Repeal Taft-Hartley

[blindpig]

Taft-Hartley drastically amended the National Labor Relations Act, which was enacted during the Great Depression to encourage unionization. Taft-Hartley reversed the act's intent by authorizing employers to engage in what Nader notes as "an array of anti-union activities."

Most significantly, it allows employers to intervene in union organizing campaigns. Rather than remaining neutral as before, employers can demand that workers vote on whether to unionize. That enables employers to wage anti-union campaigns that include requiring workers to listen to their arguments against unionization during working hours, often at mandatory meetings

Taft-Hartley seriously limits workers' ability to act in solidarity with other workers by prohibiting union members from waging sympathy strikes -secondary boycotts -- in support of striking members of other unions.

Another key provision outlaws the closed shop, which required workers seeking jobs with unionized employers to join the union representing their workers before being hired. The law does allow the union shop, which requires workers to join the union only after being hired, but allows states to enact so-called right-to-work laws that outlaw the union shop.

Twenty-two states have such laws, greatly weakening unions by allowing workers to reap the benefits that unions get in negotiating contracts with unionized employers, but without having to help pay the unions' costs by joining and paying dues.

Taft-Hartley denies union rights to workers designated as "supervisors" -- an "ever-expanding" designation, as Nader says, that includes steadily increasing numbers of workers. What's more, employers can fire supervisors who nevertheless try to unionize.

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/19103

http://www.holtlaborlibrary.org/images/baked%20to%20order.gif

http://www.holtlaborlibrary.org/images/in%20the%20back.gif

http://www.holtlaborlibrary.org/images/you%20and%20the.gif

(source of images) http://www.holtlaborlibrary.org/tafthartley.html

I didn't realize that T-H was why foremen and such were considered 'management'. An insidious move, denying the rank and file of some of the natural leadership in the workplace. They're not all dickheads.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

Taft-Hartley drastically amended the National Labor Relations Act, which was enacted during the Great Depression to encourage unionization. Taft-Hartley reversed the act's intent by authorizing employers to engage in what Nader notes as "an array of anti-union activities."

Most significantly, it allows employers to intervene in union organizing campaigns. Rather than remaining neutral as before, employers can demand that workers vote on whether to unionize. That enables employers to wage anti-union campaigns that include requiring workers to listen to their arguments against unionization during working hours, often at mandatory meetings

Taft-Hartley seriously limits workers' ability to act in solidarity with other workers by prohibiting union members from waging sympathy strikes -secondary boycotts -- in support of striking members of other unions.

Another key provision outlaws the closed shop, which required workers seeking jobs with unionized employers to join the union representing their workers before being hired. The law does allow the union shop, which requires workers to join the union only after being hired, but allows states to enact so-called right-to-work laws that outlaw the union shop.

Twenty-two states have such laws, greatly weakening unions by allowing workers to reap the benefits that unions get in negotiating contracts with unionized employers, but without having to help pay the unions' costs by joining and paying dues.

Taft-Hartley denies union rights to workers designated as "supervisors" -- an "ever-expanding" designation, as Nader says, that includes steadily increasing numbers of workers. What's more, employers can fire supervisors who nevertheless try to unionize.

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/19103

http://www.holtlaborlibrary.org/images/baked%20to%20order.gif

http://www.holtlaborlibrary.org/images/in%20the%20back.gif

http://www.holtlaborlibrary.org/images/you%20and%20the.gif

(source of images) http://www.holtlaborlibrary.org/tafthartley.html

I didn't realize that T-H was why foremen and such were considered 'management'. An insidious move, denying the rank and file of some of the natural leadership in the workplace. They're not all dickheads.

The saying is that the highest position in the plant is shop steward..although it obviously is not the highest paying..

[blindpig]

True enough, but why could a person not be both? If a worker is accomplished at his job and is a natural leader that would make for all the stronger shop stewart. To be sure, a lot of low level supervisors are assholes, that's why they got the job, but some folks just rise on their accomplishment, almost despite themselves. Removing them from the ranks is a bit of low level decapitation, by that light.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

True enough, but why could a person not be both? If a worker is accomplished at his job and is a natural leader that would make for all the stronger shop stewart. To be sure, a lot of low level supervisors are assholes, that's why they got the job, but some folks just rise on their accomplishment, almost despite themselves. Removing them from the ranks is a bit of low level decapitation, by that light.

