On February 27, Representative Joe Wilson (R., S.C.) introduced the National Right to Work Act, a one-page bill to amend federal labor law and enshrine at the national level the right-to-work protections that 27 states already have. The National Right to Work Act is regularly introduced by Republican members of Congress. Just as in past years, this year’s effort will fail to become law, but a Republican will introduce it again in the next Congress.

Why do conservatives care so much about limiting the power of organized labor? In the world of politics, where few things are permanent, conservative support for right-to-work and opposition to organized labor has been nearly constant for 75 years. And the record of achievement that this sustained effort has generated is impressive.

“Trade unions were not a power capable of impinging upon national life until they were called into existence as a major force by the Roosevelt administration,” wrote Frank Meyer in his book In Defense of Freedom. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, part of the New Deal, put the federal government’s thumb on the scale in favor of organized labor. As President Biden said on Labor Day in 2021, “when Congress passed the 1935 Labor Relations Act, it didn’t just say you can have unions. . . . It said that we, the government, should encourage unions.”

In a rare moment of lucidity for the president, that is an accurate description of the law. And with government help, unions became a political force for FDR’s Democratic Party. “To the extent that American conservatism is about opposing the New Deal, conservatives have been anti-union,” Matthew Continetti, author of The Right, a history of the conservative movement, told National Review.

After the end of World War II, the U.S. experienced a national wave of strikes by powerful unions. Between 2 and 4 million workers went on strike at one time or another in 1945 or 1946.

In 1946, Republicans capitalized on the dissatisfaction, gaining 55 seats in the House and twelve seats in the Senate and winning control of Congress for the first time since 1930. They would hold the House for only two years, but in that brief window they were able to achieve one of the greatest conservative legislative victories of all time.

Senator Robert Taft (R., Ohio) and Representative Fred Hartley (R., N.J.) led the charge to roll back the New Deal’s labor favoritism. The Taft-Hartley Act amended the NLRA to prohibit many of organized labor’s most destructive practices, such as jurisdictional strikes (striking over the way work is assigned between unions), secondary strikes (striking against companies that do business with a company that is being struck against), and solidarity strikes (striking in support of another union’s strike or for a general political purpose). It banned closed shops, agreements whereby employers are permitted to hire only union members. And it permitted states to pass right-to-work laws.

Unions fought it, calling it the “Slave Labor Act.” Taft, up for reelection in 1950, was considered a goner. But he kept up the fight. Rather than allow the unions’ narrative to go unchallenged, he surveyed his constituents on the actual provisions of the bill, piece by piece. Each of the provisions had overwhelming support. (Taft would go on to win reelection with 57.5 percent of the vote.)

President Truman vetoed Taft-Hartley, but Congress overrode his veto, with 20 Senate Democrats and over half of House Democrats joining Republicans to make it the law. “It was not just of economic consequence, it was of great political consequence as well,” conservative historian Jay Cost told NR. The veto override was possible because of southern Democrats’ opposition to unions as a means for the advancement of black people in their states, Cost said. But he said Republican support was primarily motivated by pro-business sentiment and the desire to break up the fusion of organized labor with the Democratic Party in the North, while restoring federalism by giving states the power to pass right-to-work.

That pro-business sentiment is evident in the early issues of this magazine. “National Review will explore and oppose the inroads upon the market economy caused by monopolies in general, and politically oriented unionism in particular; and it will tell the violated businessman’s side of the story,” the 1955 mission statement says.

That mission was carried out in part through support for Herbert Kohler Sr. against United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther. Kohler was chairman of the Kohler Company, located in Kohler, Wis. The company, manufacturing bathtubs and toilets, employed nearly everyone in its namesake town and provided a good quality of life. But Reuther called a strike against the company in 1954 — a strike that would last until 1960. Kohler refused to give in and hired nonunion workers, who were beaten by Reuther-hired thugs.

In response to left-wing calls for a national boycott of Kohler, the September 8, 1956, issue of NR called for the opposite, going so far as to say, “If Kohler starts producing peanut butter, we’ll eat Kohler Peanut Butter till it comes out of our ears.” In a different editorial, NR said the fight between Kohler and the UAW was “crucial” because it demonstrated “the determination by the majority of the community not to succumb to the intimidations of the violent predators of our society.”

Much like Taft in his survey of constituents (an anecdote that William F. Buckley Jr. was fond of recounting in his columns), conservatives have consistently made the majoritarian case against union abuses. It is a truth independent of politics that the number of workers represented by a union will always be smaller than the number of people who could be affected by labor disruptions. Far more Americans depend on freight railroads for their livelihoods than work for the freight railroads; far more Americans use products that contain steel than work in the steel industry.

This numerical reality became obvious in New York City in January 1966 when the transit workers went on strike for twelve days, shutting down all buses and trains. Millions of people couldn’t get to work on account of the actions of about 30,000 transit workers. It was as though the gods had been punishing the city for failing to elect Buckley mayor two months earlier. In his syndicated column of January 6, 1966, Buckley wrote, “It is unlikely . . . that an acuter demonstration will ever be made of the powers that have been accumulated by labor unions.”

The transit strike was illegal. But, in another example of unique union privilege with government, the prohibition often went unenforced. Buckley fulminated in his first column after the strike was over: “The public grew up believing that a labor union strike was in the order of a natural cataclysm; you could, if you wished, emerge from your bomb shelter to shake your fist at a merciless god; but you couldn’t do anything about the strike.”

Unions no longer have that level of power in American society, a fact for which we have conservatives to thank. A moment that proved government can, in fact, do something about a strike was when Ronald Reagan ordered the firing of illegally striking air-traffic controllers and their replacement with nonunion workers in 1981, and then salted the earth by decertifying the union. The issue was simple, Buckley argued in his August 6, 1981, column: “Unions are entitled to special protections provided by specific law. But a violation by a union of the United States Code makes it organizationally delinquent and its civil protections derivatively inoperative.”

