The
Labor–Management Relations Act is a
United States federal lawThe law of the United States consists of many levels of codified and uncodified forms of law, of which the most important is the United States Constitution, the foundation of the federal government of the United States...
that monitors the activities and power of
labor unionsA trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
. The
actAn Act of Congress is a statute enacted by government with a legislature named "Congress," such as the United States Congress or the Congress of the Philippines....
, still effective, was sponsored by Senator
Robert TaftRobert Alphonso Taft , of the Taft political family of Cincinnati, was a Republican United States Senator and a prominent conservative statesman...
and Representative
Fred A. Hartley, Jr.Fred Allan Hartley, Jr. was an American Republican Party politician from New Jersey. Hartley served ten terms in the United States House of Representatives where he represented the New Jersey's 8th and New Jersey's 10th congressional districts...
and became law by overriding U.S. President
Harry S. TrumanHarry S. Truman was the 33rd President of the United States . As President Franklin D. Roosevelt's third vice president and the 34th Vice President of the United States , he succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945, when President Roosevelt died less than three months after beginning his...
's
vetoA veto, Latin for "I forbid", is the power of an officer of the state to unilaterally stop an official action, especially enactment of a piece of legislation...
on June 23, 1947; labor leaders called it the "slave-labor bill" while President Truman argued that it was a "dangerous intrusion on free speech," and that it would "conflict with important principles of our democratic society," Nevertheless, Truman would subsequently use it twelve times during his presidency. The Taft–Hartley Act amended the
National Labor Relations ActThe National Labor Relations Act or Wagner Act , is a 1935 United States federal law that limits the means with which employers may react to workers in the private sector who create labor unions , engage in collective bargaining, and take part in strikes and other forms of concerted activity in...
(NLRA; informally the Wagner Act), which Congress passed in 1935. The principal author of the Taft–Hartley Act was J. Mack Swigert of the Cincinnati law firm Taft, Stettinius & Hollister.
Background
Taft–Hartley was one of more than 250 union-related bills pending in both houses of Congress in 1947. As a response to the rising union movement and Cold War hostilities, the bill could be seen as a response by business to the post-
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
labor upsurge of 1946. During the year after V-J Day, more than five million American workers were involved in strikes, which lasted on average four times longer than those during the war. The Taft–Hartley Act was seen as a means of demobilizing the labor movement by imposing limits on labor's ability to strike and by prohibiting
radicalsFar left, also known as the revolutionary left, radical left and extreme left are terms which refer to the highest degree of leftist positions among left-wing politics...
from their leadership.
Effects of the act
As stated in Section 1 , the purpose of the NLRA is:
[T]o promote the full flow of commerce, to prescribe the legitimate rights of both employees and employers in their relations affecting commerce, to provide orderly and peaceful procedures for preventing the interference by either with the legitimate rights of the other, to protect the rights of individual employees in their relations with labor organizations whose activities affect commerce, to define and proscribe practices on the part of labor and management which affect commerce and are inimical to the general welfare, and to protect the rights of the public in connection with labor disputes affecting commerce.
The amendments enacted in Taft-Hartley added a list of prohibited actions, or
unfair labor practiceIn United States labor law, the term unfair labor practice refers to certain actions taken by employers or unions that violate the National Labor Relations Act and other legislation...
s, on the part of unions to the NLRB, which had previously only prohibited unfair labor practices committed by employers. The Taft–Hartley Act prohibited
jurisdictional strikeLabor unions use the term jurisdiction to refer to their claims to represent workers who perform a certain type of work and the right of their members to perform such work...
s,
wildcat strikesA wildcat strike action, often referred to as a wildcat strike, is a strike action taken by workers without the authorization of their trade union officials. This is sometimes termed unofficial industrial action...
, solidarity or political strikes,
secondary boycottsSecondary action is industrial action by a trade union in support of a strike initiated by workers in another, separate enterprise...
, secondary and mass picketing,
closed shopA closed shop is a form of union security agreement under which the employer agrees to hire union members only, and employees must remain members of the union at all times in order to remain employed....
s, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. It also required union officers to sign non-communist affidavits with the government.
Union shopA union shop is a form of a union security clause under which the employer agrees to hire either labor union members or nonmembers but all non-union employees must become union members within a specified period of time or lose their jobs...
s were heavily restricted, and states were allowed to pass
right-to-work lawRight-to-work laws are statutes enforced in twenty-two U.S. states, mostly in the southern or western U.S., allowed under provisions of the federal Taft–Hartley Act, which prohibit agreements between labor unions and employers that make membership, payment of union dues, or fees a condition of...
s that outlawed union shops. Furthermore, the executive branch of the Federal government could obtain legal strikebreaking
injunctionAn injunction is an equitable remedy in the form of a court order that requires a party to do or refrain from doing certain acts. A party that fails to comply with an injunction faces criminal or civil penalties and may have to pay damages or accept sanctions...
s if an impending or current strike imperiled the national health or safety, a test that has been interpreted broadly by the courts.
