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The American labor movement seemed poised on the threshold of unparalleled success at the beginning of the post-World War II era. Fourteen million strong in 1946, unions represented 35 percent of non-agricultural workers, and federal power insured collective bargaining rights. The contrast with the pre-war years was strongest for those workers who retained vivid memories of the 1920s and early 1930s. Then, the labor movement lacked government legitimacy, and, at the worst point of the Great Depression, the union movement barely enrolled 5 percent of the non-farm workforce; one out of every four workers lacked a job. Now, the future seemed to hold unlimited possibilities.
Like the aspirations for world peace that were shattered by the sudden onset of the Cold War, the hopes unionists held for solidarity and continued growth of prestige and power collided with unhappy realities: the persistent disunity caused by dissension among workers and renewed attacks by employers. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) competed with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) for members, and “raids” by one or the other proliferated. White workers disagreed among themselves about the importance of racial equality, and efforts by nonwhite workers to achieve dignity and justice met with continuing resistance. Catholic unionists, historically suspicious of Socialist and Communist programs and activists, joined forces with employers, anticommunist politicians, and disaffected radicals critical of Soviet policies in Eastern Europe to challenge the legitimacy of left-wing officers and organizers. In 1949–1950 the CIO expelled eleven national unions, approximately one-fifth of its membership, for alleged Communist control.
When the war ended in 1945, so did the shaky wartime truce between business and labor, and a business offensive against unions brought external pressure to bear on the internally divided labor movement. New York Times columnist James Reston wrote in September “both sides seem to take the view that they have taken a lot of guff from the other side during the war and are now free to fight it out.” Influential economists and business leaders ridiculed unions’ professions of civic responsibility, characterizing them instead as “militant labor monopolies”—their officials inherently untrustworthy, their organizations hostile to the market system. Even a sympathetic analyst such as labor economist John T. Dunlop, who later served as secretary of labor under President Gerald Ford, likened labor unions to diseases, “points of infection” among employees who occupied strategic market or technological positions in their industries.1
Unions demonstrated their disapproval of President Truman’s policies for reconversion from war to peace by authorizing a wave of strikes during the latter part of 1945, and 1946. Rank-and-file workers vented their frustration over inflation by walking out in unauthorized “wildcat” strikes. The disputes rocked the maritime, trucking, railway, coal, oil, auto, electrical equipment, telephone, meatpacking, and steel industries. More members participated in more strikes during these months than in any similar period before or since. In 1946 alone, 4.5 million workers walked the picket lines. Critics denounced their actions as fresh evidence of labor irresponsibility.
The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) took advantage of widespread outrage against the strikes to weld together a coalition of trade associations and corporations, determined to enforce industrial peace by means of federal legislation to amend the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act). Frankly pro-union, the Wagner Act protected the worker’s right to join a union, and placed the federal government in the position of “encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining.” The act also provided for secret ballot elections as the means by which workers would decide whether to be represented by a union, and it established a federal National Labor Relations Board to enforce the law. Frustrated in their attempts to invalidate the Wagner Act when the Supreme Court declared it constitutional in 1937, business activists eagerly rejoined the battle during the 1946 strike wave.
The NAM led off with a “Declaration of Principles” that appealed to the bias in American political tradition against federal government power and in favor of local control by insisting upon the need for decentralizing the collective bargaining process. The group also reiterated the theme that business owners functioned as the stewards of civic well being, while union officials were merely parochial defenders of the selfish interests of their members. This official NAM position, in addition to the more hard-line proposals of dissidents within the organization who wanted the Wagner Act abolished altogether, became the basis for the Taft-Hartley Act passed in June 1947. In forging a majority that favored the act, the NAM appealed to anti-labor Republicans and conservative southern Democrats, along with moderates from both major parties who believed that the public demanded a check on union power. Congress passed the law over President Truman’s veto, and the NAM promptly took credit for the new measure and assumed the role of its defender.
