There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Representative Francis Case of South Dakota sought to act on the White House’s shifting sympathies by proposing a bill that would establish a Federal Mediation Board, a sixty-day prestrike cooling-off period, and, significantly, the surrender of workers’ Wagner Act rights for violating the cooling-off restriction. It also banned secondary boycotts and allowed for injunctions against certain forms of picketing. The New Republic termed Case’s suggested legislation “an unashamed and hateful attempt to emasculate organized labor,”28 and organized labor itself lost no time in crying foul. An angry Sidney Hillman attributed Truman’s weakening before anti-labor forces to “a moment of national hysteria deliberately provoked by the reactionary forces of big business.” The CIO gathered a million signatures on a petition urging the president to veto the Case bill “before it is too late and we embark on the road to fascism.”29 Even the New York Times, which thought Case would “begin the long-needed … job of revisiting existing federal legislation for the purpose of curbing a present monopoly of industrial labor,” deemed the legislation imperfect.30 Truman, heeding the concerns of labor and the advice of his attorney general, Tom Clark, vetoed the bill.

  Its conservative sponsors, however, merely bided their time. Republicans had not controlled both houses of Congress since 1930, but the upcoming fall 1946 midterm elections were expected to bring the historic Roosevelt era on Capitol Hill to an end. As anticipated, large margins of victory in numerous congressional races that November gave them enough new seats in both houses of Congress to achieve a veto-proof majority, as well as the ability to claim overwhelming public support. The time had arrived for conservative America’s own “new deal.”

  THEIR EFFORT COALESCED AROUND a series of proposed amendments to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the Wagner Act) that would become known as the Taft-Hartley Bill, after its Republican sponsors, Ohio senator Robert A. Taft, chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, and his House counterpart, Congressman Fred A. Hartley Jr. of New Jersey. Taft, the eldest son of President William Howard Taft, was the star of this drama and wouldn’t have had it any other way. “Mr. Republican,” as he was sometimes known, had made no secret of his intention to “cast out a great many chapters of the New Deal, if not the whole book.”31 The legislative fix he envisioned for Wagner would begin a far more sweeping campaign to reset the nation’s course along conservative lines, an effort that would require his close guidance and might well guide him into the White House. Taft’s war dance made liberals anxious, but they believed that Social Security and unemployment insurance at least were safe, as these programs had proven so popular with voters they were embraced even by the Republican Party platform; labor laws enacted by Congress at the height of the Roosevelt era, however, were a different matter. “It took 14 years to rid this country of prohibition,” said Alfred Sloan, CEO of General Motors. “It is going to take a good while to rid the country of the New Deal, but sooner or later the ax falls and we get a change.”32 Taft’s partner Fred Hartley was less ardent an advocate of sweeping reform; he was close to retirement and some observers speculated he had joined Taft’s initiative in order to link his name with a major and potentially historic legislative undertaking.33

  The bill, introduced first in the House, was a comprehensive denial of the rights labor had won over the past generation. It would give management greater control of how union representation elections were conducted and allow individual states to pass anti-labor restrictions of their own, most significantly “right to work” laws stipulating that union membership could not be required as a condition of employment, in effect an undermining of the closed shop. It forbade industry-wide collective bargaining. Employers could sue unions over secondary boycotts. Unions would have to notify management of any intention to challenge or change a contract, and could be sued in federal court for breaching one; they were prohibited from giving money to political campaigns or using funds from union treasuries to aid candidates, and union officers were required to sign statements that they were not members of the Communist Party. Finally, it expanded presidential authority to obtain injunctions against strikes thought to be endangering national health or safety.

  Critics of the bill in Congress immediately pointed out that it had been written by corporate lawyers working at the behest of the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce. As evidence, Democratic congressman John Blatnik of Minnesota circulated a list of legislative recommendations drawn up by NAM in 1946 and distributed as part of a booklet titled Now … Let’s Build America; it showed a clear similarity to the House version of Taft-Hartley.34 Although these charges were aired in the House, debate on the bill itself was limited.

