We are living in the midst of a strike wave
April 9, 2019 9:46 AM Subscribe
“The ramifications of Taft-Hartley have been wide-reaching. Decades of case law that progressively curbed the rights of workers were built on Taft-Hartley’s back, and expanded public sector bargaining rights in the 1960s and 1970s were largely modeled on the Taft-Hartley regime (or structured even more restrictively). The NLRA—labor’s “Magna Carta”—is no longer recognizable as what labor hoped it would be: a permanent power shift toward American workers and away from the vested interests that crashed the American economy, sinking the world into a global depression.” Labor has opposed Taft-Hartley for decades. Here’s why it’s time to repeal it. (Strikewave)
Don't get me wrong, T-H should be repealed, but it's hardly the thing holding unions back. T-H was a codification of the institutional bargaining framework and conservative labor practices that developed during WWII and remain in place to this day, rather than the sui generis fetter on labor radicalism that it is often presented as (often, as in this article, by union bureaucrats that want to pass over their own strata's role in these developments). A repeal of T-H alone would hardly herald a new dawn of labor militancy.
In fact, many union bureaucrats gleefully used the anti-Communist provisions of T-H to purge the most effective labor leaders from the union movement. This is but one of many self-inflicted wounds the unions committed during the postwar years (in addition to raiding each others' locals, sabotaging Operation Dixie, etc. etc.).
In any event, as the teachers' strikes are once again illustrating, winning labor demands often requires breaking laws.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 4:21 AM on April 10, 2019 [1 favorite]
In fact, many union bureaucrats gleefully used the anti-Communist provisions of T-H to purge the most effective labor leaders from the union movement. This is but one of many self-inflicted wounds the unions committed during the postwar years (in addition to raiding each others' locals, sabotaging Operation Dixie, etc. etc.).
In any event, as the teachers' strikes are once again illustrating, winning labor demands often requires breaking laws.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 4:21 AM on April 10, 2019 [1 favorite]
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posted by Morpeth at 3:05 PM on April 9, 2019 [2 favorites]