FDR and the Taft-Hartley Act

I've looked through a couple threads discussing FDR's death but none seem to have approached the issue of the Taft-Hartley Act. So my question is this, what is everyone's opinion, could FDR have held together the Democratic caucus and blocked Taft-Hartley? It's my opinion that he most certainly could. A second question then arises, so what? Well, if Truman pulls through in '48, which is much more likely than IOTL, the chance of the law ever being passed becomes virtually nill. What role, than, does greater and more militant industrial strength play on the post-war US.

What makes this so interesting is it wouldn't have the big, flashy AH events. I doubt it would have changed who became president or who was nominated, at least not till years later. However, the effect on the day to day lives of Americans would have been extraordinary, and the concerns taken in by congress vastly different. To this day I'd bet you'd see union density at least twice what it's become and the CIO would have effectively driven the AFL into obscurity, as was becoming the trend before Taft-Hartley already.

A few possible differences, both good and bad, I thought of off the top of my head:

- No NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP, etc: What's been notable about America's multitude of free trade agreements in recent years is almost all, including the most notable of all NAFTA, have been signed by Democratic presidents. A more powerful trade union lobby could have blocked this.

- Minimum Wage pegged to inflation.

- Democrats, similar to Labour in the UK, struggle to become the environmental party and the Republicans, as a result, don't become the science-deniers. The strength of a mighty industrial lobby dependent on manufacturing would make it quite difficult to regulate that very manufacturing.

- As mentioned above, substantial union density, 20%-25%.

- Reagan would never have broken the air traffic controllers strike if solidarity strikes were legal.

- Reagan's reforms really weren't as massive as many Americans think, especially compared with Thatcher and many would likely have gone off as planned, perhaps slightly moderated.

- The service industry would be highly unionized. The CIO was always a radical organization and the rise of the service industry would have come at a very important point for the CIO, right when it was teetering. I'd bet they'd have given there all to organize the service industry and would likely have been successful. This, more than anything else, would have changed the face of modern America.
 
Without George Meany effectively heading the American labor movement, you don't get the stagnation that it suffered IOTL ("I used to worry about the decline of organized labor, but I realized it doesn't matter. We count not because of our size, but because we're the organized voice"), and with the more militant CIO not adopted Meany's naive "we're part of the middle-class establishment now, big business is now our partner," won't be caught by business' turn against cooperation in the mid-to-late '70s, starting with Orrin Hatch's filibuster of labor reform in 1978.

Also, a 20%-25% union density, while substantial today, isn't very dense at all compared to OTL rates. It's basically the rate during the late '70s and '80s. No, a more successful union movement could dream of achieving Sweden's rates of the high '60s to low '80s (Finland went from 51.3% in 1970 to 69.4% in 1980!). If this is done by the 1970s, and we assume a butterfly net (without the Nixon Shock, Yom Kippur War, etc. stagflation itself is probably butterflied away, but assuming it isn't somehow), there will be substantial less inflation, as high-density countries during the period avoided the turbulence middle-density countries (like the United Kingdom) and low-density countries (like the United States) suffered, because their unions were entrenched enough to accept less strikes, lower wages, and work sharing without being afraid that they would be run out of town entirely by Scott Walker types. So Reagan is probably out of the picture entirely, assuming a butterfly net. Of course, even the strongest net probably can't break the simple fact that if labor was even a little bit stronger in 1968, Humphrey would have won. There's also the question if the Republicans still go through with their 1958 anti-union push that led to the largest loss of Senate seats in history, bringing in so many Democratic liberals that the old Southern-Northern balance was thrown completely off-kilter, diluted Johnson's grip as Majority Leader, and made the Great Society possible.

But I'm not sure if FDR could prevent Taft-Hartley to begin with, with a 1945 POD. There are ways to repeal it (no Chinese intervention in the Korean War, Democrat landslide in 1952) though.
 
I think there's also something interesting to be looked at in a continued AFL vs. CIO dynamic. The plausibility of the AFL surviving seems a shoe-in, however I'd expect that, if the CIO continues to survive and expand, we can safely assume the majority of the industrial unions within the AFL, especially the unskilled, would leave and join the CIO. Thus perhaps the AFL continues on as a token of the labor right. The result might actually be a positive for the labor movement as a whole, as it would provide the CIO a much greater deal of wiggle-room to be bold and radical. The most radical possibility is that sometime during the compromise years (my guess is around 1960 as it would grant years of CIO growth and left-of-modern-center Republican politics) the AFL begins aligning itself with the Republicans. Thus we have a radical industrial union on the left and a moderate craft federation backing the Republicans. Potentially this would entirely change American political dynamics.

As for the plausibility of the POD, I disagree. FDR was always a massively popular politician and by the end of the second world war would have been an untouchable hero. As such, his voice could have swayed popular opinion and his sway within the Democratic Party could likely have produced at least the 150 or so votes needed to uphold the veto. The question then becomes would the 'veto' have de facto survived into the 50's. Well, with the Democrats having made a stand successfully it would have been difficult to immediately begin the effort anew. Additionally, with union density as high as it was in the immediate post-war era I'd struggle to believe the Republicans could mount an effective campaign to democratically force the act through. Thus, it survives into the 50's by which time Eisenhower would be unlikely to look for such a confrontation against a more powerful trade union movement. It survives and the Wagner Act is studied today as the cornerstone of labor law.
 
I've looked through a couple threads discussing FDR's death but none seem to have approached the issue of the Taft-Hartley Act. So my question is this, what is everyone's opinion, could FDR have held together the Democratic caucus and blocked Taft-Hartley? It's my opinion that he most certainly could.

I once started a TL posited on the idea that an LBJ who's in the senate at the time sees the longterm coalition building value in getting the Dixiecrats to oppose cloture for a labor/liberal filibuster.

Fictional scenario, to be sure, but it raises the central problem here--you need a hyperactive young turk(s), in the senate, to pull this off, not a dying president who's probably just failed at reviving the New Deal during the year after Japan's defeat.

Without George Meany effectively heading the American labor movement, you don't get the stagnation that it suffered IOTL ("I used to worry about the decline of organized labor, but I realized it doesn't matter. We count not because of our size, but because we're the organized voice"), and with the more militant CIO not adopted Meany's naive "we're part of the middle-class establishment now, big business is now our partner," won't be caught by business' turn against cooperation in the mid-to-late '70s, starting with Orrin Hatch's filibuster of labor reform in 1978.

Overall it's good that you guys have considered the potential longterm industrial relations economics aspect of this, but c'mon, CIO wank. Taft Hartley was hardly the one and only thing holding them back from dominating teh US union movement.

The legacy of wartime strikes; Cold War stuff; Walther Reuther being keen on cooperating with Meany, while ubermilitant John L Lewis wasn't. That sort of thing.
 
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