WI SCotUS made unions illegal?

Inspired in part by this thread.

Congress passed laws banning "yellow dog" contracts (which forbade unions), & under Lochner & Adair, SCotUS declared this unconstitutional. Moreover, Mass. law following Vegelahn prohibited workers' interference with customers.

So, suppose SCotUS had not overturned Lochner, & moreover had made Vegelahn stronger, preventing interference with strikebreakers. Add OTL's ban on sit-in strikes (like GM 1937). Add also a ban on boycotts (which, IIRC, SCotUS overturned). Does this effectively emasculate unions?

If this is effectively makes unions illegal, what does the American labor scene look like in 1940? 1960? Today?

Edit: I should be clear: the headline was meant to be provocative; I meant functionally rather than actually....
 
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When you link to an AH thread that is close to a decade old, I would hope you'd put some warning out there that it is not to be necro'd! Someone might see something they want to respond to and not notice the posting dates, before scrolling to the bottom of the page where the red banner warnings are!

I think unions could indeed be outlawed, but one effect of this would be to strengthen the political labor left. Of course in turn these parties can also be outlawed, but the effect would be to legitimize a political counterculture for a huge segment of the working class. Part of how the American system worked (don't know that it is anymore hence the past tense) was to persuade the US worker that they had more of a stake inside the system pissing out than outside pissing in. I think the alternative to giving unions some rope was to give a labor party at least some semblance of respect; refusing to do either is telling the American workers they are screwed. It is OK to do this in postmodern times, apparently. I notice though except for the implication that the POD would be these court decisions, and we could look up their dates to determine the time frame, you don't say just when this draconian attitude is handed down. Do it any time before WWII, and we are looking at something not unlike the background for Jello Biafra's Reds! Not only would workers be desperate, a fairly large stratum of the middle classes and upper class intellectuals and adventurers will be attracted to the romance of The Rising of the Workers; it resonates too much with Spirit of '76 to fail to attract a major following.

Now I don't know that I can predict with certainty that the workers will then indeed rise up, hold a more or less classically Marxist proletarian revolution and usher in a worker's paradise. They might well succeed in blowing apart the old republic and install a party-ruled reign of terror, or they might be defeated in bloody reaction turning the USA into another sort of heavy-handed dictatorship.

And all my prattling of the mighty working class might be nonsense and workers just basically suck it in, the standard of living is depressed and US industrial power is relatively stunted.

OK, I looked it up; all this anti-union legislation was circa 1900, one half a decade before the other half a decade after. I do think that if SCOTUS and Congress both took this hard line and firmed it up by 1910, we'd see a strong political reaction, and if they tried to suppress that, it would just go underground. Going into WWI with that kind of pent up rage would be a bad idea--it does indeed seem to parallel Jello's TL pretty closely! We might wind up with Patton being a Red agent or something. If the matter is still festering, with both unions and socialist parties criminalized, when the stock markets crash in 1929 or about then, I'd invest in guillotine stock or ammunitions futures, or I would if the damn stock market were functional enough to allow me to! The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side principle applies; the workers will believe all sorts of wondrous outcomes were denied them and this will make them all the more fanatical. Prior to the Cold War, Red scares can take the nation's reactionaries only so far.

Meanwhile an ununionized work force will be working cheaper and harder; relative to OTL the lives of the rich might be somewhat more opulent but with wages suppressed consumerist production will have less of a market; the USA would be poorer overall.

I think perhaps SCOTUS knew what it doing OTL and was aware when it was playing with fire
 
When you link to an AH thread that is close to a decade old, I would hope you'd put some warning out there that it is not to be necro'd! Someone might see something they want to respond to and not notice the posting dates, before scrolling to the bottom of the page where the red banner warnings are!
:eek::oops: You're right. (And I've missed them, too...) On top of that, the link actually goes to a wrong thread: :oops::oops: this is what I was actually reading, & it linked out to two older threads (one of them the one I originally linked to...). (Necro warning: they're all 3 older than 3mo!)
I think unions could indeed be outlawed, but one effect of this would be to strengthen the political labor left.
So an inevitable growth in power of a labor-oriented party? I'm presuming the Democrats; do you suggest a Democratic splinter (akin the Federalist split), so we see Labor (or Progressive Democrat, or something) v Republican as the norm later? That's exactly the opposite of what I anticipated.
we could look up their dates to determine the time frame, you don't say just when this draconian attitude is handed down.
I'm thinking it's on the OTL schedule that saw Lochner overturned, so this decision in 1937. Some of that hangs on FDR's court packing, tho...so you'd need to avoid that, probably, to avoid the change to Lochner.
Do it any time before WWII, and we are looking at something not unlike the background for Jello Biafra's Reds! Not only would workers be desperate, a fairly large stratum of the middle classes and upper class intellectuals and adventurers will be attracted to the romance of The Rising of the Workers; it resonates too much with Spirit of '76 to fail to attract a major following.

