RESEARCH Business Labor

STRIKE BREAKING
Taft-Hartley strike-breaking power a political anachronism

Mark Reutter, Business Editor
(217) 333-0568; mreutter@uiuc.edu

9/1/2000

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Leveling the playing field between unions and management means limiting the role a U.S. president can play in "breaking" a strike through the power of the Taft-Hartley Act, according to two University of Illinois labor professors.

The 1947 act, which allows the president to seek an injunction ending strikes that "imperil the national health," has outlived its usefulness and should be amended, if not repealed, because it has shifted "the balance of bargaining power in critical strikes, usually to the detriment of unions," Michael H. LeRoy and John H. Johnson IV, UI professors of labor and industrial relations, wrote in a paper to appear in the Arizona Law Review.

While work stoppages can cause temporary inconvenience, even the major labor disputes of the 1950s did not remotely imperil national health or military security, they reported. On the other hand, "Taft-Hartley injunctions lowered public support for unions by portraying them as selfish economic actors who were harmful to the nation and altered the balance of bargaining power in critical strikes, usually to the detriment of unions."

Their research covers all 32 disputes in private industry where the White House invoked the powers under Taft-Hartley to end the strike. LeRoy and Johnson cite Jimmy Carter's use of Taft-Hartley powers in the 1977-78 coal strike as an example of "political expedience" that undercut the lawful right of unions to strike for better wages and working conditions.

What's more, 30 percent of Taft-Hartley injunctions did not result in a settlement during the prescribed 80-day "cooling-off" period, which was one of the key rationales of the law.

Calling strikes "an essential voice-mechanism in America's economic democracy and pluralistic society," LeRoy and Johnson recommend that Congress either repeal Taft-Hartley or limit White House intervention to standards that actually constitute a national emergency.

The UI researchers attribute the battering that unions took in Taft-Hartley cases to the sharp decline in strike activity since 1970. Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers have dropped from 424 in 1974 to 46 in 1999.

Pressure to invoke Taft-Hartley powers almost always comes from industry groups that otherwise strenuously oppose an "activist government," LeRoy and Johnson wrote. "The low levels in the 1990s are astounding considering that unemployment is extremely low ­ a phenomenon that usually increases union bargaining power.

What has changed since Taft-Hartley was enacted in 1947? The globalization of business, combined with technological displacement of labor, has acted as powerful brakes on union bargaining power.

Assuming that these trends continue, there is no justification for a law that enjoins lawful strikes." Their paper is titled "Death by Lethal Injunction: National Emergency Strikes Under the Taft-Hartley Act."