Its absolutely intended as that -- low level decapitation. Take the up-n-comers, give them a cushy semi-well-paid management position and put them in the quandry of being "management" and having to relate to the rank and file as such. Its the equivalent of saying "Wanna sell out?"

Even those that enter management with the best of intentions and motives find it awkward..

I am talking second hand here, but its pretty common

[TBF]

Happened to me as a paralegal manager. You make much less money than you previously did with your OT (which is really why they do it), you still work as many hours, and you can't complain because you are given a management title, but it's in name only. Retiring to stay home with my kids has far and away been my best promotion. My new "office" has plenty of windows.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

Happened to me as a paralegal manager. You make much less money than you previously did with your OT (which is really why they do it), you still work as many hours, and you can't complain because you are given a management title, but it's in name only. Retiring to stay home with my kids has far and away been my best promotion. My new "office" has plenty of windows.

My mom became manager at a travel center..holy shit, it was the worst thing ever..because she believes in doing her job and is very conscientious..she'd basically been doing the manager's job as an hourly BUT was on the clock so not allowed to put in 50+ hrs and collect OT. As manager she was putting in 60 minimum for the same shitty pay (and trust me, in Florida pay for that type of position is *really* shitty)

She now makes more doing a paper route..

But there are basically no unions down here other than places like UPS..

[Mary TF]

What stinks about some union officers and stewards is that, I'm discovering, they start to take on an elitist attitude and start to take on some "management" positions, at least in my teacher's local. As one of two building reps in a high school, my rookie year, I'm privy to a lot of the "executive" union decisions made. I hear a lot of talk about teachers who the executive board doesn't think toe the line they would like them to toe. I think this is so antithetical to union it makes me sick...These elected union members are entrenched as so very few want to run against them, so it is just awful...I'm doing my little battles, but have already been "inadvertently" not informed about certain building decisions. I'll continue to try to get my people taken care of...the other building rep is a super arrogant asshole, the kind who always has to have the last word.

As an example of what my union has tried to push in recent years is an Official dress code for teachers!!! WTF if thats not management's role I don't know what is, it didn't go, they actually went to the principal and asked him to put one in place and "talk" to those folks not dressed professionally!! He was more union than they were...refused point blank...

I think I'm one of the few true Labor advocates in the union :( .

[eattherich]

Swan Song of the Old Right by Murray N. Rothbard |

[This article is excerpted from chapter 10 of The Betrayal of the American Right.]

In addition to being staunch opponents of war and militarism, the Old Right of the postwar period had a rugged and near-libertarian honesty in domestic affairs as well. When a nationwide railroad strike loomed, it was the liberal Harry Truman who proposed to draft the strikers into the army and force them to keep working, and it was Senator Taft who led the opposition to the move as slavery.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), in those days before Big Business corporate liberalism had conquered it in the name of a "partnership of government and industry," took a firm laissez-faire line. Its staff economist, Noel Sargent, was a believer in the free market, and the dean of laissez-faire economics, Ludwig von Mises, was one of the NAM's consultants. In those days, the NAM was largely small-business oriented, and indeed, various small businessmen's organizations formed the business base for the organized Right. Indeed, it was in the high places of the NAM that Robert Welch learned the anti-Establishment views that were later to erupt into the John Birch Society.

