Legislation

Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (Taft-Hartley Act)

Obverse of the Great Seal of the United States. (link)
Long Title:

An Act to amend the National Labor Relations Act, to provide additional facilities for the mediation of labor disputes affecting commerce, to equalize legal responsibilities of labor organizations and employers, and for other purposes.

Other Name:

Taft-Hartley Act

Congress:

80th Congress

Vetoed By:

Harry S. Truman

June 20, 1947

Veto Overridden:

In House, 331-83

In Senate, 68-25

Effective June 23, 1947

Related Agencies:

National Labor Relations Board

Amended:

National Labor Relations Act

Amended By:

Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959

United States Code:

29 U.S.C. ch. 7 §§ 141-197

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The Taft-Hartley Act (known formally as the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947) is a set of amendments to the federal National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) passed after the Second World War to promote industrial peace and correct the pro-organized-labor bias of the New Deal-era Wagner Act (the un-amended NLRA).

Taft-Hartley is named for its principal co-sponsors in the 80th United States Congress, Rep. Fred Hartley (R-NJ) and Sen. Bob Taft (R-OH). The law, and the Republican majorities that passed the law over the veto of President Harry Truman, arose in response to a wave of strikes that followed the conclusion of World War II, most prominently a 113-day strike by the United Auto Workers against General Motors in the winter of 1945-46. In total, an estimated 4.6 million workers amounting to over 10 percent of the workforce struck,1 and general strikes were declared in Rochester, New York and Oakland, California. 2

Frustration with the strike wave, the onset of the Cold War, and 13 years of unbroken New Deal Democratic rule propelled Republicans to victory in the 1946 midterm elections. Using their new (and, as it would turn out, fleeting) majorities, Republicans passed the Taft-Hartley Act. 3

The law corrected a power imbalance between labor unions and employers created by the Wagner Act. Affirming that employees had a right to “refrain” from participating in union activities, Taft-Hartley applied anti-coercion rules already applying to employers to labor unions. 4 The law also secured employee rights to refrain from membership in unions and refrain from supporting unions; it codified a state option to enact a “right-to-work” law guaranteeing “that no person can be compelled, as a condition of employment, to join or not to join, nor to pay dues to a labor union.” 5

Labor Background

The NLRA and the War Years

In 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt and his Democratic Party passed the Wagner Act as part of the New Deal program of social-democratic economic planning the Democrats advanced to counter the Great Depression. The law strengthened the bargaining position of labor unions by prohibiting management interference in union organizing, legally protecting strikers and strike actions, and compelling employers to bargain with certified labor representatives. 6

The Wagner Act led to increased union membership, which peaked after the Second World War. During the war, President Roosevelt had created a National War Labor Board (NWLB) to regulate wage rates and prevent strikes and lockouts for the length of the conflict; in practice, the NWLB required “maintenance of membership,” a union security provision requiring union members to remain so for the length of a contract, in exchange for preventing strikes. 7 (Union security provisions are clauses in contracts obligating employees to have some relationship with a union; in modern practice in states where union security provisions under the “union shop” are permitted, the mandatory relationship is membership in the union or payment of fees in lieu of membership.)

Despite a no-strike pledge from the heads of both major union federations, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the predecessors of the contemporary AFL-CIO, unauthorized “wildcat” strikes continued throughout the war years. 8

The Great Strike Wave

After the end of World War II, the tensions that lay beneath the surface-level labor peace enforced by the NWLB broke down. Unions struck against the maritime, railroad, energy, electrical, communications, and steel production industries. 9

Socialist United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther called the most prominent strike, a walkout of 320,000 General Motors workers in November 1945 that lasted 113 days. Reuther’s demands went far beyond mere wages and working conditions; the UAW sought a role fixing the prices of GM cars, demanding that they be held steady despite a 30 percent wage increase for UAW workers. The automaker defeated the socialist; wage increases would track the level (18.5 cents per hour10) given to other unionized production workers in other industries and GM would retain pricing power. 11

The politically dominant New Deal Democrats felt the danger from the strike wave. Railroad workers called a national strike in May 1946; President Harry Truman retaliated (despite the strike being resolved on his terms) by proposing legislation that would draft striking railway workers into the U.S. Army. 12