  In the Senate the conversation was more extended, conservatives proposing the Wagner Act be viewed as a kind of experiment, one crafted with good intentions, but that had proven extreme in some of its effects, and now sorely needed repair. Wagner’s defenders argued that New Deal labor legislation had largely been a success and that gutting it would set back industrial relations half a century. They pointed to the health and vitality of organized labor compared with the 1920s—the large numbers of railway, mining, and manufacturing workers who were now unionized, with more unions winning NLRB elections every year. Such a degree of organization among American workers, they insisted, had a stabilizing effect on the economy, indeed on all of society.

  The NAM, if it listened to these arguments at all, hesitated not a minute in launching a well-oiled public relations effort to rebut criticism and smooth the bill’s passage. Labor returned fire with what were becoming familiar words of outrage, the ILGWU’s David Dubinsky terming Taft-Hartley “a monstrous piece of legislation” and “a body blow to our democracy.” In retrospect labor’s response may have focused too heavily on its adversaries in Washington without fully acknowledging the extent to which public opinion itself had shifted; it was no longer 1935. The ominous details of Taft-Hartley could be challenged, but harder to defeat was the sense that it was conservatives who were prepared to do the nation’s “new business” while labor unions and their faithful remained entrenched in the old.35 Understandably, labor became distracted by the bill’s requirement of an anti-Communist oath. Many union officials, led by John L. Lewis, decried as insulting the idea that government would infantilize union officials by this stipulation; indeed, such an imposition seemed to validate Lewis’s long-held fear of what might come of labor’s bonding so tightly with the Democratic Party, the New Deal, and government “control” of labor unions through the National Labor Relations Act. Other labor leaders, including Walter Reuther of the UAW, agreed to sign the affidavits and chastised fellow UAW leaders reluctant to do so. The AFL also fell into line, Secretary-Treasurer George Meany urging colleagues that little would be lost to principle by anyone’s swearing a public oath against a political philosophy so universally despised.

  The House bill had been intentionally designed as stringent so that Bob Taft and his forces, who would take it up in the Senate, might appear conciliatory. The goal was to bring a sufficient number of Democrats on board and convince President Truman that the final bill sent to his desk contained enough compromise to be veto-proof. Even in its supposedly milder form the bill, which swept through both houses by substantial margins (308–107 in the House, and 68–24 Senate), offered a potent anti-labor restructuring of the country’s industrial relations. Lewis described the conservatives’ handiwork as “the first ugly, savage thrust of Fascism in America”; others termed it a “slave-labor law.” But these were sounds of helpless rage as labor was shoved over a cliff. Politically, given the bond between labor and the Democratic administration, President Truman had no choice but to veto the bill, noting as he did so that Taft-Hartley held “seeds of discord which would plague this nation for years to come” and would “reverse the basic direction of our national labor policy.”36 With such substantial vote totals in Congress, however, even the president knew resistance was futile. His veto was overridden and i
n June 1947 the Taft-Hartley Act became law.

  DESPITE THE HOPES of its chief author, the law’s passage did not prompt Congress to forge ahead with a more substantive rollback of the New Deal. Nor did it prove as effective at quelling union activity as labor had feared. Indeed, a seminal victory for labor followed close on the heels of Taft-Hartley. In fall 1949, the United Steelworkers threatened to strike over the issue of whether employers should bear the entire cost of employee benefits such as pensions and health insurance, or whether employees should contribute to such costs.

  Two recent federal court rulings had allowed that, under the Wagner Act, workers could bargain for retirement and health benefits with employers. After Truman persuaded the union three times to delay strike action, the steelworkers ran out of patience, and on October 1 a half-million employees walked off the job. Steel companies and their subsidiaries were affected from New Jersey to the iron ore mines of Minnesota’s Mesabi Range.

