No Taft Hartley Act

America has seen a dramatic decline in the proportion of the workforce that is unionised after probably having reached their pinnacle of power just after World War 11. The Taft Hartley Act and Right to Work laws came in despite opposition from Harry S Truman and the trade unions began to decline the fall being partially masked by a rise of public employees unionised.

Suppose the Taft Hartley Act failed to get on the statute book maybe Truman was able to veto it owing to the republicans not winning as many seats. Also suppose the FBI had concentrated on mafia infiltration in trade unions rather than alledged communist infiltration and the difference between militants who are out to improve working conditions and those with other agendas that could involve wrecking industries. A bit like the difference between Brother Harvey and the functionalists in Heinlein's the Roads must roll. Could the decline have been halted or maybe delayed as in the UK. Canada has one of the strongest trade union movements in the world and it has had ILO friendly governments none of which have been socialist. Could America have followed the same road?
 
America has seen a dramatic decline in the proportion of the workforce that is unionised after probably having reached their pinnacle of power just after World War 11. The Taft Hartley Act and Right to Work laws came in despite opposition from Harry S Truman and the trade unions began to decline the fall being partially masked by a rise of public employees unionised.

I'm not an expert on US industrial relations, I don't know to what extent Taft-Hartley is responsible for the decline in union membership later in the century.

The fifties and sixties are now considered a golden age for the AFL-CIO, f'rinstance, and that despite the fact repeal of that legislation was never achieved.

Andrew Hudson said:
Suppose the Taft Hartley Act failed to get on the statute book maybe Truman was able to veto it owing to the republicans not winning as many seats.

I started a TL on this very subject, in which LBJ gets to the senate in the first months of the Truman administration & by '47 has enough influence to convince the Dixiecrats to allow a northern Democrat filibuster of Taft-Hartley.

Even though I didn't continue it I've come to the conclusion that the failure of Taft-Hartley would lead to an attempt to devolve federal labour laws to the states. If this succeeds then the fate of closed shop and secondary strike laws is decided state-by-state. Taft-Hartley by default?

And what happens if either type of 'anti-union' reform isn't passed?

I can't see the industrial unrest that existed in the late forties getting worse. The idea that Taft-Hartley saved America from a form of UK 'winter of discontent' rolling strikes doesn't ring true to me; it ignores the fact that there was a lot of unique economic dislocation coming out of the postwar demobilisation.

The biggest shorterm effect isn't economic. It's political.

If the laws proposed in early '47 aren't passed by the time of the next presidential election then we could see the Republican running on an explicit anti-union platform, and, to borrow from the CIO's unofficial anthem, Truman campaigning as the 'solidarity forever' candidate.

The stakes would then appear higher than they did in OTL.

Andrew Hudson said:
Also suppose the FBI had concentrated on mafia infiltration in trade unions rather than alledged communist infiltration and the difference between militants who are out to improve working conditions and those with other agendas that could involve wrecking industries. A bit like the difference between Brother Harvey and the functionalists in Heinlein's the Roads must roll. Could the decline have been halted or maybe delayed as in the UK. Canada has one of the strongest trade union movements in the world and it has had ILO friendly governments none of which have been socialist. Could America have followed the same road?

The idea of a stronger FBI approach to organised crime during this era is an even bigger subject, IMHO. It goes beyond industrial relations.

Anyway, every nation has experienced a decline in union members in recent decades.

The question is this: how much larger would a reduced US labour movement be in 2009, and how much power would it have retained after the inevitable anti-union policies of what we call the 'Washington consensus' emerged after the seventies? Or would that Rightwards move somehow be prevented by the existence of a stronger American union sector in the quarter century after a failed Taft-Hartley?
 
I'm not an expert on US industrial relations, I don't know to what extent Taft-Hartley is responsible for the decline in union membership later in the century.

The fifties and sixties are now considered a golden age for the AFL-CIO, f'rinstance, and that despite the fact repeal of that legislation was never achieved.

One issue that we should not forget was the establishment of OSHA in 1970. Before that time, workplace safety was a major functions for unions. When government inspectors gained their clout, interest in unions declined.
 
One issue that we should not forget was the establishment of OSHA in 1970. Before that time, workplace safety was a major functions for unions. When government inspectors gained their clout, interest in unions declined.

Interestingly UK Health and safety legislation gives union reps a strong role in that the legislation provides for health and sasfety representatives independent of the employer and it is largely the unions that provide this role,. Factory legislation has existed to some extent in the UK since Victorian times. Was the OSHA weakended in the Reagan/Bush era? Regan deregulated a lot of other things including some of the regulation of the meat industry that followed the publication of the Jungle
 
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