Unrest and disorder continued through the end of the year. Oakland labor unions under the auspices of the Alameda County Central Labor Council and Building Trades Council of the American Federation of Labor called a “general strike”; 100,000 workers brought the city to a halt for two and a half days in early December 1946. 13

Political Background

The Battle for the Republican Party

Entering the 1946 election cycle, the Democratic Party had won the Presidency in four consecutive elections (all with President Franklin Roosevelt as its candidate), eight consecutive majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives elections, and seven consecutive majorities in U.S. Senate elections. While a “conservative coalition” of Southern Democrats and national Republicans could block major New Dealer legislative activity, the GOP sought a return to power after the longest wilderness period since the modern two-party system emerged in 1856. 14

Motivated by fear—no American political party had recovered if it did not hold the White House for 20 consecutive years—Republicans divided into two factions; a moderate, New Deal-accomodationist faction led by 1944 Presidential candidate and New York Gov. Tom Dewey and a conservative, anti-New Deal faction led by U.S. Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. 15

Prior to April 1946, Dewey-aligned operatives controlled the Republican National Committee; Taft-aligned factions took it over after the chairman resigned that month. A newly aggressive RNC heated up its messaging, attacking Communists at home and abroad and capitalizing on Truman’s inept handling of the strike wave. RNC messaging targeted organized labor, especially the efforts of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ $6 million political committee, the CIO-PAC. 16

Congressional Elections of 1946

Buoyed by a vigorous party machine and a favorable political climate, Republicans swept to control of both Houses of Congress in the midterm elections of 1946. Republicans gained 55 seats in the House, giving them 246 total seats,17 a number the party would not match until the midterm elections of 2014. 18 Republicans also took control of the U.S. Senate, with 12 seat gains. 19

For organized labor and its political arm the CIO-PAC, the results were even worse than the top-level numbers showing commanding GOP majorities indicated. A majority of its highest-rated incumbents (42 of 78) lost re-election; 108 of 132 incumbents it opposed were re-elected. 20

The members elected in the 1946 elections (and continuing Senators) formed the 80th United States Congress. Notable freshmen included Reps. Richard Nixon (R-CA) and John Kennedy (D-MA), both of whom would become President of the United States in later years. 21

Legislative History

Senator Robert Taft (R-OH) and Representative Fred Hartley (R-NJ) chaired the respective labor committees in the two houses; both favored enacting measures to re-balance the power of organized labor with the needs of the general public. Taft’s Senate Labor Committee was stacked with Dewey-aligned moderate Republicans skeptical of such measures, so he directed Hartley and House Majority Leader Charles Halleck (R-IN) to advance the most free-market-oriented bill that could pass with a veto-override majority, allowing Taft’s Senate committee to weaken it to secure more moderate votes. 22

As an example of the House bill’s broad scope, its prohibition on “featherbedding” was substantially more comprehensive and expansive than the rule in the final Taft-Hartley Act. The House bill would have prohibited a union from demanding an employer “employ or agree to employ any person or persons in excess of the number of employees reasonably required [. . .] to perform actual services,” among other prohibited practices. The final law prohibited only acts “to cause or attempt to cause an employer to pay or deliver or agree to pay or deliver any money or other thing of value, in the nature of an exaction for services which are not performed or not to be performed”; if the union members provided services to the employer, they did not commit an unfair labor practice. 23

Both the Hartley House bill and Taft’s narrower Senate proposal passed their respective Houses with veto-proof margins. 24 A conference committee agreed upon a proposal between the House and Senate bill in scope; it passed by a veto-proof margin. 25

President Truman vetoed the bill, though he told at least one prominent official that he did so for naked partisan gain rather than from policy conviction. He reportedly told James J. Reynolds, at the time a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board and later an Undersecretary of Labor in the Johnson Administration:26

Everybody thinks I am pro-labor, and I am—but they’ve [labor leaders] gone too far in many, many ways. I’m convinced Taft-Hartley is a pretty good law. I’ve had a head count made on the Hill, and I know that if I veto it my veto’s going to be overridden. So we’re going to have a pretty good law on the books in spite of my veto, and if I veto it, I’m going to have labor support in the election next year.

As President Truman predicted, Congress overrode his veto. 27 The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 took effect on June 23, 1947, upon the certification of the override vote in the U.S. Senate. 28

Provisions

Union Unfair Labor Practices

The original Wagner Act did not permit the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) it created to hold unions accountable for unfair labor practices. The Taft-Hartley Act outlined a number of union practices that would be prohibited as unfair labor practices, including coercion of employees,29 failing to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement in good faith,30 forcing employers to pay for work not performed under most circumstances,31 and engaging in “secondary boycotts” to coerce outside “neutral” employers to stop doing business with an employer in a labor dispute. 32 The law also made unions liable for damages caused by an illegal strike.

The Taft-Hartley Act banned a number of activities for coercing employees, including coercing them not to exercise their right to refrain from joining a union. The Wagner Act prohibited coercion of employees by employers and empowered a National Labor Relations Board to adjudicate allegations of employee rights violations. Taft-Hartley extended jurisdiction of the NLRB to similar forms of coercion by unions. Pro-union labor scholar Steven E. Abraham described one potential effect of this change on a union organizing campaign:33

For example, while unions had not been able to use physical violence or intimidation during the preelection campaign even before the Taft-Hartley Act, they had been able to do things such as make false promises regarding previous success elsewhere, call employees names such as “scab” and “union buster” if they opposed the union, and refer to rival unions as “weak and incompetent.” These statements were prohibited by Section 8(b)(1)(A).

Taft-Hartley also made reciprocal the Wagner Act requirement that employers bargain in “good faith” to unions negotiating with employers. This change also made not-in-good-faith bargaining by a union a defense against a charge that an employer did not bargain in good faith. 34 The law restricted the practice of “featherbedding”—requiring more workers than a job actually required—by banning payment of excess workers when work is not performed. 35

Perhaps the most important unfair labor practice by unions prohibited by Taft-Hartley is the practice of “secondary boycotts” or “secondary strikes.” A secondary boycott is “secondary” because it targets a business not directly party to a labor dispute. Taft-Hartley “made it an unfair labor practice for a union to induce employees to strike or stop work with the aim of getting their employer to cease doing business with another firm with which the real dispute existed.” 36

Secondary strikes—the most prominent of which were the “general strikes” in Rochester, New York and Oakland, California—contributed to the mass disruption in the economy during the 1946 strike wave. 37

Organizing and Representation

The Taft-Hartley Act clarified a number of issues related to union organizing and representation created by the Wagner Act. The law made management-level employees ineligible to unionize, removing a conflict of interest in workplace supervision; dictated that the NLRB should use a secret-ballot election to resolve contested unionization campaigns; made explicit employers’ rights to express opinions about unionization, so long as they did not coerce employees; and established a procedure to decertify—remove—an unwanted union.

The NLRB and Supreme Court spent much of the 1940s vacillating on whether the unionization authority granted to production workers also applied to their supervisors. By 1947, they had established that the Wagner Act did allow supervisors’ unions; employers argued that these unions created conflicts of interest in supervisors tasked with enforcing employer directives. Taft-Hartley made supervisors ineligible to unionize. 38

The law also changed how the NLRB should resolve a contested unionization (known as a “question concerning representation” legally). If the employer did not “voluntarily recognize” the union based on its signature collection, the Wagner Act allowed the NLRB to order recognition without an election based on a check of signed authorizations (known in contemporary labor policy as a “card check”). Taft-Hartley ordered the NLRB to instead hold a secret ballot election. 39

The Wagner Act made it an unfair labor practice for employers to “interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees” in their exercise of collective bargaining rights, including the right to form a union. 40 The Taft-Hartley Act clarified that “the expression of views, arguments, or opinions shall not be evidence of an unfair labor practice absent the threat of reprisal or promise of benefit.” 41

Taft-Hartley also corrected a major oversight in the Wagner Act: The Wagner Act had no provision for employees to dissolve a union outright. Taft-Hartley allowed employees to petition to “decertify” their union and replace it with no union representation. 42

Forced Unionism

The Taft-Hartley Act curtailed the practice of compulsory unionism through “union security” contract provisions substantially. The law prohibited outright “closed shop” provisions requiring employers only to hire and employ union members. 43

“Union shop” provisions requiring newly hired employees to join unions and pay dues throughout their employment remained legal, but unions had to win an NLRB-sanctioned election affirming such provisions. Further, section 14(b) explicitly authorized states and territories to enact “right-to-work” laws that forbid union shop provisions. 44