Campaign expenditures
According to
First AmendmentThe First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering...
scholar
Floyd AbramsFloyd Abrams is an American attorney at Cahill Gordon & Reindel. He is an expert on constitutional law, and many arguments in the briefs he has written before the United States Supreme Court have been adopted as United States Constitutional interpretative law as it relates to the First Amendment...
, the Act "was the first law barring unions and corporations from making independent expenditures in support of or opposition to federal candidates."
Closed shops
The outlawed
closed shops were contractual agreements that required an employer to hire only
labor unionA trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
members.
Union shops, still permitted, require new recruits to join the union within a certain amount of time, but only as part of a collective bargaining agreement and only if the contract allows the worker at least thirty days after the date of hire or the effective date of the contract to join the union. The National Labor Relations Board and the courts have added other restrictions on the power of unions to enforce
union securityA union security agreement is a contractual agreement, usually part of a union collective bargaining agreement, in which an employer and a trade or labor union agree on the extent to which the union may compel employees to join the union, and/or whether the employer will collect dues, fees, and...
clauses and have required them to make extensive financial disclosures to all members as part of their
duty of fair representationThe duty of fair representation is incumbent upon U.S. labor unions that are the exclusive bargaining representative of workers in a particular group. It is the obligation to represent all employees fairly, in good faith, and without discrimination...
. On the other hand, Congress repealed the provisions requiring a vote by workers to authorize a union shop a few years after the passage of the Act when it became apparent that workers were approving them in virtually every case.
Union security clauses
The amendments also authorized individual states to outlaw
union security clauses (such as the union shop) entirely in their jurisdictions by passing right-to-work laws. A right-to-work law prevents unions from negotiating contracts or legally binding documents requiring companies to fire workers who refuse to join the union. Currently all of the states in the
Deep SouthThe Deep South is a descriptive category of the cultural and geographic subregions in the American South. Historically, it is differentiated from the "Upper South" as being the states which were most dependent on plantation type agriculture during the pre-Civil War period...
and a number of states in the Midwest, Plains, and
Rocky MountainsThe Rocky Mountains are a major mountain range in western North America. The Rocky Mountains stretch more than from the northernmost part of British Columbia, in western Canada, to New Mexico, in the southwestern United States...
regions have right-to-work laws (with five states –
ArizonaArizona ; is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States. It is also part of the western United States and the mountain west. The capital and largest city is Phoenix...
,
ArkansasArkansas is a state located in the southern region of the United States. Its name is an Algonquian name of the Quapaw Indians. Arkansas shares borders with six states , and its eastern border is largely defined by the Mississippi River...
,
FloridaFlorida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
,
MississippiMississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...
and
OklahomaOklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...
– going one step further and enshrining right-to-work laws in their states' constitutions).
Strikes
The amendments required unions and employers to give 60 days' notice to each other and to certain state and federal mediation bodies before they may undertake
strikesStrike action, also called labour strike, on strike, greve , or simply strike, is a work stoppage caused by the mass refusal of employees to work. A strike usually takes place in response to employee grievances. Strikes became important during the industrial revolution, when mass labour became...
or other forms of economic action in pursuit of a new collective bargaining agreement; it did not, on the other hand, impose any "cooling-off period" after a contract expired. The Act also authorized the President to intervene in strikes or potential strikes that create a national emergency, a reaction to the national coal miners' strikes called by the United Mine Workers of America in the 1940s. Presidents have used that power less and less frequently in each succeeding decade. President
George W. BushGeorge Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
invoked the law most recently in connection with the employer
lockoutA lockout is a work stoppage in which an employer prevents employees from working. This is different from a strike, in which employees refuse to work.- Causes :...
of the
International Longshore and Warehouse UnionThe International Longshore and Warehouse Union is a labor union which primarily represents dock workers on the West Coast of the United States, Hawaii and Alaska, and in British Columbia, Canada. It also represents hotel workers in Hawaii, cannery workers in Alaska, warehouse workers throughout...
during negotiations with West Coast shipping and stevedoring companies in 2002.
Treatment of supervisors
The amendments expressly excluded supervisors from coverage under the act, and allowed employers to terminate supervisors engaging in union activities or those not supporting the employer's stance. The amendments maintained coverage under the act for professional employees, but provided for special procedures before they may be included in the same bargaining unit as non-professional employees.