But even in those early days, the handwriting was on the wall for the NAM as a laissez-faire organization. The first great turning point came in the spring of 1947, after a conservative Republican majority had captured both houses of Congress in a mass uprising of voters against the Fair Deal, and partially in reaction against the power of labor unionism. The NAM, since the inception of the Wagner Act, had been pledged, year in and year out, to outright repeal of the law, and therefore to a repeal of the special privileges that the Wagner Act gave to union organizing. When the 80th Congress opened in the winter of 1946 the NAM, which now finally had its chance to succeed in Wagner repeal, shifted its stand in a dramatic battle, in which the corporate Big Business liberals defeated the old laissez-fairists, headed by B.E. Hutchinson of Chrysler, who was also a leading trustee of FEE. The NAM, on the point of a significant laissez-faire victory in labor relations, thus turned completely and called simply for extending the powers of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to regulate unions as well as business — a notion which soon took shape in the Taft-Hartley Act. It was the Taft-Hartley Act that completed the Wagner Act process of taming as well as privileging industrial unionism, and bringing the new union movement into the cozy junior partnership with Big Business and Big Government that we know so well today. Once again, Taft, in opposition to the purists and "extreme" rightists in Congress, played a compromising role.

http://mises.org/story/2755


Can there be harmony of interests in an unequal society?

Like the right-liberalism it is derived from, "anarcho"-capitalism is based on the concept of "harmony of interests" which was advanced by the likes of Frédéric Bastiat in the 19th century and Rothbard's mentor Lugwig von Mises in the 20th. For Rothbard, "all classes live in harmony through the voluntary exchange of goods and services that mutually benefits them all." This meant that capitalists and workers have no antagonistic class interests [Classical Economics: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Vol. 2, p. 380 and p. 382]

For Rothbard, class interest and conflict does not exist within capitalism, except when it is supported by state power. It was, he asserted,fallacious to employ such terms as 'class interests' or 'class conflict' in discussing the market economy." This was because of two things: "harmony of interests of different groups" and "lack of homogeneity among the interests of any one social class." It is only in"relation to state action that the interests of different men become welded into 'classes'." This means that the "homogeneity emerges from the interventions of the government into society."[Conceived in Liberty,vol. 1, p. 261] So, in other words, class conflict is impossible under capitalism because of the wonderful coincidence that there are, simultaneously, both common interests between individuals and classes and lack of any!

You do not need to be an anarchist or other socialist to see that this argument is nonsense. Adam Smith, for example, simply recorded reality when he noted that workers and bosses have "interests [which] are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter to lower the wages of labour."[The Wealth of Nations,p. 58] The state, Smith recognised, was a key means by which the property owning class maintained their position in society. As such, it reflects economic class conflict and interests and does not create it (this is not to suggest that economic class is the only form of social hierarchy of course, just an extremely important one). American workers, unlike Rothbard, were all too aware of the truth in Smith's analysis. For example, one group argued in 1840 that the bosses "hold us then at their mercy, and make us work solely for their profit . . . The capitalist has no other interest in us, than to get as much labour out of us as possible. We are hired men, and hired men, like hired horses, have no souls." Thus "their interests as capitalist, and ours as labourers, are directly opposite" and "in the nature of things, hostile, and irreconcilable." [quoted by Christopher L. Tomlins, , Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic, p. 10] Then there is Alexander Berkman's analysis:

"It is easy to understand why the masters don't want you to be organised, why they are afraid of a real labour union. They know very well that a strong, fighting union can compel higher wages and better conditions, which means less profit for the plutocrats. That is why they do everything in their power to stop labour from organising . . .

"The masters have found a very effective way to paralyse the strength of organised labour. They have persuaded the workers that they have the same interests as the employers . . . and what is good for the employer is also good for his employees . . . If your interests are the same as those of your boss, then why should you fight him? That is what they tell you . . . It is good for the industrial magnates to have their workers believe [this] . . . [as they] will not think of fighting their masters for better conditions, but they will be patient and wait till the employer can 'share his prosperity' with them . . . If you listen to your exploiters and their mouthpieces you will be 'good' and consider only the interests of your masters . . . but no one cares about your interests . . . 'Don't be selfish,' they admonish you, while the boss is getting rich by your being good and unselfish. And they laugh in their sleeves and thank the Lord that you are such an idiot.

"But . . . the interests of capital and labour are not the same. No greater lie was ever invented than the so-called 'identity of interests' . . . It is clear that . . . they are entirely opposite, in fact antagonistic to each other." [What is Anarchism? , pp. 74-5]

That Rothbard denies this says a lot about the power of ideology.

