Taft-Hartley Act

Impact

Labor unions reacted strongly against the Taft-Hartley Act. Many labor leaders characterized the law as a slave labor law. Within one hour of the law's passage, thousands of bituminous coal miners went on a protest strike, with 250,000 on strike within four days. The mine workers stayed out as government control of the mines came to an end on June 30, 1947, and returned to work only after ratifying a new contract with significant gains in wages and benefits. Representative Hartley condemned the agreement as inflationary and specified provisions he viewed as in violation of the letter and spirit of the Taft-Hartley Act. The miners' actions were atypical, however. Although there were calls from left-wing union leaders for strikes to protest the legislation, both the AFL and the CIO decided to rely on legal action and future political activity rather than immediate mass protests or strikes. Moreover, political differences within the union movement undermined concerted action.

In the wake of the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, there was shift in the battle for power then under way in the United Auto Workers. The anti-Communist faction, led by President Walter Reuther, gained new support from the union's secondary leaders. It was able to defeat a proposal to merge the United Auto Workers with the left-wing Farm Equipment Workers union and then win a majority of delegates to displace a left-center coalition as the dominant force at the union's fall convention and on the union's executive board. The CIO convention in October 1947 adopted a resolution condemning Taft-Hartley and pledging not to acquiesce to it. But the influence of Reuther and other anti-Communist leaders was such that the resolution allowed individual unions the autonomy to make their own decisions on compliance. The AFL at the same time rejected the proposal of United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis to boycott the law.

The division within the labor movement over whether to file non-Communist affidavits and otherwise comply with the law led to raids by complying unions against noncomplying unions. Left-wing unions were particularly vulnerable. Although Truman's attacks on the Taft-Hartley Act and the “do-nothing” Eightieth Congress led to his surprise victory and the recapturing of Congress by the Democrats in 1948, there was neither repeal nor revision of the act, owing to the continuing clout of a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats. In the context of the intensifying cold war and Red scare, the CIO in 1949 expelled its left-wing unions, and raiding intensified. The Taft-Hartley Act's limitations on unions' solidarity actions and its role in uprooting leftists from a significant role in the unions eventually led to a decline in both grassroots activism and visionary impulses. Under Republican presidents, moreover, the NLRB titled toward a pro-employer perspective in administering the law. Workers seeking to unionize found themselves increasingly enmeshed in bureaucratic delays and litigation, while sanctions against employer violations of the law became ineffective. Union density, the percentage of the nonagricultural labor force that is unionized, declined from about one-third of the labor force in the fifteen years after World War II to 12 percent of the labor force in 2006. The only significant revision in the Taft-Hartley framework came in 1959 with the passage of the Landrum-Griffin Act, which added new federal government regulations of internal union affairs.