FOR UNIONS IT WAS SHAFT-HARTLEY - La Cueva
FOR THE UNIONS IT WAS SHAFT-HARTLEY. IT'S STILL IN FORCE
The Passage of the Law Most Odious to Organized Labor Was Also the Birth of Corporate Public Relations.
By Steve Varalyay
Published in Random Lengths, September 3, 1999
It was awful. An abomination. John Lewis of the United Mine Workers (UMW) called it the "first ugly thrust of Fascism in America". On June 23, 1947, an ultra-conservative, Republican-controlled Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, the most anti-union piece of legislation in the US today. Many present-day labor leaders still regard it as the reason they have not organized a greater percentage of the US workforce.
In 1947 Labor was at the Pinnacle of its strength. Thirty-five percent of the US workforce was unionized. Memories of the unequal distribution of the wealth of the 1920s and the hardships of the Great Depression were still fresh in the minds of many Americans. The Democratic Party of Truman and Roosevelt was on record opposing Taft-Hartley, calling it the "Slave Labor Bill". And the American Labor Party was electing candidates to Congress. Yet the override of Truman's veto passed by 331-83 and 68-25 in the House and Senate respectively.
WHAT IT DID AND HOW IT PASSED
In a nutshell, it prohibited most of the tactics that unions had successfully employed during the previous 50 years and granted management considerable freedom to prevent workers from organizing unions. Specifically, it prohibited the following:
The "closed shop" requiring workers to join the union and pay dues as a precondition of employment.
The secondary boycott. This is when a union that is not on strike refuses to handle products an an employers whose employees are on strike in order to force an agreement.
Members of the Communist Party from holding union offices.
And it allowed the following:
States to pass their own laws banning the union shop, in which joining the union is a condition of employment, usually after 60 days. Many Southern and Southwestern states quickly passed "right to work" laws barring the union shop, resulting in many companies moving to those states ("runaway shops").
Management broad freedom of expression rights during a union organizing campaign.
Corporate America managed to achieve the passage of this one-sided bill for several reasons.
Corporations committed tremendous resources lobbying Congress to weaken all parts of the New Deal. especially the Wagner Act, which gave unions legal recognition to bargain with their employer.
They had timing on their side. The nation had gone into a conservative mood at the onset of the Cold War.
THE BIRTH OF CORPORATE PUBLIC RELATIONS
But mostly they did it through a sophisticated, intense public relations campaign. As a field, public relations (PR) truly came into being during the First World War. Initially the American public was apathetic about the US's entry. So the Wilson Administration enlisted the help of Edward Bernays, George Creel and other PR pioneers to whip the public into a jingoistic frenzy. They cast Germany as a monster and immediate threat to our liberty, repeating this message incessantly in newspapers, movies, billboards, music and leaflets. And they quickly moved opinion in favor of sending troops.
Immediately following the war PR was used on unions. During the "Red Scare" period from 1919 to 1921 militant union leaders and radicals were targeted as Bolsheviks. Congress passed the Criminal Syndicalism Act, which made the meeting of two or more union members grounds for arrest and jail. "This may have been worse than Taft-Hartley, although this bad law was eventually repealed" said union historian and ILWU pensioner Art Almeida.
This, too, proved successful. Labor was stymied for the rest of the 1920s.
Labor broke through during the Great Depression to score its greatest legislative victory, the Wagner Act. Corporate America quickly responded. By this time they had developed PR almost to a science with the "Mohawk Valley Formula"--painting all labor leaders and organizers as radicals, using the police to break up union meeting and, most importantly, launching propaganda campaigns to get the citizenry behind "law and order".
The extent of the campaign was staggering. At the end of 1945 the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) summarized some of its activities for the year:
Every day one or more news stories about {promoting} the NAM appeared in some
part of the country and often in all newspapers in all parts of the country. On the airlines {this year} NAM members spoke directly with the public for a total of 1350 hours, or 36
full days. Their words reached into the homes of Americans and into the barracks of Americans stationed in all parts of the world.