The Taft-Hartley Act further prohibited unions from requiring employees subject to a union security contract to pay “excessive or discriminatory” initiation fees. The provision was included in part to prevent permitted union shops from becoming de facto closed shops by imposing a penalty initiation fee on non-member hires. 45

Other Minor Provisions

The law required union officers to file affidavits affirming that they were not members of the Communist Party. Unions whose officers failed to file these affidavits would not be able to seek redress for unfair labor practices before the NLRB. 46

Taft-Hartley also made changes to federal campaign finance. Unions and corporations were prohibited from making expenditures or campaign contributions in federal elections. 47

Fallout

The Taft-Hartley provisions and the Republican Congress elected in 1946 took the wind out of the strike wave. With public order and economic stability returning and facing an anemic Republican challenge from moderate New York Governor Tom Dewey, President Truman won re-election with support from labor interests he had placated with his politically motivated Taft-Hartley veto. 48 Democrats also retook control of both Houses of Congress, and Congress of Industrial Organizations president Philip Murray declared repeal of the law “Number One on the list” of his legislative priorities. 49

But repeal proved strategically difficult and ultimately politically impossible. First, the “popular mandate” against Taft-Hartley was less obvious than it first appeared: Both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate, though controlled by Truman’s Democratic Party, had majorities of members who had voted either in the House or the Senate to override Truman’s veto of Taft-Hartley. 50 Second, Democrats and labor divided over strategy: The Truman administration, mindful of the political consequences of the 1946 strike wave under the old Wagner Act, proposed a “repeal and replacement” approach, while the AFL and CIO both demanded total repeal of Taft-Hartley before considering any amendments to the Wagner framework. 51

The divisions in Congress soon came to the forefront of debate over a possible Taft-Hartley replacement. A moderate bill sponsored by Representative John Wood (D-GA) received backing from Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans; it passed a House test vote despite the Truman administration backing a different, more pro-union proposal offered by Rep. John Lesinski Sr. (D-MI). The Senate similarly adopted a moderate proposal backed by (among others) Sen. Taft. The administration and the House let the moderate Senate bill die, defeating labor’s goal of repeal. 52

Labor reacted by targeting Sen. Taft, who was up for re-election in the 1950 midterms. 53 The Congress of Industrial Organizations’ CIO-PAC made the U.S. Senate election in Ohio a referendum on what Big Labor called the “slave labor law,” heavily backing his Democratic challenger, State Auditor Joseph Ferguson. But Taft aggressively defended his eponymous labor law, buoyed by survey research showing “no ground swelling [sic] demand for repeal of the Taft-Hartley law” and public resentment of mass disruption and economic costs from labor unrest. Taft was reelected by a landslide margin, increasing his majority by over 400,000 votes from his election in 1944. 54

Taft was not the only anti-repeal candidate to triumph over labor opposition in 1950; among the victors was Richard Nixon, elected to the U.S. Senate from California. The Senate of the 82nd Congress would begin with an estimated 55 supporters of the law and only 41 opponents, despite nominal Democratic control. 55

Amendments

The 82nd Congress passed a series of technical corrections to provisions of the Taft-Hartley law in a bipartisan package backed by Sen. Taft and Sen. Hubert Humphrey (D-MN). The package modified the requirement for non-Communist affidavits, fixing a potential major disruption caused by a Supreme Court decision applying it to CIO national officials retroactively, and removed the requirement for an NLRB-supervised election to authorize a “union shop” forced dues provision. 56

Congress passed and President Dwight Eisenhower signed a subsequent major labor reform bill, the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959. That law, passed in response to revelations about labor racketeering, dealt with union internal expenditures and governance and expanded Taft-Hartley’s ban on secondary strikes by prohibiting “hot cargo” agreements, which prevented secondary employers from carrying goods produced by a struck employer. 57

Effects

The Taft-Hartley Act’s best-known effect is a substantial curtailment of forced unionism. As of early 2019, twenty-seven states and the territory of Guam have a right-to-work law authorized by Taft-Hartley Section 14(b) in force. 58 Labor unions and Democrats have tried on numerous occasions to reverse all right-to-work laws by repealing substantial portions of Taft-Hartley; as of 2019, they came closest in the 89th United States Congress, when Senate filibusters defeated two attempts to repeal all right-to-work laws. The second attempt came after a major transportation workers’ strike in New York City; disruption caused by the strike was credited with hardening opposition to repeal of right-to-work. 59

