Today in 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act became law.
Republican Robert A. Taft (son of president William Howard Taft) pushed the Taft-Hartley in an effort to restrain the power of unions. The bill would allow the president to order employees back to work in the event of a strike. The employees would work through an 80-day cooling off period. During this period, collective bargaining between the company and the union continue.
The Act also permitted states to adopt right-to-work laws and ban the closed shops. Right-to-work laws are statuetes which prohibit agreements between unions and employers making membership or payment of union dues a condition of employment. The closed shop had been a powerful asset for unions. Closed shops were closed to those who did not belong to the corresponding union. If everyone had to be a member of the union it would make the union more strong as it would have the support of all employee. By eliminating union membership as a prerequisite for many jobs, unions lot a great deal of their power and their ability to organize.
Now that union membership was no longer required for employment, union members recognized that they would be replaced if they went on strike. Ordinarily, they might have been able to use alternative methods to sway their employers’ opinions, but the Taft-Hartley Act banned these as well. Both sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts were banned. The secondary boycotts are labor actions directed not at an employer, but those who did business with the employer. The theory was that if the companies lost business they would pressure the employer to follow the demands of the union. This was an effective way to keep employees in their jobs working but also make demands against their employers. By removing this, the unions were forced to follow more traditional (and now less effective) means of demanding change.
Finally, union officials were required to swear they were not communists, reflecting the new red scare sweeping the nation. Those who refused to make such a statement were left without legal protection and the nation’s largest union, the CIO, expelled numerous left-wing officials and eleven communist-led unions, representing almost one million workers. For some Americans, this also created a permanent link between unions and communism.
President Truman vetoed the bill, but the Republican-controlled Congress over turned his veto with a two-thirds vote.
Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to sort out this Stanley McChrystal mess. However, it does have some historical significance (namely General McClellan under President Lincoln, General MacArthur under President Truman, and General Westmoreland under LBJ). I have just been reading an article by NPR that does a nice job of finding and explaining those historical links: History Says McChrystal Will Lose His Job.