Rothbard was clear what unions do, namely limit the authority of the boss and ensure that workers keep more of the surplus value they produce. As he put it, unions"attempt to persuade workers that they can better their lot at the expense of the employer. Consequently, they invariably attempt as much as possible to establish work rules that hinder management's directives . . . In other words, instead of agreeing to submit to the work orders of management in exchange for his pay, the worker now set up not only minimum wages, but also work rules without which they refuse to work."This will "lower output." [The Logic of Action II p. 40 and p. 41] Notice the assumption, that the income of and authority of the boss are sacrosanct.

For Rothbard, unions lower productivity and harm profits because they contest the authority of the boss to do what they like on their property (apparently, laissez-faire was not applicable for working class people during working hours). Yet this implicitly acknowledges that there are conflicts of interests between workers and bosses. It does not take too much thought to discover possible conflicts of interests which could arise between workers who seek to maximise their wages and minimise their labour and bosses who seek to minimise their wage costs and maximise the output their workers produce. It could be argued that if workers do win this conflict of interests then their bosses will go out of business and so they harm themselves by not obeying their industrial masters. The rational worker, in this perspective, would be the one who best understood that his or her interests have become the same as the interests of the boss because his or her prosperity will depend on how well their firm is doing. In such cases, they will put the interest of the firm before their own and not hinder the boss by questioning their authority. If that is the case, then "harmony of interests" simply translates as "bosses know best" and "do what you are told" -- and such obedience is a fine "harmony" for the order giver we are sure!

So the interesting thing is that Rothbard's perspective produces a distinctly servile conclusion. If workers do not have a conflict of interests with their bosses then, obviously, the logical thing for the employee is to do whatever their boss orders them to do. By serving their master, they automatically benefit themselves. In contrast, anarchists have rejected such a position. For example, William Godwin rejected capitalist private property precisely because of the"spirit of oppression, the spirit of servility, and the spirit of fraud" it produced. [An Enquiry into Political Justice, p. 732]

Moreover, we should note that Rothbard's diatribe against unions also implicitly acknowledges the socialist critique of capitalism which stresses that it is being subject to the authority of boss during work hours which makes exploitation possible (see section C.2). If wages represented the workers' "marginal" contribution to production, bosses would not need to ensure their orders were followed. So any real boss fights unions precisely because they limit their ability to extract as much product as possible from the worker for the agreed wage. As such, the hierarchical social relations within the workplace ensure that there are no"harmony of interests" as the key to a successful capitalist firm is to minimise wage costs in order to maximise profits. It should also be noted that Rothbard has recourse to another concept "Austrian" economists claims to reject during his anti-union comments. Somewhat ironically, he appeals to equilibrium analysis as, apparently,"wage rates on the non-union labour market will always tend toward equilibrium in a smooth and harmonious manner" (in another essay, he opines that "in the Austrian tradition . . . the entrepreneur harmoniously adjusts the economy in the direction of equilibrium").[Op. Cit, p. 41 and p. 234] True, he does not say that the wages will reach equilibrium (and what stops them, unless, in part, it is the actions of entrepreneurs disrupting the economy?) however, it is strange that the labour market can approximate a situation which Austrian economists claim does not exist! However, as noted in section C.1.6 this fiction is required to hide the obvious economic power of the boss class under capitalism.

Somewhat ironically, given his claims of "harmony of interests,"Rothbard was well aware that landlords and capitalists have always used the state to further their interests. However, he preferred to call this "mercentilism" rather than capitalism. As such, it is amusing to read his short article,"Mercentilism: A Lesson for Our Times?",as it closely parallels Marx's classic account of "Primitive Accumulation" contained in volume 1 of Capital. [Rothbard, Op. Cit., pp. 43-55] The key difference is that Rothbard simply refused to see this state action as creating the necessary preconditions for his beloved capitalism nor does it seem to impact on his mantra of "harmony of interests" between classes. In spite of documenting exactly how the capitalist and landlord class used the state to enrich themselves at the expense of the working class, he refuses to consider how this refutes any claim of "harmony of interests"between exploiter and exploited.

http://www.geocities.com/capitolHill/1931/secF3.html