Taft-Hartley Act

The passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, also called the Labor-Management Relations Act, over President Harry Truman's veto on June 23, 1947, ended the national policy established with the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) in 1935. Under this policy, the federal government had supported workers' self-organization into unions and for collective bargaining. Unions increased their membership more than fourfold between 1933 and 1945 thanks in part to the National Labor Relations Act, the friendliness of the New Deal Democratic administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the expansion of the economy during World War II. The campaign of business organizations to amend the National Labor Relations Act, begun after the Supreme Court declared the law constitutional in 1937, was renewed in earnest after World War II. After a year of numerous strikes, some of which found unions and Truman seriously at odds, the Republicans campaigned on the slogan “Had Enough?” and won decisive control of both houses of Congress in the 1946 election. Passage of the Taft-Hartley Act followed, with the majority of House Democrats and nearly half of Senate Democrats joining their Republican colleagues.

The Taft-Hartley Act retained National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) responsibility for acting on complaints of unfair labor practices by employers and conducting representation elections for employees to select collective bargaining agents. It added to the National Labor Relations Board's purview a set of union unfair labor practices. In addition, the Taft-Hartley Act outlawed the closed shop, the secondary boycott, political contributions and expenditures by unions for candidates for federal offices, and strikes by federal employees. It permitted states to outlaw the union shop and private parties to sue unions. The protection of unions against injunctions established by the 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act was removed, with both the National Labor Relations Board and the president authorized to seek injunctions, the latter in strikes affecting the nation's health and welfare. The Taft-Hartley Act requires unions to file financial and other reports and union officials to file affidavits declaring they were not Communists for the union to have access to the National Labor Relations Board. Although Truman secured election in his own right in 1948 by campaigning against the Taft-Hartley Act and the “do-nothing” Republican Congress, the new Democratic-controlled Congress did not repeal the Taft-Hartley Act. Union efforts to secure revisions of the act in subsequent decades failed, and most of its provisions remained in effect six decades later. In part because of the unfavorable legal climate created by Taft-Hartley, union membership as a percentage of the labor force plummeted to the pre–New Deal level by the early twenty-first century.