Now I don't know that I can predict with certainty that the workers will then indeed rise up, hold a more or less classically Marxist proletarian revolution and usher in a worker's paradise. They might well succeed in blowing apart the old republic and install a party-ruled reign of terror, or they might be defeated in bloody reaction turning the USA into another sort of heavy-handed dictatorship.

And all my prattling of the mighty working class might be nonsense and workers just basically suck it in, the standard of living is depressed and US industrial power is relatively stunted.
:eek: A CPUSA-led revolution?:eek: (Or, at least, one led by Upton Sinclair.;) ) Just in time for WW2...&, by appearances, a public that would be less tolerant of Nazis, but might be more responsive to Sov influence.
The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side principle applies; the workers will believe all sorts of wondrous outcomes were denied them and this will make them all the more fanatical. Prior to the Cold War, Red scares can take the nation's reactionaries only so far.
It looks like that would be different TTL.
Meanwhile an ununionized work force will be working cheaper and harder; relative to OTL the lives of the rich might be somewhat more opulent but with wages suppressed consumerist production will have less of a market; the USA would be poorer overall.
You don't think lower prices, or improved productivity, make up for it? (That said, with artificially-depressed wages, the need to improve productivity is less.)

I'm also wondering if this doesn't produce some cutthroat competition at the bottom of the market.
I think perhaps SCOTUS knew what it doing OTL and was aware when it was playing with fire
Certainly with FDR's efforts to move the Court in a more "people-friendly" direction, there was an understanding something needed to change...
 
First of all, *Lochner* really had nothing to do with unions, at least directly. The other decisions weakened unions but did not outlaw them. More important, to assume that anti-union decisions would not be overruled is to assume that for decades on end, there would be only conservative presidents (or else that conservative justices were immortal, which is even less likely...) But if that were true, the whole history of the US would be altered, and the effects on Supreme Court labor decisions might be one of the less important consequences.
 
First of all, *Lochner* really had nothing to do with unions, at least directly. The other decisions weakened unions but did not outlaw them. More important, to assume that anti-union decisions would not be overruled is to assume that for decades on end, there would be only conservative presidents (or else that conservative justices were immortal, which is even less likely...) But if that were true, the whole history of the US would be altered, and the effects on Supreme Court labor decisions might be one of the less important consequences.
Okay, forget Lochner as a decision. The judicial theory underpinning it, & the subsequent decisions relying on it, need not have changed: that's why it's called "precedent". How long it survives is the question.

As for only "conservative" justices (or PotUSes), I'd agree. (I don't like the use of the political term to describe justices, but absent an agreed-on better one...) I'm wondering how long the "Lochner era" lasts, given it's not ended in 1937, as OTL. Does it end up changing who's PotUS to begin with? That obviously changes who gets nominated for the Court.

It also likely changes the attitude toward strikes, sit-in strikes, picketing & strikebreaking, & maybe boycotts, too: not only on the Court, but in society at large. Don't think SCotUS doesn't pay attention to that in deciding cases, "conservative" or no. So, if the social fabric is changed, how might that impact a more "liberal" SCotUS (presuming one arises)?

As a matter of fact, would a Court that supported Lochner still have decided Schechter the same way? Or would it hold the USG didn't have the power to interfere with contracts?
 