Although the Taft-Hartley Act did not repeal the Wagner Act, it fundamentally changed the character of federal government regulation of labor relations. For the first time, controls were placed upon the actual substance of the collective bargaining agreement, as well as on procedural matters. The closed shop, prohibiting the hiring of non-union employees, was made illegal. Other measures likewise limited union activities. Management could sue unions for breaking contracts or damaging company property during strikes. The law established a new federal agency, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, to seek resolution of conflicts without resort to strikes, and the government could obtain injunctions requiring a “cooling-off” period of 80 days during a strike considered dangerous to health or safety. Several provisions placed the government in the position of supervising the internal operations of unions. Officers had to swear that they did not belong to the Communist Party. Unions had to make their financial statements public and could not make financial contributions to political campaigns. In 1951 Congress amended the act to allow contracts establishing a union shop, providing that employees must join the union within thirty days of being hired, without a majority vote of the employees.
The Taft-Hartley Act also included a clause that allowed states to prohibit union shops. No one was surprised when anti-labor coalitions in eleven states immediately succeeded in lobbying for such “Right to Work” (anti-union shop) state-level legislation. All these states were in the Sunbelt or Midwest regions, where unionism had made little headway by 1945, usually in the face of widespread hostility and determined resistance. Six more states in the same regions passed similar laws during the 1950s, but the vigorous opposition by unions stopped the campaign in 1958, when all but one of six right-to-work proposals on state ballots were quashed by the electorate. Voters in Indiana repealed that state’s law in 1965, but Louisiana voters established one as late as 1976.
The Taft-Hartley Act likely contributed to restricting unionism to those areas of the country and sectors of the economy in which the labor movement had made its greatest successes by the end of World War II. The act hurt labor by slowing down the expansion of union membership and bargaining rights. It also established government monitoring of internal union decision-making and financial accounting practices that provided safeguards against potential abuses, but at the cost of onerous and burdensome reporting requirements.2
The setbacks to the labor movement stimulated by Taft-Hartley coincided with the election of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, in 1952. In 1955 George Meany and Walter Reuther, new presidents of the AFL and the CIO, decided to merge their organizations. The goal was to strengthen unionism against the certainty of continued efforts to stop the expansion of union membership, limit collective bargaining gains, and pass additional anti-union legislation.
The merger curtailed the expensive and fruitless practice of “raiding,” but even the combined efforts of the AFL-CIO and its allies in Congress could not stop the passage by Congress in 1959 of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (Landrum-Griffin Act). The background to Landrum-Griffin was a series of investigations, including those by New York State in 1952–1953 and the United States Senate’s McClellan Committee in 1957, into corruption and racketeering in the unions. In 1954 George Meany’s AFL expelled the International Longshoremen’s Association and followed suit in 1957 with the Teamster’s and two other unions, for harboring criminal elements. Teamster president Dave Beck was convicted of embezzlement in 1957, and his successor Jimmy Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering, fraud, and conspiracy in 1964.
The AFL-CIO tried to limit the damage to the reputation of organized labor by expelling the offending unions and by adopting a code of ethics, but the abuses uncovered by investigators were genuine and could not be explained away. The officers of several unions, including the nation’s largest—the Teamsters—enriched themselves by racketeering, used union funds for personal aggrandizement, abused the democratic process by intimidating members who dissented from their policies, and severely violated the civil rights of members. Congress intended the Landrum-Griffin Act to remedy such abuses by union officials, as well as to increase federal government regulation of internal union activity.3
The new legislation imposed four major responsibilities on unions. They had to comply with a “Bill of Rights” that protected individual union members. They needed to make financial disclosures and demonstrate their freedom from transactions where a conflict of interest existed between the parties. They were prohibited from improper trusteeships, and they were subject to federal safeguards against the manipulation of union elections in favor of incumbents.
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Notes
1. James Reston quoted in John Barnard, Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983), 102. John T. Dunlop, “The Development of Labor Organizations: A Theoretical Framework,” in Insights into Labor Issues, ed. Richard A. Lester and Joseph Shister (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 180. See also Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
2. Howell John Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 118–125.
3. Doris McLaughlin and Anita L.W. Schoomaker, The Landrum-Griffin Act and Union Democracy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), 180–181.
4. Ann Fagan Ginger and David Christiano, eds., The Cold War Against Labor, 2 vols. (Berkeley: Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, 1987); Steve Rosswurm, ed., The CIO’s Left-Led Unions (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992); George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Ronald L. Filippelli and Mark D. McColloch, Cold War in the Working Class: The Rise and Decline of the United Electrical Workers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).