The Taft-Hartley Act (known formally as the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947) is a set of amendments to the federal National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) passed after the Second World War to promote industrial peace and correct the pro-organized-labor bias of the New Deal-era Wagner Act (the un-amended NLRA).

Taft-Hartley is named for its principal co-sponsors in the 80^th United States Congress, Rep. Fred Hartley (R-NJ) and Sen. Bob Taft (R-OH). The law, and the Republican majorities that passed the law over the veto of President Harry Truman, arose in response to a wave of strikes that followed the conclusion of World War II, most prominently a 113-day strike by the United Auto Workers against General Motors in the winter of 1945-46. In total, an estimated 4.6 million workers amounting to over 10 percent of the workforce struck,⁸

The Great Strike Wave

After the end of World War II, the tensions that lay beneath the surface-level labor peace enforced by the NWLB broke down. Unions struck against the maritime, railroad, energy, electrical, communications, and steel production industries. ⁸

Political Background

The Battle for the Republican Party

Entering the 1946 election cycle, the Democratic Party had won the Presidency in four consecutive elections (all with President Franklin Roosevelt as its candidate), eight consecutive majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives elections, and seven consecutive majorities in U.S. Senate elections. While a “conservative coalition” of Southern Democrats and national Republicans could block major New Dealer legislative activity, the GOP sought a return to power after the longest wilderness period since the modern two-party system emerged in 1856. ¹²

Motivated by fear—no American political party had recovered if it did not hold the White House for 20 consecutive years—Republicans divided into two factions; a moderate, New Deal-accomodationist faction led by 1944 Presidential candidate and New York Gov. Tom Dewey and a conservative, anti-New Deal faction led by U.S. Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. ¹²

Prior to April 1946, Dewey-aligned operatives controlled the Republican National Committee; Taft-aligned factions took it over after the chairman resigned that month. A newly aggressive RNC heated up its messaging, attacking Communists at home and abroad and capitalizing on Truman’s inept handling of the strike wave. RNC messaging targeted organized labor, especially the efforts of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ $6 million political committee, the CIO-PAC. ¹³

Congressional Elections of 1946

Buoyed by a vigorous party machine and a favorable political climate, Republicans swept to control of both Houses of Congress in the midterm elections of 1946. Republicans gained 55 seats in the House, giving them 246 total seats,¹⁵ Republicans also took control of the U.S. Senate, with 12 seat gains. ¹³

The members elected in the 1946 elections (and continuing Senators) formed the 80^th United States Congress. Notable freshmen included Reps. Richard Nixon (R-CA) and John Kennedy (D-MA), both of whom would become President of the United States in later years. ¹³

As an example of the House bill’s broad scope, its prohibition on “featherbedding” was substantially more comprehensive and expansive than the rule in the final Taft-Hartley Act. The House bill would have prohibited a union from demanding an employer “employ or agree to employ any person or persons in excess of the number of employees reasonably required [. . .] to perform actual services,” among other prohibited practices. The final law prohibited only acts “to cause or attempt to cause an employer to pay or deliver or agree to pay or deliver any money or other thing of value, in the nature of an exaction for services which are not performed or not to be performed”; if the union members provided services to the employer, they did not commit an unfair labor practice. ¹⁷

Both the Hartley House bill and Taft’s narrower Senate proposal passed their respective Houses with veto-proof margins. ¹³

President Truman vetoed the bill, though he told at least one prominent official that he did so for naked partisan gain rather than from policy conviction. He reportedly told James J. Reynolds, at the time a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board and later an Undersecretary of Labor in the Johnson Administration:¹³ The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 took effect on June 23, 1947, upon the certification of the override vote in the U.S. Senate. ²⁶

The law also changed how the NLRB should resolve a contested unionization (known as a “question concerning representation” legally). If the employer did not “voluntarily recognize” the union based on its signature collection, the Wagner Act allowed the NLRB to order recognition without an election based on a check of signed authorizations (known in contemporary labor policy as a “card check”). Taft-Hartley ordered the NLRB to instead hold a secret ballot election. ³⁰

Other Minor Provisions

The law required union officers to file affidavits affirming that they were not members of the Communist Party. Unions whose officers failed to file these affidavits would not be able to seek redress for unfair labor practices before the NLRB. ³³ Democrats also retook control of both Houses of Congress, and Congress of Industrial Organizations president Philip Murray declared repeal of the law “Number One on the list” of his legislative priorities. ³⁴

But repeal proved strategically difficult and ultimately politically impossible. First, the “popular mandate” against Taft-Hartley was less obvious than it first appeared: Both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate, though controlled by Truman’s Democratic Party, had majorities of members who had voted either in the House or the Senate to override Truman’s veto of Taft-Hartley. ³⁶

Labor reacted by targeting Sen. Taft, who was up for re-election in the 1950 midterms. ³⁶ The Congress of Industrial Organizations’ CIO-PAC made the U.S. Senate election in Ohio a referendum on what Big Labor called the “slave labor law,” heavily backing his Democratic challenger, State Auditor Joseph Ferguson. But Taft aggressively defended his eponymous labor law, buoyed by survey research showing “no ground swelling [sic] demand for repeal of the Taft-Hartley law” and public resentment of mass disruption and economic costs from labor unrest. Taft was reelected by a landslide margin, increasing his majority by over 400,000 votes from his election in 1944. ³⁷

Taft was not the only anti-repeal candidate to triumph over labor opposition in 1950; among the victors was Richard Nixon, elected to the U.S. Senate from California. The Senate of the 82^nd Congress would begin with an estimated 55 supporters of the law and only 41 opponents, despite nominal Democratic control. ³⁶

Amendments

The 82^nd Congress passed a series of technical corrections to provisions of the Taft-Hartley law in a bipartisan package backed by Sen. Taft and Sen. Hubert Humphrey (D-MN). The package modified the requirement for non-Communist affidavits, fixing a potential major disruption caused by a Supreme Court decision applying it to CIO national officials retroactively, and removed the requirement for an NLRB-supervised election to authorize a “union shop” forced dues provision. ³⁶

Congress passed and President Dwight Eisenhower signed a subsequent major labor reform bill, the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959. That law, passed in response to revelations about labor racketeering, dealt with union internal expenditures and governance and expanded Taft-Hartley’s ban on secondary strikes by prohibiting “hot cargo” agreements, which prevented secondary employers from carrying goods produced by a struck employer. ⁴¹ This forbade unions from imposing fines or discipline on unwilling members for any reason other than failure to pay initiation fees, dues, or “agency fees” assessed of non-members in lieu of dues. ⁴² In 1988, the Court further restricted the application of forced dues in a case titled Communications Workers of America v. Beck; in a decision authored by arch-liberal Justice William Brennan, the Court held that the mandatory financial core could not include spending on advocacy and political activities unrelated to collective bargaining, allowing dissenters subject to union security rules to reduce their forced dues payments. ⁴⁵ has fallen precipitously. 0){ let parent=divs[divs.length-1].parentNode; let footer=divs[divs.length-1]; delete divs[divs.length-1]; for (let i=2; i