of the board. It included the Wagner Act's preamble encouraging the practices and procedures of collective bargaining but now emphasized workers' right to refrain from such activities. The bill specified unfair union labor practices, established provisions protecting employers' right of “free speech” to resist unionization, authorized the president to intervene in labor disputes by invoking an eighty‐day “national emergency” injunction, and required the NLRB to seek injunctions against unions involved in secondary boycotts or jurisdictional strikes. It also required union officials to sign noncommunist affidavits to obtain the law's protection, outlawed the closed shop, and permitted states to prohibit other forms of compulsory union‐membership clauses.

Although Taft‐Hartley was hardly the “slave labor law” unions claimed it to be, its emphasis on the right to reject collective bargaining, its protection of employee and employer rights against unions, and its listing of specific unfair labor practices by unions did encourage employers to resist unionization and collective bargaining. Yet the core of the Wagner Act survived in Taft‐Hartley, so that interpretations of the law's meaning came to depend primarily on which political party held power. The related Landrum‐Griffin Act of 1959 further restricted certain boycott and picketing practices by organized labor, though it did give workers who lost their jobs in a strike the continued right to vote in union elections.
See also Anticommunism; Industrial Relations; Labor Markets; Labor Movements; Strikes and Industrial Conflict.

Bibliography

James A. Gross , Broken Promise: The Subversion of U.S. Labor Relations Policy, 1947–1994, 1995.

James A. Gross