Industry-Wide Bargaining and Industry-Wide Strikes

Report Outline
Revision of Six-Year-Old Taft-Hartley Act
Controversy Over Industry-Wide Bargaining
Prevention of National Emergency Strikes

Revision of Six-Year-Old Taft-Hartley Act

“Proposals for removing or minimizing the threat of work stoppages that endanger the national health or safety promise to be a subject of lively debate during the long period, already begun, in which Congress wrestles with revision of the Taft-Hartley Act. When the House Committee on Education and Labor opened hearings on labor-management relations, Feb. 10, the lead-off witness was Rep. Lucas (D., Tex,), sponsor of a bill to curtail industry-wide bargaining and ban industry-wide strikes. And at the start on Mar. 24 of a scheduled six weeks of hearings before the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Sen. Taft (R., Ohio) urged study of the procedure for handling so-called national emergency strikes that was prescribed by the law which bears his name. In the meantime, other witnesses have advocated a variety of methods of dealing with dangerous strike threats or have picked holes in the measures suggested.

End of Political Deadlock on Taft-Hartley Revision

Supporters of the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947, which was put on the statute books over President Truman's veto by the Republican-controlled 80th Congress, were prepared in 1949 to accept revision of the law in numerous particulars. The Democratic platform of the preceding year had pledged outright repeal, however, and the President had made repeal a leading issue in his successful campaign for return to the White House. An administration bill to repeal Taft-Hartley and reinstate the Wagner Act of 1935 with certain changes was reported in Senate and House but ran into difficulties in both chambers. Sen. Taft proposed 29 amendments to the existing statute and won Senate assent to all of them. But the struggle between advocates of repeal and adherents of revision ended in a stalemate when the House, which had passed and then recommitted a compromise measure, failed to act on the Senate-approved bill.

With both sides maintaining their respective positions, and neither commanding sufficient strength to carry the day, there was no serious attempt during the ensuing three years to make overall changes in labor relations legislation. A thorough reconsideration of the basic statute became a practical possibility only after the shift of political control in Congress and the White House brought about by the 1952 election. President Eisenhower said in his State of the Union message on Feb. 2 that experience under Taft-Hartley had “shown the need for some corrective action and we should promptly proceed to amend that act.” Organized labor, though no more friendly to Taft-Hartley than formerly, recognized that the fight for outright repeal was lost and that it would be to its interest to cooperate as far as possible in the task of revision.