Right of employer to oppose unions
The amendments codified the
Supreme CourtThe Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
's earlier ruling that employers have a constitutional right to express their opposition to unions while barring employers from offering incentives to employees as an alternative to unionizing, so long as they did not threaten employees with reprisals for their union activities. The amendments also gave employers the right to file a petition asking the Board to determine if a union represents a majority of its employees, and allow employees to petition either to decertify their union, or to invalidate the union security provisions of any existing collective bargaining agreement.
National Labor Relations Board
The amendments gave the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board discretionary power to seek injunctions against either employers or unions that violated the Act. The law made pursuit of such injunctions mandatory, rather than discretionary, in the case of
secondary boycottsSecondary action is industrial action by a trade union in support of a strike initiated by workers in another, separate enterprise...
by unions. The amendments also established the General Counsel’s autonomy within the administrative framework of the NLRB. Congress also gave employers the right to sue unions for damages caused by a secondary boycott, but gave the General Counsel exclusive power to seek injunctive relief against such activities.
Federal jurisdiction
The act provided for federal court jurisdiction to enforce collective bargaining agreements. Although Congress passed this section to empower federal courts to hold unions liable in damages for strikes violating a no-strike clause, this part of the act has instead served as the springboard for creation of a "federal common law" of collective bargaining agreements, which favored
arbitrationArbitration, a form of alternative dispute resolution , is a legal technique for the resolution of disputes outside the courts, where the parties to a dispute refer it to one or more persons , by whose decision they agree to be bound...
over litigation or strikes as the preferred means of resolving labor disputes.
Other
The Congress that passed the Taft–Hartley Amendments considered repealing the
Norris-LaGuardia ActThe Norris–La Guardia Act was a 1932 United States federal law that banned yellow-dog contracts, barred federal courts from issuing injunctions against nonviolent labor disputes, and created a positive right of noninterference by employers against workers joining trade unions...
to the extent necessary to permit courts to issue injunctions against strikes violating a no-strike clause, but chose not to do so. The Supreme Court nonetheless held several decades later that the act implicitly gave the courts the power to enjoin such strikes over subjects that would be subject to final and binding arbitration under a collective bargaining agreement.
Finally, the act imposed a number of procedural and substantive standards that unions and employers must meet before they may use employer funds to provide pensions and other employee benefit to unionized employees. Congress has since passed more extensive protections for workers and employee benefit plans as part of the
Employee Retirement Income Security ActThe Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 is an American federal statute that establishes minimum standards for pension plans in private industry and provides for extensive rules on the federal income tax effects of transactions associated with employee benefit plans...
("ERISA").
Entertainment industry
The term
Taft-Hartley has a special meaning in the entertainment industry. Specifically, for film and television actors, an actor not in the union who becomes a "principal performer" (says a line) is immediately eligible to join the
Screen Actors GuildThe Screen Actors Guild is an American labor union representing over 200,000 film and television principal performers and background performers worldwide...
and is covered under the SAG contract with the production company for 30 days, at which point he or she must either join SAG or cease working on any union productions; this same provision applies to so-called "background actors" (extras) who work on a SAG covered production for 3 or more days. Once joining the union, the actor may not work on any non-union production, per the terms of the bylaws. This allows SAG to get around the rules forbidding closed shops by providing a mechanism for new members to join the union.
Opposition to the Act
Union leaders did not like the bill when it was proposed. Harry Truman vetoed Taft-Hartley, but Congress
overrode his vetoA veto override is an action by legislators and decision-makers to override an act of veto by someone with such powers - thus forcing through a new decision. The power to override a veto varies greatly in tandem with the veto power itself. The U.S constitution gives a 2/3 majority Congress the...
. More Democrats joined Republicans in voting for the bill and the override than voted against it. Despite this, union leaders in the
Congress of Industrial OrganizationsThe Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not...
(CIO) continued to support Democrats and vigorously campaigned for Truman in the 1948 election based upon a (never fulfilled) promise to repeal Taft-Hartley. Organized labor nearly succeeded in pushing Congress to amend the law to increase the protections for strikers and targets of employer retaliation during the
CarterJames Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...
and
ClintonWilliam Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
administrations, but failed on both occasions because of Republican opposition and lukewarm support for these changes from the Democratic President in office at the time.
See also
- Labor unions in the United States
Labor unions in the United States are legally recognized as representatives of workers in many industries. The most prominent unions are among public sector employees such as teachers and police...
- Norris-LaGuardia Act
The Norris–La Guardia Act was a 1932 United States federal law that banned yellow-dog contracts, barred federal courts from issuing injunctions against nonviolent labor disputes, and created a positive right of noninterference by employers against workers joining trade unions...
- Wagner Act
- Jurisdictional strike
Labor unions use the term jurisdiction to refer to their claims to represent workers who perform a certain type of work and the right of their members to perform such work...
- Secondary boycott
- McCarthyism
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...