Joe McCarthy voted for it. So did Richard Nixon. John F. Kennedy voted against it. Harry Truman vetoed it, but it still became law.
On June 23, it will be 62 years old, and it still casts a long shadow over the fight for justice in America.
It's the most ominous piece of anti-labor legislation since the Civil War: The Taft-Hartley Act. For more information about how this measure came to be, read on.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 will mark 62 years to the day since the enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
The law has done terrible damage to workers in this country.
For those of us in the union Workers United, the Taft-Hartley Act has a special notoriety. Our union can trace its lineage back to a whole series of predecessor unions, organizations which fought for the New Deal's pro-labor legislation and to organize workers in traditionally non-union parts of this country -- especially the South. The Taft-Hartley Act was specifically designed to gut the New Deal's most important labor law and to make union organizing more difficult.
Some background:
In 1935, Sidney Hillman, the president of one of Workers United's main predecessor organizations -- the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America -- worked closely with U.S. Senator Robert Wagner to craft a law often described as "labor's Magna Carta" -- the National Labor Relations Act.
Before that measure was signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt on July 5, 1935, a right to join a union in the workplace did not clearly exist in the United States.
The National Labor Relations Act -- or NLRA -- was designed not just to tolerate unions, but to encourage them. When he introduced the measure in the Senate, Wagner declared: "Democracy cannot work unless it is honored in the factory as well as the polling booth."
The NLRA protected workers' rights to bargain collectively. It established a three-member National Labor Relations Board and prohibited employers from engaging in unfair labor practices (such as setting up a company union), or firing or otherwise discriminating against workers who organized or formed unions.
The enacting of the NLRA helped unite this country for the fight against Hitler during World War II. However, by the time the war ended in 1945, the NLRA had fulfilled its purposes (at least as far as a significant part of the industrial manufacturers were concerned.)
When the auto workers, packing-house workers, steel workers, and workers in many other industries went on strike shortly after the war, some of the same employers who had been willing to tolerate unions during the late 1930s moved to clamp down. These forces began supporting candidates for public office committed to restricting and even undoing the provisions of the New Deal's social legislation.
In the 1946 mid-term election, the Republican Party won control of both houses of Congress. Many of the new Republicans in Congress were arch-conservatives. Their first target was the National Labor Relations Act. They had the support of a big section of the Democrats in Congress -- especially the Dixiecrats, the bloc of Southern Democrats who supported racial segregation.
The bill which Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio and Representative Fred A. Hartley, Jr. of New Jersey pushed through Congress gutted the NLRA. It was so outrageous that President Harry Truman called it a "slave labor bill."
Here are just a few of the nasty provisions of Taft-Hartley:
1.) The law bans the closed shop, the situation in which an employer agrees to hire only union members;
2.) The law lets states outlaw the union shop. (This has led directly to numerous states -- especially in the South -- becoming "right to work" states);
3.) The law allows the president to intervene in any strike which might lead to a "national emergency";
4.) It prohibits secondary boycotts and sympathy strikes;
5.) It required that all union officials pledge that they were not communists. (This was ruled unconstitutional in 1965.)
The passage of the Taft-Hartley Act had an immediate negative effect on the union movement, especially the unions that were struggling to organize the South. Two of the main unions fighting to do this were important predecessors of Workers United -- the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) and the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA).
One year before the Taft-Hartley Act was passed, the CIO had begun a massive effort to unionize Southern workers -- Operation Dixie. The CIO's leaders believed that organizing the South's largest industrial sector -- cotton textile production -- was the key to organizing the region.
The CIO spent over $2 million on Operation Dixie. Both the ACWA and the TWUA participated, contributing funds and organizers to the effort. Over 200 organizers participated in 12 Southern states. (The ACWA and the TWUA were the only CIO unions to send female organizers into the field.)
But the passage of Taft-Hartley made the defeat of Operation Dixie almost inevitable. When the campaign was called to a halt in 1953, the labor movement had failed to organize more than 15 percent of Southern textile workers.
It would be another 10 years before a major effort to organize Southern textile workers would begin -- at the J.P. Stevens company in 1963. And that effort would take 17 years before it would end in victory, a victory hastened by the decision of the ACWA and TWUA to merge and form the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), another predecessor of Workers United.
What lessons can we learn from the passage of Taft-Hartley?
First, trade unionists -- and progressives in general -- have to face what might be called "the Southern question." In a sense, Taft-Hartley was the Confederacy's revenge. Taft-Hartley passed because in 1947 African-Americans in the South were still denied the right to vote. Almost all of the members of Congress from the "Solid South" were staunchly anti-union. Some of those Southern members of Congress said openly that they wanted to stop union organizing drives in the South because if those drives succeeded, they would set the stage for organizing against racial segregation.
Today, the South remains the least unionized part of the United States, and the center of opposition to current pro-union legislation like the Employee Free Choice Act.
Second, we all have to stand up to witch-hunts and fear-mongering. Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon were both first elected to Congress in 1946, and their brand of fear-mongering was already underway by 1947. The supporters of the Taft-Hartley Act exploited the public's anxiety to promote fear: fear of the unions, the communists, and the Soviet Union. Much of organized labor failed to stand up to this in 1947, and the union movement paid a big price for that.
Third, we all have to respond to new situations with new thinking. In 1947, labor tended to play defense. It tried to simply hold on to what had been won during the Roosevelt years. This didn't work in 1947 when the whole world was changing and it definitely won't work now.
Several parts of the Taft-Hartley law -- the "right to work" provision, the anti-communist affidavit, and the cooling-off period, among others -- were cleverly designed to put labor on the moral defensive.
Today, our message ought to echo that of Eleanor Roosevelt. Commenting on the Taft-Hartley Act, she wrote: "[I]nstead of clamping down on the labor movement, Americans 'should be extremely grateful to unions.' "
Those of us in Workers United are very proud that she made that comment in the Sept. 1, 1950 edition of The Advance, the newspaper of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, one of Workers United's predecessors.
Eleanor Roosevelt's words about unions were true in 1950 -- and they ring true today. On this 62nd anniversary of the passage of an evil law, let's get off the defensive. Let's get on the offensive and stay there. Let's proclaim our message loud and clear: It's time to repeal Taft-Hartley!