Certainly SCOTUS maintained a very pro-capital, anti-labor ideology across the board for a very long time, through the Gilded Age and right into the middle of FDR's second term. It wasn't universal. There was some decision or other that Oliver Wendell Holmes dissented from, writing "The Constitution does not enact Marshall's Economics!" But he was writing in the minority. To be sure the entire period from 1860 to 1932 featured a grand total of 2 Democratic Presidents, each holding two terms, one not contiguous--Cleveland and Wilson. Of course it would be wrong in that era to identify "progressive" versus "conservative" with one party or the other; the Republicans were a mixed bag of hard headed business interest types with people holding some fascinating range of idealism. U.S. Grant for instance is claimed as a Georgist, as in Henry George and "Single-Tax." I could also mention Theodore Roosevelt of course. Meanwhile of the two Democrats, Cleveland was infamously a very conservative one, holding to very strict views on the proper power of the Federal government and very tight fiscally, while Wilson, though his administrations featured the passage of a whole raft of Progressive Amendments (senators being elected by popular vote, the Income Tax, and at the end both Prohibition and women's right to vote; also his administration featured the inauguration of the Federal Reserve system and of course the war involved a massive expansion of federal powers and revenues, not all of it reversible) was on the other hand an active reactionary on matters of race and pretty heavy handed with projections of US power abroad, long before entering the Great War as purported crusade for Democracy sending in the Marines to quell democracy in action in places like Nicaragua, Mexico and Haiti.

So I don't think we can attribute the overwhelming consensus of SCOTUS justices as just a political whim of the Presidents, and if we characterize all the Presidents between Lincoln and FDR as "conservatives" then we have to ask why the people kept electing them. On at least one occasion in that time they didn't of course, referring here to the case of Harrison getting in via outright fraud in key state races. Hayes is more infamous as the product of a "stolen election" but in that case I credit the Republicans with stealing it back, the terrorization of African American voters in the South having clearly stolen some of those EV away. I figure one reason so many SCOTUS justices were conservative on labor matters was that the general pool of experienced judges to draw them from was strongly biased in favor of property owners as more authentic and worthy citizens, of greater value to the Republic and impeccable respectability compared to these democratic mobs. By the time FDR was threatening to expand the court to pack it with judges on his side, the pool of judges had had some decades of experience with progressive philosophy. Progressivism (in the sense of the movement in both dominating parties of the later part of the post-Civil War period up to the Depression) could be cynically defined as the effort of elites to preempt elements of the agenda of radical populism, in a top-down managed form acceptable to elites. The People's Party had flexed its muscles in the late 1880s and early '90s and the mainstream two parties scrambled to steal their thunder; also other radical parties, including a succession of worker parties leading up to Deb's leadership of the Socialists, posed the challenge even more sharply that had to be faced with more moderate and elite-controlled concessions. This involved a lot of reforms and things more cynical business politicians called "goo-goo," for "good government" as opposed to machines and so forth. Also regulation of food and medicines in the interest of public safety, a la carte labor reforms, limiting child labor, stuff like that. In that context I suppose that more young up and coming lawyers of the first decade of the century would cut their teeth on advocacy for such reforms, and s the decades passed they got placed on state and Federal benches and eventually the next SCOTUS replacement would be one of these, and more and more of them to choose from. But meanwhile the majority was time-warped back to the verities of their own youth, in which radicals were just plain dangerous and unenlightened and would in their simple minded greed undercut the very foundations of civilization, as they and other respectable people saw it.

Even so, as observed, they didn't quite rule out union organization as plain illegal. (Then again, as I understood it, not long after the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed in the late 19th century, aimed plainly at checking corporate consolidation (Quixotically IMHO) the courts struck down all readings to actually use it against business trusts, but affirmed it clearly did ban labor unions, so I think there was a period when unions were all outlaw, no matter how conservative. But clearly this interpretation did not last long!)

The oP question is, what if they did? They'd have to be not just conservative but obtuse to do so IMHO; even the Iron Chancellor Bismarck backed off from keeping either labor unions or the Social Democratic Party in criminal status in Germany--he also set examples of judicious top down state intervention to limit the explosiveness of the working class. And German unions and the SDP were explicitly revolutionary and anti-capitalist! In the USA at least the various radical revolutionaries were offset by conservative unionists like Samuel Gompers's AFL; his patchwork of craft unions would go far to co-opt the most potentially dangerous strata of skilled craft workers and tend to block more than aid comprehensive organization and was quite firmly opposed to the political platform of a mass worker's party to seize control of the state by ballot--still less by other means. So they'd have to be pretty fatuous to be blind to the threat and to the wisdom of having some kind of safety valve. But supposing they were that dumb, then what?

I answered this my way already; are they also dumb enough to attempt to block grassroots populist parties with a radical program of using state power to do what the Court says they can't do in the workplace? If they block unions they seem to be stubborn enough to block that channel too; were I a cynical agent of the propertied classes I would advise tolerating and then regulating and manipulating unions and focus on keeping a radical party off the table instead, but maybe the logic of liberalism would permit the reverse to this OTL pattern more; politics is sacred but the workplace belongs to the boss seems a plain enough interpretation of classic 19th century liberalism. Letting radical parties stand since suppression and manipulation of the vote is a no no would lead to a more radical than OTL electoral ascendency I think, though it might still be quite effectively checked from actions more radical than OTL.