The Supreme Court has narrowed the extent of permissible union shop provisions over time. In a 1963 case (NLRB v. General Motors Corp.), the Court ruled that “It is permissible to condition employment upon membership, but membership, insofar as it has significance to employment rights, may in turn be conditioned only upon payment of fees and dues,” known as the “financial core.” 60 This forbade unions from imposing fines or discipline on unwilling members for any reason other than failure to pay initiation fees, dues, or “agency fees” assessed of non-members in lieu of dues. 61 In 1988, the Court further restricted the application of forced dues in a case titled Communications Workers of America v. Beck; in a decision authored by arch-liberal Justice William Brennan, the Court held that the mandatory financial core could not include spending on advocacy and political activities unrelated to collective bargaining, allowing dissenters subject to union security rules to reduce their forced dues payments. 62

The Taft-Hartley Act succeeded in bringing order to American labor relations; work stoppages have not reached the peaks of 1946 since Taft-Hartley’s passage. 63 The rate of private-sector unionization, which was in many ways artificially inflated by wartime agreements that forced workers into unions to which they were not committed,64 has fallen precipitously. 65

References

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  16. Bowen, Michael. “Communism vs. Republicanism, 1946–1948.” In The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party, 35-55. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. doi:10.5149/9780807869192_bowen.7.
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  19. Busch, Andrew E. “1946 Midterm Gives GOP First Majority Since 1928 Elections, Helps Ensure Truman’s Reelection.” Ashbrook. June 2006. Accessed April 10, 2019. https://ashbrook.org/publications/oped-busch-06-1946/.
  20. Bowen, Michael. “Communism vs. Republicanism, 1946–1948.” In The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party, 35-55. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. doi:10.5149/9780807869192_bowen.7.
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  23. Weiner, Walter H. “Labor Law: Labor-Management Relations Act: Anti-Featherbedding Provision.” Michigan Law Review 51, no. 8 (1953): 1243-246. doi:10.2307/1285227.
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  25. Bowen, Michael. “Communism vs. Republicanism, 1946–1948.” In The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party, 35-55. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. doi:10.5149/9780807869192_bowen.7.
  26. Quoted in Lee, R. Alton. “Unions and the Democrats.” In Eisenhower and Landrum-Griffin: A Study in Labor-Management Politics, 1-17. University Press of Kentucky, 1990. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130jqnj.4.
  27. Bowen, Michael. “Communism vs. Republicanism, 1946–1948.” In The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party, 35-55. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. doi:10.5149/9780807869192_bowen.7.
  28. Labor Management Relations Act of 1947. Public Law 80-101. http://legisworks.org/congress/80/publaw-101.pdf
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  30. Abraham, Steven E. “How the Taft-Hartley Act Hindered Unions.” Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal 12, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 1-38. https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1198&context=hlelj.
  31. Abraham, Steven E. “How the Taft-Hartley Act Hindered Unions.” Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal 12, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 1-38. https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1198&context=hlelj.
  32. “Secondary Boycotts (Section 8(b)(4)).” NLRB. Accessed April 17, 2019. https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/unions/secondary-boycotts-section-8b4.
  33. Abraham, Steven E. “How the Taft-Hartley Act Hindered Unions.” Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal 12, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 1-38. https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1198&context=hlelj.
  34. Abraham, Steven E. “How the Taft-Hartley Act Hindered Unions.” Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal 12, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 1-38. https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1198&context=hlelj.
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  38. Leiter, Robert D. “Supervisory Employees and the Taft-Hartley Law.” Southern Economic Journal 15, no. 3 (1949): 311. doi:10.2307/1054128.
  39. Abraham, Steven E. “How the Taft-Hartley Act Hindered Unions.” Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal 12, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 1-38. https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1198&context=hlelj.
  40. “Interfering with Employee Rights (Section 7 & 8(a)(1)).” NLRB. Accessed April 22, 2019. https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employers/interfering-employee-rights-section-7-8a1.
