The Greatest Attack on Labor Since Reagan Walloped Air Traffic Controllers

As it prepares for war in the Middle East, the Bush administration is using the Taft-Hartley law to launch a mini-war against one of the strongest and historically militant and progressive unions in U.S. history, the International Longeshormans' and Warehousemans' Union (ILWU). Founded by Harry Bridges, a militant Australia-born partisan of socialism allied to the Communist Party, USA, in the 1930s(now that he is dead, the New York Times calls him a Marxist) the ILWU did not purge its leadership after WWII and survived numerous attempts by the government to deport Bridges. At one of the deportation trials, a representative of the shippers, who after years of fighting the ILWU came to the conclusion that they had better deal with him than the gangsters and labor racketeers who controlled the rival International Longshoreman's Association (ILA) actually served as a character witness for Bridges.

The Taft-Hartley law, which all sections of the labor movement, left,right, and center, opposed when it was enacted over Harry Truman's veto in 1947, used the "us against them" outlook of the developing cold war, which made Communist Party USA militants who had played a leading role in the development of the industrial unions into "agents of a foreign power," an "enemy within", to role back many of the gains workers and the labor movement had made in the New Deal era .
The act gave the government the right to thwart strikes by gaining injunctions for 80 day "cooling off" periods; states the right to enact anti-union shop laws, which publicists, for business called "right to work laws":and other amendments to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935(NLRA) that business and conservative organizations had been fighting for since 1937 when, to their surprise and disappointment, the Supreme Court declared the NLRA constitutional.

Although Harry Truman ran on a pledge to repeal the Taft-Hartley law in the 1948 elections and calls for repeal of important parts of Taft-Hartley remained in Democratic party platforms until 1988, the only part of the act to be eliminated eventually was the crudely unconstitutional clause that required all trade union officials, from shop steward on up, to sign an annual oath that they were not members of the Communist Party, USA. At the time of its passage, it should be noted, some conservatives opposed the act because of the great powers it gave to the federal government and even conservative business unionists refused to sign the anti-Communist oath on principle.

However, the government has rarely used the anti-strike provisions of the act over the last fifty-five years, and has never used it in a lockout. Bush's action transparently serves the interests of the ship owners. Under Bridges leadership the union participated with management in the introduction of new technology to protect jobs and wages and benefits. The lockout is seen by labor as an attempt to force the union out of this process, leaving workers largely defenseless against both technological unemployment and severe wage and benefit cuts for remaining workers over time.

Much of the press has been trumpeting the high wages that a significant number of ILWU members earn along with excellent benefits, including some who earn in excess of $100,000 a year, to create the stereotype of a selfish greedy union, although there has been little red-baiting of its leadership. Ironically, the remarkable achievements that the ILWU has made for its members over the last seventy-years, in spite of the concerted efforts of business and government in the past to destroy the union, is now being held against it.

There are some lessons one can learn from this. While most citizens, quite rightly, have their eyes on war with Iraq, the Bush administration has launched the most important attack on a trade union since Ronald Reagan destroyed the Air Traffic Controllers at the beginning of his administration and sent a message to corporate America that union busting of a kind not seen since the 1920s, not simply the "containment" of unions which Taft-Hartley represented, was OK.
The relative weakness of the labor movement itself, which was never able to overcome its stagnation in the Taft-Hartley "right to work states," which became very important as a number of those states, particularly Texas, Florida, and North Carolina, grew hugely in population and the "right to work states" became centers for internal capital flight, is now highlighted. This weakness has made organized labor unable to b reform labor law, including Taft-Hartley, in the U.S. or deter in this case the Bush administration from invoking Taft-Hartley for the first time against workers in an employer lockout.

To a considerable extent, Taft-Hartley has also influenced the course of postwar U.S. politics, giving conservatives and Republicans a huge advantage in the "right to work for less" states, as the AFL-CIO calls them, of the South and the Plains and Mountain West. In the last presidential election, for example, Gore won every major union shop state except Ohio, Missouri and Colorado and Bush won every major "right to work" state (and virtually all of the minor ones).
Still, Bush, even by the standards of postwar Republican administrations, is setting a very dangerous precedent, one that complements the administration's interventionism abroad . Globally the Bush administration seems committed to forcing everyone to except a Pax Americana. Internally, the administration is acting as if the whole country were a right to work state like Texas, where unions outside of the public sector are marginal.