Newsletter No. 28
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2005
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The Taft-Hartley Act as a model for strangling unions The US anti-union Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 was big business’s response to the growing power of unions in the US. It has been labour’s ‘ball and chain’ ever since. During the New Deal and World War II union membership grew from 4 to 15 million. After the war ended in 1945 a series of strikes in oil, steel, auto, rubber & other basic industries demonstrated union strength and helped to “modestly redistribute some of the corporations’ bloated war time profits to labour". The Cold War and the ‘Red Scare’ had two targets, conceded the head of General Electric — labour at home and the Soviet Union abroad. Taft-Hartley was big business’s way to screw the workers ( ‘Taft-Hartley: a workers’ nightmare’). Despite early resistance and a spike in membership, US unions declined from then, “aided heavily by the employers’ tools supplied by Taft-Hartley". Democrat administrations do not repeal it, despite Democrat President Truman warning it was a ‘slave-labor bill’ and Human Rights Watch since declaring US is in violation of international law on workers’ rights ( ‘The Silent War..’ p3). Even Business Week foresaw that “a few million unemployed, an administration .. not pro-union and the Taft-Hartley Act conceivably could wreck the labor movement" (Taft-Hartley Act). The Taft-Hartley Act lets employers obstruct almost every union activity — from organising in the workplace, to striking and picketing, to mobilising community support for a campaign. It excludes supervisors and contractors from joining unions, ‘protects’ the right to work without joining a union, prohibits secondary boycotts, lets management campaign against union organising drives and forces work-places to vote on whether unions can represent them, with management controlling timing of these elections, so it can either force an election before the union is ready, or delay till it has coerced workers into rejecting union representation. The Act started an era of red-baiting that split the union movement and sent a message to employers that it was OK to bust unions and deny workers the right to bargain collectively. It “entrenched significant executive tyranny in the work place and has led to routine employer violations of labour rights and illegal firing of union supporters in labor organising drives" (Ralph Nader). |