Taft-Hartley Act

Questions for Further Study

• 1. Most labor unions strenuously opposed the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. Unions have sought on several occasions either to repeal the 1947 law or to significantly alter its provisions to make it less burdensome to workers' efforts to unionize. Examine one of the following episodes and explain the reasons for unions' lack of success in improving the labor law environment: passage of Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959; failure to enact a labor law reform bill in 1978; failure to enact a workplace fairness bill in 1991–1994; failure to enact the Employee Free Choice Act in 2006–2007.
• 2. Examine presidential use of the Taft-Hartley-sanctioned injunction to stop strikes deemed to be national emergencies and evaluate whether the use of the injunction produced long-term positive or negative results for labor-management relations in the industry in question.
• 3. Union density—the proportion of the labor force in unions—has declined dramatically from its peak in the 1945–1960 period. Beginning in the early 1960s, however, union density increased significantly in the public sector and has remained at a high level. Examine the character of the workforces and the distinctive economic, political, and legal environments in the private and public sectors to identify reasons why public employees today are four times as likely to be union members as private-sector employees.
• 4. Public opinion polls regularly show that a majority of workers would like to be represented by unions but only about one in eight workers are union members. What factors in today's social, economic, and political environment make workers interested in joining unions? What factors, on the other hand, keeps the rate of unionization low?