He also noted in that column, “No one has contrived to find out, in Great Britain, how to get the unions to obey the law.” That remains true today. Britain has been wracked by transportation strikes for the past two years, and British history is full of strikes that immobilized the country. The U.S. has mostly been able to avoid strikes of that kind, in large part because Taft-Hartley prohibits many of the tactics that lead to them and conservatives have effectively defended the law.

One of the key organizations that have done that is the National Right to Work Committee. Founded in 1955, the NRTWC achieved prominence in the 1960s and ’70s under the leadership of Reed Larson. Using direct mail and aggressive lobbying tactics, Larson made clear to political leadership that the unions weren’t the only players on the field.

The section of Taft-Hartley that permits states to pass right-to-work laws was nearly repealed under Lyndon Johnson; Richard Nixon almost enacted compulsory unionism for postal workers; political observers thought it inevitable that Gerald Ford would sign a bill legalizing coercive picketing for construction workers; but Larson and the NRTWC’s membership, which in the ’70s was in the millions, helped block those efforts.

“Most of the time we were on defense,” NRTWC president Mark Mix told NR of his organization’s history. “We punched above our weight,” he said, given the magnitude by which NRTWC was always outspent by organized labor, a fact that remains true today despite unions’ being much smaller.

Five new right-to-work laws have been enacted in the past eleven years. Rather than just preventing bad ideas from taking hold, right-to-work advocates have been able to go on offense. Mix argued that right-to-work is one of the best economic-development policies a state can enact. “You don’t have to do tax changes or subsidies — it’s free,” he said. Though causation is impossible to determine for certain, the trends in major employment decisions, such as where car manufacturers build new plants, and overall rates of job growth, welfare receipt, and public-pension health all suggest that right-to-work states are better off than non-right-to-work states.

And Mix is optimistic about the future. “Now, unions have to spend billions of dollars every year to defend their privileges,” he said. “The American people are going to prove that they believe in voluntarism.”

American workers, when allowed voluntary unionism without government putting its thumb on the scale, by and large do not choose to join unions. The unionization rate in 2022 was 10.1 percent, the lowest on record. That’s half of what it was in 1983. Only 6 percent of private-sector workers are unionized. Where unions remain powerful is in the public sector, where 33.1 percent of workers are members.

That’s where the conservative legal movement has made gains. Since public-sector unions are inextricable from government, all their actions are political in nature. That means that compelling workers to support them violates their First Amendment rights against compelled political speech.

It took the Supreme Court a long time to recognize that fact, but it finally has. In the 2018 case Janus v. AFSCME, Samuel Alito wrote for the Court that no worker can be forced to subsidize a public-sector union unless he or she “affirmatively consents to pay.” That seems like common sense, but it has been the law of the land for less than five years.

Whether it’s free speech, voluntary association, or the rule of law, conservative arguments against union coercion have been grounded in ideas of individual freedom. Not everyone sees it that way. The Left, of course, does not, but neither did Milton Friedman.

In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman opposed right-to-work laws. He reasoned that banning employers from requiring union membership is no different from mandating that they require union membership as a question of government coercion. “Given competition among employers and employees, there seems no reason why employers should not be free to offer any terms they want to their employees,” he wrote.

As an economic argument, that is entirely sound, but the given condition does not apply to the United States, a fact Friedman acknowledged when he wrote of “the presence of monopoly in the form of union organizations on the employee side and the presence of federal legislation in respect of labor unions.” But he still didn’t support right-to-work laws, instead advocating the purist position that labor law should be reformed entirely to remove unions’ special privileges.

Someday, perhaps, but until then defending Taft-Hartley and right-to-work is the right thing to do. Buckley felt so strongly about Taft-Hartley that, upon hearing that a moderate Republican had proposed repealing it, he wrote, “I got down on my knees when I saw that and fasted for three days and three nights praying that my eyes had deceived me, or that the dispatches had been wrong.”

In a spirit of self-government at the conclusion to Up from Liberalism, Buckley wrote, “I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me.” Who would drain it away? “I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO,” he wrote. Big Government, Big Business, and Big Labor — all three are threats to self-government in principle, but since the NLRA puts Big Labor and Big Government together, they present a bigger threat.

Conservatives have been smacking organized labor around for three-quarters of a century. They shouldn’t feel ashamed of what they have wrought. American workers value flexibility, not union-enforced rigidity, and for good reason. A January 2022 paper by economist Niklas Engbom found that countries with more-fluid labor markets have higher wage growth, employment levels, and productivity. Engbom also found that they are the easier places to start a business — it’s not a coincidence that entrepreneurship is stronger in the U.S. than in heavily unionized countries.

That’s why today’s fight against unions over independent contracting is so important. The flexibility to be your own boss, set your own schedule, and avoid the tangled mess of the NLRA is one of the most valuable assets of the American economy, and it’s one that unions are seeking to destroy. California has already made many forms of independent contracting more difficult, and Democrats are being pressured by unions to do the same at the federal level.

Real-life workers don’t always fit into the boxes that unions create for them, and conservatives should not lose sight of that in an attempt to win over new voters. “They see their economic interests in a very different way than both the liberal intellectuals and the natcon intellectuals,” Continetti said.

Buckley put it in starker terms in his column from June 22, 1965. “If it should stand, suddenly, as the party that seeks to woo the vote of organized labor at the expense of its highest principles of individual freedom, as incorporated into the Taft-Hartley Act, what role is there for the GOP except for the opportunists who want, occasionally, to alternate power with the Democrats?”