Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act

May 11, 1953

It has remained for John L. Lewis to make the most sensible suggestion of any witness before the Senate Labor Committee on what to do about the Taft-Hartley Act: “Since management has cried out so sorely against the Wagner Act and all the manifold injustices alleged to be contained therein, let them now join us in repealing the Taft-Hartley Act in toto, lock, stock, and barrel, including the Wagner Act itself, upon which Taft-Hartley is founded. This would give to this country, its employers and employees, an opportunity . . . to practice for a season true, free, and genuine collective bargaining without governmental interference. . . . Leave the Norris-La Guardia and the Clayton Acts as the Federal rule and guide in the field of labor-management relations. . . .”

Most of us, including Senator Taft and a multitude of business groups, have forgotten that the Taft- Hartley Act is merely an amended Wagner Act, and retains most of the unsound principles embodied in the parent law. The Wagner Act abridged the freedom of the employer to hire or discharge, negotiate or bargain. It abridged his freedom to employ associates of his own choosing. He was forced to deal with the particular unions certified by a government board, no matter how unreasonable their demands or how unsatisfactory their performance. The union leaders were, it is true, certified through an “election,” but the Labor Board decided what unions it would allow on the ballot, and it could gerrymander the “appropriate” bargaining units pretty much to suit itself.

The Wagner Act in effect turned the government into a union-organizing agency. The frankly avowed purpose of its sponsors was to increase the power of unions. Its way of seeking “to diminish the causes of labor disputes” was to encourage strikes by granting strikers immunity from discharge, and often even holding out the promise of back pay after a strike.

The act was openly one-sided. The only “unfair” acts it forbade were acts of employers. The employer could not “refuse to bargain collectively” with his employees (an extremely vague requirement never satisfactorily defined). There was nothing in the act, however, to prevent even the government-certified union from refusing to bargain with the employer. The certified-union leaders became government-certified monopolists. The law in effect authorized unions to paralyze the economic life of the country or dictate the terms on which they would refrain from doing so.

The Taft-Hartley Act retained most of the abridgments in the Wagner Act on the bargaining freedom of employers, but sought a semblance of balance by trying to impose a few curbs on union leaders. Therefore most union leaders have denounced it as a “slave labor” act. Yet a good deal of the one-sidedness and hypocrisy of the Wagner Act has been retained in Taft-Hartley. In its one pretense of balance, the Wagner Act declared it to be an unfair practice for an employer either to “encourage or discourage membership in any labor organization.” The “discourage” was interpreted with a severity that infringed the employer’s very freedom of speech. But the Wagner Act at another point specifically authorized a closed shop—i.e., it authorized the employer to discriminate totally against nonunion members. And the Taft-Hartley Act specifically authorizes a “union shop” under which the employer must fire anyone who does not join a union 30 days after his employment.

The effort, in brief, to “balance” abridgments of the bargaining freedom of employers with allegedly corresponding restrictions on union leaders has worked badly. It has led to increased governmental meddling with individual and collective bargaining. This meddling has created, exacerbated, and prolonged far more labor strife and strikes than it has prevented. Last year’s steel strike is an outstanding example.

Why not, as John L. Lewis suggests, try the pre- New Deal labor-law situation for a while?