  Industry executives balked at the notion of shouldering all the costs of the disputed benefits, partly out of contempt for what management saw as the lingering New Deal’s ethos of “something for nothing.” It was important to industry that they not assume quasi-governmental responsibilities, providing for workers’ welfare independent of any initiative on the part of the individual worker. The Steelworkers, led by CIO president Philip Murray, countered that employers taking just such responsibility for workers’ health and retirement needs would help “safeguard the democratic way of life against totalitarian onslaughts from left or right.” A fact-finding board established by President Truman appeared to concur with Murray, concluding “that depreciation of ‘the human machine’ should be as much a charge against industry as care of plant equipment”; it pointed out that the steel industry had long provided comprehensive noncontributory benefits of the sort desired by the union to its own top executives. The board proposed that industry contribute 10 cents per hour per worker toward benefits, which the steel employers agreed to, with the stipulation that employees pay an additional amount from their weekly salary. The union, however, believed there was no need for any extra employee contribution since the 10 cents per hour paid by industry for employee benefits was itself a kind of wage—one that went toward the worker’s needs but not into his pocket. The union also contended that such coverage should be automatic and in no way voluntary, thus ensuring that all workers would be covered.37

  Truman was in a difficult spot, because his own board had recommended the 10-cent cost to industry; as far as the union was concerned, that was the matter to be acted upon; but industry reminded the president that both sides had agreed the board’s advice would be nonbinding, and thus the companies felt their demand for a employee contribution remained valid. The other complicating factor was that since the union had already postponed its strike at the request of the White House for seventy-seven days, three days short of what Truman could have demanded under Taft-Hartley, it would now be grossly unfair for the White House to invoke Taft-Hartley and seek an eighty-day injunction. A critical sidebar to the steel imbroglio was that 380,000 mine workers had also gone out on strike in September, raising the specter of a near-total shutdown of the nation’s industry if both steel and coal workers stayed away from their jobs, since so many other types of businesses—automotive, manufacturing—relied on them. In the UMW’s case, Truman was free to invoke the national emergency provisions of Taft-Hartley and obtain an eighty-day injunction, but such a move against one industry (coal) and not the other (steel) would appear inappropriate. His options in lieu of Taft-Hartley, which he had vetoed and was known to dislike, would be to invoke the Selective Service Act of 1948, which allowed for the government to compel the production of coal for use by the armed forces; use the “inherent powers” of the presidency to act in the public interest as defined in the 1895 Supreme Court ruling In re Debs; or attempt to win emergency legislation in Congress. None were politically appealing.38

  Eleven days into the steel strike its impact was already being felt nationwide. Railroads had less to transport, and steel-reliant businesses were forced to step down production and even lay off workers. The Big Three automakers notified the White House that their production would slow dramatically within weeks for want of a steady supply of steel. A few days later Commerce Secretary Charles Sawyer stoked further anxiety by warning that if the stoppage in steel and coal continued until November 1, as many as 2 million American workers would be unemployed, and were it to go as far as December 1, the number of those out of work would rise to 5 million. Indeed, it was inevitable, he advised, that some smaller businesses whose production was sidelined would not have the capital or capacity to recover, and would cease to exist along with the jobs they provided.39 Within days newspapers were caught up in the dire images Sawyer had suggested, warning of school and hospital closings and a remorseful Christmas for the nation’s children.

  In such news Philip Murray saw a potential win for the steelworkers. Speaking before enthusiastic CIO rallies and by radio he vowed “no retreat,” praising the Truman board’s 10-cent recommendation and holding up as ridiculous the notion that steel companies couldn’t afford the benefits arrangement the union requested. Murray stood firm against criticisms that organized labor was using the greater public welfare as a bargaining chip; when his AFL counterpart, President William Green, questioned the holdout in steel, Murray dismissed him as “an old faddy-doodle … who has never rendered a public service in his life.”40

  The break in the standoff came on October 31, when Bethlehem Steel Corporation, the nation’s second-largest steelmaker, agreed to provide pensions that would be noncontributory for individual employees. Bethlehem workers reaching sixty-five years of age with twenty-five years on the job would be eligible for pensions of $100 per month and upward, while those with fewer years of employ would receive lesser amounts. The agreement included a life insurance provision and a comprehensive Blue Cross health plan with coverage for workers and their dependents, the health insurance to be paid for by a 50–50 contribution of 2½ cents an hour from Bethlehem and the same from each of the firm’s seventy-seven thousand employees.

