When the Wagner Act – aka National Labor Relations Act – was debated and passed in 1935, Republicans were supporters and conservative Democrats were in fierce opposition.
· Democrats viewed the act as a threat to democracy and advocated repeal of these "socialist" efforts.
· Democrats encouraged employers to refuse to comply with the NLRA and supported suits challenging the law’s Constitutionality. SCOTUS settled the issue in the same year in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation.
· Businesses at the time were faced with competing unions operating in the same workplaces. Employers didn’t want to work with more than one bargaining unit so they and Republicans supported NLRA. [Take care what you wish for.]
· Most unions were opposed to the details affecting competition between unions.
It took until 1947 to pass legislation that began to reign in unions. Communists, violence and out of control work stoppages after the war led to the Taft–Hartley Act – aka the Labor–Management Relations Act. This law added a list of "unfair labor practices" on the part of unions where previously only employers could be unfair.
Purging unions of communists made more space for that other great pillar of organized labor, mobsters.
The most important aspect of Taft-Hartley was enabling states to pass Right-to-work laws. Such laws, now in force in twenty-two states, address two Constitutionally protected, inalienable individual rights:
1. No worker may be required to join a union as a condition of employment.
2. No worker may be required to pay dues to any organization, even a union.
The fact that right-to-work is left out of our Federal law is testament to the power of unions – not workers – and to the ineptness of legislators.
New Hampshire – of “Live Free or Die” renown – is now likely to become the 23rd right-to-work state. This is the strategy I believe Republican Governors should follow, rather than Governor Walker’s lead in Wisconsin. New Hampshire’s Democratic Governor vows to veto the legislation but it passed the state house with good margins and has now passed the senate with a veto proof margin of 16 to 8 – not our biggest state.
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