The use of PR in business has escalated tremendously ever since. Today every corporations of a least medium size has a staff of people who deal exclusively in public relations. In the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, for example, there is a permanent hierarchy of people working exclusively on PR.
The business press gloated shamelessly following Taft-Hartley's passage. Business Week's headline read, "A New Deal for America's Employers?"; US News and World Report asked, "Are Unions Slipping? No Growth in Six Years."
The make-up of the board to institute the new law did not contain a single representative from labor and only one member from the FDR Administration. Five were members of the NAM: a Missouri financier, a labor relations consultant from the Houdaille-Hershey Corporation, an insurance executive, a corporate lawyer and a lumberman.
A FORMULA FOR UN-ORGANIZATION
Taft-Hartley had three immediate effects.
It hobbled organizing. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had just embarked on "Operation Dixie", an ambitious organizing drive in the South. Southern states quickly passed "right to work" laws banning the union shop. Coupled with the nature of "company towns" and the open hostility of many whites towards working with African-Americans, it proved insurmountable and Operation Dixie failed.
It increased unions' internal strife. The provision that no member of the Communist Party could hold a union office and oaths be taken to that effect added to the existing anti-Communist hysteria and caused infighting between the CIO unions and more conservative ones. Unions in the CIO generally had more Communists and were more progressive than their counterparts in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). "This was still a major issue when I came to the ILWU in 1950" said Almeida. "The ILWU refused to sign on to these pledges{oaths} and eventually became an independent union."
And, finally, the 80-day Cooling Off Period. After Congress had overridden his veto by such wide margins, President Truman felt obligated to intervene in strikes and used this measure nine times, including the famous railroad strike.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE OPPOSITION?
But the effect of the Taft-Hartley Act would be most clearly seen in the 1970s and 1980s. Unions remained relatively strong throughout the 25-year economic boon following WWII. After 1973, however, a new trend began. This was the last year the average American worker's real income would increase from the previous year, and the percentage of unionized workers began a precipitous decline.
Ronald Reagan brought an unprecedented anti-union stance to the presidency in 1981. His firing of Air Traffic Controllers in their strike gave the green light to other employers that union busting was OK with his administration. Employers began taking advantage of their freedom of expression rights granted under the Taft-Hartley Act. They began hiring management consultants to fend off organizing drives, get delays in union certification elections and, in some cases, go to the National Labor Relations Board, which was stacked with Reagan's pro-business appointees. Union busting became a lucrative business.
With a Democrat in the White House for most of the 1990s, the abuses of Taft-Hartley have subsided ever-so-slightly. President Clinton did not use the 80 Day Cooling Off Period to intervene in the Teamsters strike against United Parcel Service in 1997, for example, although he briefly considered it. However, the Pacific Maritime Association filed a suit against the Laney College Labor Studies Program, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and others when the ILWU honored their picket lines protesting the British scab ship Neptune Jade in Oakland that same year. The suit was later dropped.
Kent Wong, a labor lawyer and Director of the UCLA Labor Staff, attributes the drop in union membership as a percentage of the workforce to the Taft-Hartley Act. "The raw number of union members is increasing but it has not kept pace with the number of new jobs being created." In the private sector the number i down to 10-percent, compared to 38-percent in the public sector. "Clearly this reflects the inadequacy of the law", he added. "Surveys show that fully half of the US workforce would like to be unionized."
On the question of repealing or even changing Taft-Hartley, Wong said, "There are provision that are in dire need of change. But the political will is lacking in the White House and certainly in Congress. However, I can see them doing a great job of raising Taft-Hartley as an issue and educating people."
Art Almeida is optimistic, too. "Labor is on the rebound and has been electing more labor-friendly politicians. But I feel that more is going to have to happen to get their hackles raised to take on something like this."