And if they are stubborn enough to firmly try to block both? I subjectively think the odds of a violent revolution, or attempt at it, go way up then--which is why it is foolish for them to be so doctrinaire of course. It might succeed gloriously, or succeed and turn to a nightmare of terror, or fail and usher in an era of more open repression than we've ever seen.

The author asks, well, if worker power just plain fails across the board and workers are driven to abject submission for lower wages, won't the higher profits offset the economic contraction I predicted from that? Well, it matters in whose hands wealth flows. If the worker share of gross production is stunted, that undermines a huge sector of markets that were buoyant OTL. The markets for people like Henry Ford would be constricted, since he aimed at a cheap car for the masses--either he would trim his sails for higher quality and cost in reduced numbers for the rich or simply never crowd into the dozens of competing auto makers. And so across the board; the telephone would not become a common implement in every household since the majority could not afford one (indeed as late as 1932 they were skewed enough to the rich that a major magazine blew predicting the outcome of the election that year, randomly surveying--just people with phones, who were more for Hoover than Roosevelt). The more money finds its way to the workers in the form of wages, the more expansive the US consumer market, which means more jobs for those workers and yet more purchases of big ticket items like refrigerators and washing machines, more megastores like Sears and Montgomery Ward, more consumer credit, etc. The outcome would be the USA would be weaker in situations like WWI and WWII, with recruits less healthy, less familiar with machinery, and probably more alienated into the bargain; a much smaller mass base of savings to tap for wartime credit.

It would be dumb. The question is can we plausibly engineer such dumbness into the SCOTUS with political plausibility?
 
I don't think we can attribute the overwhelming consensus of SCOTUS justices as just a political whim of the Presidents
I don't recall doing that, nor suggesting we should.
not long after the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed in the late 19th century, aimed plainly at checking corporate consolidation (Quixotically IMHO) the courts struck down all readings to actually use it against business trusts, but affirmed it clearly did ban labor unions, so I think there was a period when unions were all outlaw, no matter how conservative. But clearly this interpretation did not last long!
And yet, SCotUS did it. So what would it have taken for that attitude to persist?
They'd have to be not just conservative but obtuse to do so
And yet, look at the decisions I linked to--indeed, look at Citizen's United. SCotUS today appears not to recognize corruption when it's staring them in the face; the Court in 1910, or 1937, might be just as blind.
various radical revolutionaries were offset by conservative unionists like Samuel Gompers's AFL; his patchwork of craft unions would go far to co-opt the most potentially dangerous strata of skilled craft workers and tend to block more than aid comprehensive organization and was quite firmly opposed to the political platform of a mass worker's party to seize control of the state by ballot--still less by other means. So they'd have to be pretty fatuous to be blind to the threat and to the wisdom of having some kind of safety valve.
So why did SCotUS rule they way it did, if they weren't obviously stupid?

Flipside is, what happens to major corporations? That is, wouldn't the likes of the coal industry think banning unions (or virtually doing it) would be a good thing? Does the Court simply ignore that? A Court that is promoting the supremacy of contract? I doubt it.
The more money finds its way to the workers in the form of wages, the more expansive the US consumer market, which means more jobs for those workers and yet more purchases of big ticket items
I did, & do, accept that as a general principal; Ford raising his workers' wages as a way to reduce turnover coincidentally helped create a market for the Model T. That being true, I conversely wonder if other businesses don't find the same is true: higher wages reduce turnover which actually reduces costs, while (accidentally) increasing demand. I realize there's no "perfect" wage level...but unions being allowed, or banned, doesn't seem to be a governing factor in finding it in a given company.
more consumer credit
I wonder if you don't get a growth in debt, tho that may be a more modern approach; culturally, in the '30s, debt might be seen as an evil to be avoided.
The outcome would be the USA would be weaker in situations like WWI and WWII, with recruits less healthy, less familiar with machinery, and probably more alienated into the bargain; a much smaller mass base of savings to tap for wartime credit.
And this is more like it.:cool: Does a functional ban on unions necessarily lead to this? It may be probable it does, especially given the Depression, but that isn't a given. U.S. industry, from its earliest days, put heavy emphasis on technology to multiply the effectiveness of labor; who's to say that trend doesn't lead to greater productivity per worker?

