When US Labor Backed US Imperialism

Jeff Schuhrke

After the 1932 election, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt won, Democrats had big majorities in Congress and were in charge of the White House for the next decade and a half. This is when the New Deal, Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, National Labor Relations Act, regulations on corporations and Wall Street, and more were passed. Then World War II started. In the 1946 midterm elections, Republicans retook control of Congress for the first time since FDR had been elected. By this point, FDR was dead, and the country shifted in a more right-wing direction.

The Republicans elected to Congress in 1946 included people like Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy. They had seen how organized labor was getting more and more powerful in these preceding years, especially 1945–1946. There was this huge strike wave after World War II with workers fighting back against wartime inflation, wanting to keep some of the gains they had won during the war like security of union membership. These Republicans came in with a mission to stop this growth that the labor movement had been seeing.

At the same time, the fragile wartime alliance between the United States and Soviet Union was breaking down. There had always been strong anti-Soviet, anti-communist sentiment in the United States, and so the Republicans and corporate America were really eager to use this emerging Cold War, anti-Soviet animus against organized labor, and to paint the labor movement in the US as nothing more than a communist conspiracy aiming to destroy the American way of life.

So in 1947, they passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which was a series of amendments to the 1935 National Labor Relations Act that explicitly wanted to rein in the kinds of powerful, militant union tactics like secondary strikes and secondary boycotts; to allow states to pass “right-to-work” laws, which are designed to defund and bankrupt unions; and to weaken the law around who could be in a union via a number of other provisions. Harry Truman vetoed the Taft-Hartley act. But Republicans were able to override his veto, and it was passed anyway.

This was 1947. Ever since then, repealing Taft-Hartley has been the number one political and legislative agenda of the labor movement; it still hasn’t been repealed, despite numerous Democratic administrations and Democratic congresses coming in since 1947.

An important component of the Taft-Hartley Act was a provision that union officers would have to sign an affidavit swearing they were not members of the Communist Party. They didn’t have to sign affidavits saying that they had never been involved in any kind of fascist organization, or that they were not part of any other political party or political movement. It was only the Communist Party. A lot of these CIO unions were led by communists, and they would be perjuring themselves if they signed this. And that was kind of beside the point, because it was more of a matter of principle. Why should anyone have to announce what their political affiliations were as a condition of being a union official?

But the AFL’s leadership had always been conservative and anti-communist. They were jumping all over this saying, “see, this is why it’s such a bad idea to allow communists into the labor movement — it’s just going to lead to the destruction of unions.” And some of the noncommunist CIO leaders, like Philip Murray, the president of the CIO at the time, and especially Walter Reuther, the up-and-coming, just elected president of the UAW, agreed. Taft-Hartley helped to give more justification to the CIO for a purge of communist-led unions. And Taft-Hartley really did kneecap organized labor. You could see union density growing between the late 1930s and the mid-1940s, right up until Taft-Hartley was passed. Ever since then, union density has been in decline.