  41. “1947 Taft-Hartley Substantive Provisions.” NLRB. Accessed April 22, 2019. https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/who-we-are/our-history/1947-taft-hartley-substantive-provisions.
  42. Abraham, Steven E. “How the Taft-Hartley Act Hindered Unions.” Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal 12, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 1-38. https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1198&context=hlelj.
  43. “Closed Shop.” Encyclopædia Britannica. November 16, 2016. Accessed April 22, 2019. https://www.britannica.com/topic/closed-shop.
  44. Abraham, Steven E. “How the Taft-Hartley Act Hindered Unions.” Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal 12, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 1-38. https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1198&context=hlelj.
  45. Foley, James F. “Union Unfair Labor Practices under the Taft-Hartley Act.” Virginia Law Review 33, no. 6 (1947): 697-729. doi:10.2307/1068990.
  46. “Control of Communism in the United States.” CQ Researcher by CQ Press. February 11, 1948. Accessed April 22, 2019. https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1948021100.
  47. Petro, Sylvester. “Political Activity and Political Expenditures.” FEE. January 01, 1960. Accessed April 22, 2019. https://fee.org/articles/political-activity-and-political-expenditures/.
  48. Bowen, Michael. “Opportunity Wasted, 1948.” In The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party, 56-74. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. doi:10.5149/9780807869192_bowen.8.
  49. Quoted in Aaron, Benjamin. “Amending the Taft-Hartley Act: A Decade of Frustration.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 11, no. 3 (1958): 327-38. doi:10.2307/2519952.
  50. “Revision of the Taft-Hartley Act.” CQ Researcher by CQ Press. December 1, 1948. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1948120100.
  51. “Revision of the Taft-Hartley Act.” CQ Researcher by CQ Press. December 1, 1948. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1948120100.
  52. Aaron, Benjamin. “Amending the Taft-Hartley Act: A Decade of Frustration.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 11, no. 3 (1958): 327-38. doi:10.2307/2519952.
  53. Aaron, Benjamin. “Amending the Taft-Hartley Act: A Decade of Frustration.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 11, no. 3 (1958): 327-38. doi:10.2307/2519952.
  54. Bowen, Michael. “A Nation of Morons, 1949–1950.” In The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party, 75-108. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. doi:10.5149/9780807869192_bowen.9.
  55. Aaron, Benjamin. “Amending the Taft-Hartley Act: A Decade of Frustration.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 11, no. 3 (1958): 327-38. doi:10.2307/2519952.
  56. Aaron, Benjamin. “Amending the Taft-Hartley Act: A Decade of Frustration.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 11, no. 3 (1958): 327-38. doi:10.2307/2519952.
  57. Lee, R. Alton. “The Impact of the Law.” In Eisenhower and Landrum-Griffin: A Study in Labor-Management Politics, 160-67. University Press of Kentucky, 1990. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130jqnj
  58. “Right to Work States.” National Right to Work Foundation. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.nrtw.org/right-to-work-states/.
  59. “‘Right to Work’ Repeal Again Loses in Senate.” CQ Almanac Online Edition. 1966. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal66-1300523.
  60. Quoted in Alston, Rossie D., Jr., and Glenn M. Taubman. “Union Discipline and Employee Rights.” National Right to Work Foundation. 1998. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.nrtw.org/union-discipline-and-employee-rights#N_16_.
  61. Alston, Rossie D., Jr., and Glenn M. Taubman. “Union Discipline and Employee Rights.” National Right to Work Foundation. 1998. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.nrtw.org/union-discipline-and-employee-rights#N_16_.
  62. Baird, Charles W. “The Permissible Uses of Forced Union Dues: From Hanson to Beck.” Cato Institute. July 24, 1992. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/permissible-uses-forced-union-dues-hanson-beck.
  63. For trend pre-1972, see National Bureau of Economic Research, Man-Days Idle in Strikes and Lockouts for United States [M08257USM552NNBR], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M08257USM552NNBR , April 23, 2019; see also “Major Work Stoppages: Annual Summary Data.” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. February 08, 2019. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.bls.gov/web/wkstp/annual-listing.htm.
  64. See Lee, R. Alton. “Unions and the Democrats.” In Eisenhower and Landrum-Griffin: A Study in Labor-Management Politics, 1-17. University Press of Kentucky, 1990. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130jqnj.4, “Rather than being organized and indoctrinated, millions of workers had become unionized by a decree from Washington.”
  65. Watson, Michael. “Union Desperation Increases as Unionization Falls.” Capital Research Center. January 30, 2019. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://capitalresearch.org/article/union-desperation-increases-as-unionization-falls/.
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