One of the greatest conservative legislative victories of the past 100 years.
The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 is one of the greatest conservative legislative victories of the past 100 years, and it has been so successful that many have largely forgotten about it. Michael Watson of the Capital Research Center has done valuable public service by writing a series of four articles on the history of Taft-Hartley and why conservatives should stay the course in the fight against organized labor.
New Deal Democrats had controlled both the House and the Senate for 14 uninterrupted years, often with massive majorities, and they had remade the federal government. One of their crowning achievements, still with us today, was the National Labor Relations Act. It was supposed to bring “labor peace,” but really gave unions special privileges and solidified their spot in the Democratic political coalition.
Conservatives talk of the progressives’ “march through the institutions,” by which previously conservative or apolitical organizations were taken over by the Left. That framework is not helpful for understanding unions in the United States. Unions have at various points in history played different roles within the Left, sometimes as a moderating force and sometimes as a radical one, but they have been anti-Republican in politics and opposed to the goals of the conservative movement since well before the 1960s. As Watson writes, “The courtship between Big Labor and Big Government advanced through the passage of legislation during the Woodrow Wilson administration that exempted organized labor from antitrust laws,” and the NLRA in 1935 “consummated the marriage.”
After World War II, unions began to overreach, with about 4 million workers going on strike. Total U.S. population at that time was about 150 million, and the strikers represented about 10 percent of the total labor force. “The economic and social damage got so bad that even New Dealers had enough,” Watson writes. Harry Truman threatened to use the military to break a rail strike.
In response, in the 1946 midterms, voters rewarded Republicans with a congressional majority for the first time since before the Great Depression. The red wave was 55 seats in the House and twelve seats in the Senate. Senator Robert Taft worked with Representative Fred Hartley to amend the National Labor Relations Act to curtail union power and make sure unions would never again wreak havoc on the American economy like they did in 1946.
Watson summarizes what Taft-Hartley did in three categories: voluntarism, transparency, and accountability. He calls that the “Taft-Hartley consensus” (which I have written about before). Joining a union should be voluntary, and nobody should be forced to financially support a union they don’t support. Union operations should be subject to transparency requirements given their role in politics and the special privileges labor-relations law grants them. And unions should be held accountable for the economic damage they cause, with the law designed to protect the public from such damage.
The Taft-Hartley Act allows states to pass right-to-work laws, which a majority of states have since passed. It prohibits solidarity strikes, where unions in unrelated industries join another industry’s strike in solidarity with its aims. That provision largely prevents the massive strikes that Americans have seen abroad but never at home since Taft-Hartley passed in 1947. “While strikes and lockouts from the 1940s through the 1970s often took over 1 million Americans out of work, the 21st century has not yet seen a year with half a million idled and the attendant fallouts in the broader economy,” Watson writes.
Taft-Hartley was smeared as the “slave-labor act” by unions and was vetoed by President Truman. But Congress overrode his veto, and thank goodness it did. “The Taft-Hartley consensus has largely succeeded — succeeded so well in fact, that abandoning it from ignorance of the consequences of doing so seems possible,” Watson writes.
The political orientation of organized labor hasn’t changed. If anything, it has gotten more progressive as its membership is increasingly employed in the public sector. About 14 million American workers — only 10 percent of the labor force — are unionized today, and about 7 million of them work for government. Most workers are free from union coercion, but the ones who are employed in union workplaces in non-right-to-work states face a dilemma, Watson writes: “Either concede any voice in the workplace by resigning from the union, or pay dues that will support such wonderful institutions as the Women’s March, ballot measure committees pushing for gun control and Planned Parenthood-backed sex-ed curriculums, and the electoral-advocacy arm of the Arabella Advisors network of liberal dark money, the Sixteen Thirty Fund.” Nobody should have to face that choice.
Though we are in a much better place today than we would be without the Taft-Hartley Act, Watson points out that there are more recent examples of what happens when unions get out of control:
Under the COVID-era lockdown regime, teachers unions extensively illustrated to the public the consequences of giving labor unions unlimited power to disrupt society. Teachers’ unions explicitly, without fear of governmental reprisal, demanded that the police be defunded, charter schools be banned, and illegal immigrants be given government benefits as a condition of reopening schools that were ostensibly closed due to COVID-19. Teachers unions denounced reopening schools as “rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny” while their board members vacationed in the Caribbean. When America’s children needed a firm, Taft-Hartley response, the world wondered. The consequences of that failure are only beginning to be learned.
“Over the 76 years since the passage of the law bearing the name of ‘Mr. Republican,’ organized labor has done absolutely nothing to disabuse conservatives of their skepticism of it,” Watson writes. He’s correct, and conservatives must stay the course.