  Murray hailed the agreement as “a vindication of the union’s position that there is a social responsibility in industry to take care of the aged and their families.” The Bethlehem compromise was copied not only by other steelmakers, but served as a model for employer-based pension and health benefits in hundreds of U.S. companies, helping to ground a philosophy of corporate benefits and pension administration that would pertain for much of the next half century.41

  LABOR WOULD NOT ALWAYS BE so successful at managing a victory around the new restrictions imposed by Taft-Hartley; in fact the detrimental effects of the law would prove both powerful and enduring. Even the atmosphere of reaction associated with the act could prove toxic, as organizers affiliated with the CIO’s ambitious Operation Dixie discovered in the late 1940s when they spread out across the South in the hope of unionizing textile mills. This was an historic undertaking. The insular South, with its rigid folkways and its legacy of slavery, sharecropping, convict labor, and states’ rights, had rejected labor unionization as doggedly as it defended racial segregation. Efforts to bring reform in either area had encountered fierce resistance since Reconstruction following the Civil War; indeed one of Reconstruction’s chief legacies was the idea, shamelessly sold by the South, that its society was unique and not easily understood by outsiders, and that it must be left to handle its own affairs. But because by the 1940s Northeast textile firms were beginning to head for the region in pursuit of cheaper, nonunion labor, the CIO had nobly felt compelled to follow. Organizing the Southern mills would have two benefits: it would bring Southern workers into the fold of organized labor, and possibly, by equalizing wages between North and South, stymie the exodus from New England mills.

  As ambitious as the plan was, the CIO could rightfully claim to have exerted influence on a large demographic scale before; its organizing of th
e Midwestern industrial belt in the 1930s along with the efforts of the Communist Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) had helped open the doors of Northern industry to blacks, who in large cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia had subsequently become a significant voting bloc, chiefly Democratic. This significant development had made possible the success of the March on Washington Movement of 1941, led by A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which demanded an end to racial discrimination in the defense industries accompanied by the threat of a massive labor demonstration that would bring one hundred thousand protesting black workers to the nation’s capital. In response, President Roosevelt had issued an executive order banning such discrimination and created an enforcement agency, the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC).

  The timing of the launch of Operation Dixie, spring 1946, appeared in some ways fortuitous. America remained buoyed by a mood of postwar pride related to its role in the world’s triumph over Fascism overseas, and everywhere—in schools, churches, Congress, in the public discourse—the nation’s core values of tolerance and democracy were extolled and celebrated. Some of the nation’s founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Emancipation Proclamation—were taken on a whistle-stop tour of the country aboard a “Freedom Train,” to tremendous popular reception. There was a corresponding sense of incremental progress in race relations. President Truman, following up on Roosevelt’s 1941 executive order desegregating defense work, in 1948 issued one of his own, ending segregation in the armed forces. He also established the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, took the unprecedented step of demanding the federal investigation and prosecution of a multiple lynching in Georgia, and became the first president to address a gathering of the NAACP. At the same time John L. Lewis, along with NAACP executive secretary Walter White and legal adviser Thurgood Marshall, began work to address many of the long-simmering problems of black labor—emphasizing the advantages of worker solidarity across racial lines and counseling blacks not to serve as scabs. White, who had been influential in convincing black Ford workers to side with the UAW at River Rouge in 1941, had in the postwar years launched an effort to swing the votes of black labor behind Democratic candidates. Meanwhile, in 1947 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a biracial civil rights organization that had proved its mettle with public accommodations sit-ins in the Chicago area during the war, sponsored a series of integrated interstate bus rides into the South known as the Journey of Reconciliation.