Labor history of the United States: Encyclopedia II - Labor history of the United States - Organized Labor 1932-1955

Labor history of the United States - Organized Labor 1932-1955

Labor history of the United States - New Deal Labor Policy

Labor history of the United States - John L. Lewis and CIO

John L Lewis, leader of the United Mine Workers broke in the mid 1930s from the AFL and formed the rival, Committee for Industrial Organization. The two fedderations were bitter enemies in the late 1930s but re-united in 1955.

Labor history of the United States - Revival of AFL

Labor history of the United States - Upsurge in World War II

Labor history of the United States - Walter Reuther and UAW

Labor history of the United States - PAC and New Deal Coalition

Labor history of the United States - Taft-Hartley Act

The Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act were signed over Truman's veto in 1947. They were designed to equalize the rights of labor and management. They outlaw secondary boycotts and closed shops, allow individual states to outlaw union security clauses by passing “right-to-work” laws, require unions and employers to give sixty days notice before they may undertake strikes, give the President authority to intervene in strikes or potential strikes that create a national emergency, exclude supervisors from coverage under the Act, require special treatment for professional employees and guards, codify the Supreme Court's earlier ruling that employers have a constitutional right to express their opposition to unions, give employers the right to file a petition asking the Board to determine if a union represents a majority of its employees, and allow employees to petition to oust their union or to invalidate the union security provisions of any existing collective bargaining agreement.

The Taft-Hartley amendments also provided for federal court jurisdiction to enforce collective bargaining agreements while imposing a number of procedural and substantive standards that unions and employers must meet before they may use employer funds to provide pensions and other employee benefit to unionized employees.

Congress amended the Act again in 1959, when it enacted new restrictions outlawing hot cargo agreements, which require an employer to cease doing business with other employers in some circumstances, and limiting unions' ability to use recognitional picketing to obtain union recognition without going through an NLRB-conducted election. Congress extended coverage of the Act in 1974 to apply to workers at health care institutions.

Unions made repeated efforts over the past fifty years to amend the Act to eliminate the right to work provisions of the Act, to expand construction unions' right to picket at sites where other building trades employees work, to strengthen the protections for employees fired during organizing campaigns, to require the NLRB to prosecute violations of the Act more aqgressively and to limit employers' power to hire permanent replacements for strikers. None of those efforts have succeeded.

Labor history of the United States - Fighting Communism

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Organized Labor 1932-1955", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki