To Improve the Taft-Hartley Law

April 12, 1948

In spite of the persistent smear campaign against the Taft-Hartley Act, experience has shown it to be incomparably superior to the Wagner Act that it supplanted. Strikes have been fewer, most union demands more moderate, and union leaders less highhanded. The improvement is so great that it takes the appearance of some new crisis, like the walkout in the coal fields, to remind us how defective our labor legislation still remains. Yet the way toward labor peace is not through more laws and more government coercions, but through more freedom.

The Taft-Hartley Act is after all only an amendment to the Wagner Act. It retains what was centrally unsound in the original law. It keeps nearly all the Wagner Act’s legal compulsions on employers, but tries to balance them by equivalent legal compulsions on unions. When this fails to bring the results desired, sponsors of the Taft-Hartley Act can only think of additional compulsions. Thus Congressman Hartley himself wants to make violence in labor strikes a Federal offense. It would be difficult to imagine a worse remedy. It is clearly unconstitutional. It would usurp the police functions of the states and cities.

It is clear, on the other hand, that the continued arrogance of John L. Lewis, his continued power, which he seems eager to demonstrate afresh each year, to bring the country’s industry to a slowdown or a halt by merely knitting his bushy brows, is not a power that he possesses in spite of existing Federal law but because of it. John L. Lewis is a Frankenstein monster blown up to his present size by Federal protection. He was not always so big. The Lewis coal strikes of 1927 and 1932 collapsed completely. The result of Lewis’s recklessness in those years was to leave his mine union shattered and prostrate—until he and it were put back on their feet, first by the NRA and then by the Wagner Act of 1935.

The mighty monopolistic weapon which the Wagner-Taft-Hartley Act has placed in the hands of the Lewises, Murrays, Reuthers, and Petrillos is the legal compulsion on the employer to recognize and bargain with huge industrywide unions no matter how contemptuous their conduct or fantastic their demands. All that is needed is to withdraw this compulsion. This would not illegalize industrywide or nationwide unions. Such unions would then occupy the same status under the law that foremen’s unions now occupy under the Taft-Hartley Act. They could continue to exist, but the employer would not be legally compelled to recognize or bargain with them. Section 9 (b) of the existing law provides that the labor board “shall decide in each case whether... the [employee] unit appropriate for the purposes of collective bargaining shall be the employer unit, craft unit, plant unit, or subdivision thereof.” The mere removal of the two words “craft unit” would not illegalize such units; it would merely take from the board its power to force employers to recognize and bargain with such industrywide units.

Two other changes in the law are necessary. One would remove the legal requirement on the employer to continue to recognize or bargain with a union that resorted to mass picketing, threats, and violence. The Federal authorities should make no effort to stop these. That should be left wholly to the local police. But at least the Federal government should remove the implied sanction it now gives to such tactics when it continues to make it obligatory on an employer to bargain with unions that resort to them.

Finally, the compulsion should be removed from the Wagner-Taft-Hartley law which in effect prevents employers from discharging strikers. The Federal government should not illegalize strikes; but neither should it encourage them by removing the risks involved.

If these coercions on employers were modified or removed, the Taft-Hartley Act could also modify or remove the ill-advised coercions it has imposed on unions—in connection, for example with political expenditures and 80-day waiting periods. In spite of the present Federal injunction against John L. Lewis, it is doubtful whether most of these coercions can be enforced.