Also, if wages & consumption are lower, & if they're perceived to be lower, why wouldn't the Depression be less serious? (Or, rather, why wasn't it?) If there's self-evidently not a market for products (thanks to low worker wages), why continue to produce them? Yet...
 
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I'd like to continue this, but I have a massive time demand until Sunday at least.

As for why SCOTUS, and the American right generally, dares act a certain way today but would have been fools to 100 years ago, things have changed since then. For one thing in a more globalized world, American capital can profit off of exploiting and trying to sell things to different people; in 1900 they were stuck with the American working classes for both. And other stuff but later.
 
I'd like to continue this, but I have a massive time demand until Sunday at least.

As for why SCOTUS, and the American right generally, dares act a certain way today but would have been fools to 100 years ago, things have changed since then. For one thing in a more globalized world, American capital can profit off of exploiting and trying to sell things to different people; in 1900 they were stuck with the American working classes for both. And other stuff but later.
I'll wait for a fulsome answer when you can.:)

The change between 1937 & 2017 is significant, but not an entirely different animal, IMO: trade has never been completely internal (or external). My point was, SCotUS responds to the existing public standards, then & now, & is aware of them, & the probable effect of its decisions, then as now.
 
The Unions made radicals like the communists unnecessary. When the system was modified to work in favor of the average worker , so overthrowing the system wasn't an option.
Remove the Unions from the picture and you've got all the ingredients for a revolution.
 
The Unions made radicals like the communists unnecessary. When the system was modified to work in favor of the average worker , so overthrowing the system wasn't an option.
Remove the Unions from the picture and you've got all the ingredients for a revolution.
There were more than a few radicals & Communists among union leaders... However, I take your point.

The recipe for revolution is also a fair point. OTOH, what does the gov't do? If SCotUS won't allow regulation of contracts (or existence of unions), what about hours & wages? Safety & health? I suspect some of the same reasons for prohibiting unions would lead to fails on hours & wages laws (some of which did fail in the '10s & '20s).

What about regulation against transporting strikebreakers? (Hiring them would appear to be legal, with no way around it.)

What about trust-busting? Or laws on "good corporate citizenship": corporations required to behave within certain limits, or they lose their certification? (Bearing in mind corporations are legal fictions, & exist at the sufferance of the gov't--contrary to what you'll hear today, & contrary to what Citizens United & today's SCotUS might lead you to believe:rolleyes:...)

I will say, a lot of the problems trace back to the Fourteenth Amendment. So long as we're working with a POD after it exists...
Edit to add, from here:
Thats why I brought up the point about education & skills. To repeat my opinion from the 1970s the US unions had become to focused on wages & job security through contracts, vs guaranteeing a skilled labor service for the employer in exchange for the higher compensation. In the late 1970s & early 80s I was working on the quality control side of the construction industry. that experience made it clear the superiority of high skilled labor vs lower & semiskilled. The customers who paid for high standards & getting tasks done correctly the first time round forced the contractors to use the higher skilled/higher wage labor, which was usually union. Customers who selected by price point got contractors who were using less skilled labor, at all levels including management. The result was a higher amount of rework, delays, failed inspections, and failing product post acceptance. During my occasional forays into manufacturing the same was visible. Strictly price pointing labor & balancing low skill labor with increased supervision is not a dependable strategy. In my own business since the mid 1990s I've operated both ways, taking on low skilled labor to keep that cost down. It worked for specific situations, usually short term, but the extra supervisory and training cost made it a money loser as a primary strategy. Currently my operation is very small, but I refuse to cut costs on the labor side. Less than 20% of my labor cost is towards low or semiskilled labor. By using labor needing minimal supervision I can concentrate my own time on true management issues like sorting out customer specs, materials selection, operations scheduling. I don't waste much time discussing quality failures and corrections with employees, coaching techniques, trouble shooting tools, ect...
That suggests to me non-union might not (necessarily) mean low-wage... (@Carl Schwamberger: any further comment?)

And to add this link, which suggests the anti-union/anti-labor attitude persisted quite a while...:eek:
 
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I think SCOTUS banning unions outright is a bridge too far. A more realistic PoD IMHO would be an alternate court case in which SCOTUS doesn't ban unions, but closed shops like is the case in Europe.
 
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