Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (Taft-Hartley Act) And DECLINE OF UNIONS IN AMERICA.

The Taft-Hartley Act (known formally as the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947) is a set of amendments to the federal National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) passed after the Second World War to promote industrial peace and correct the pro-organized-labor bias of the New Deal-era Wagner Act (the un-amended NLRA). Taft-Hartley is named for its principal co-sponsors in the 80th United States Congress, Rep. Fred Hartley (R-NJ) and Sen. Bob Taft (R-OH). The law, and the Republican majorities that passed the law over the veto of President Harry Truman, arose in response to a wave of strikes that followed the conclusion of World War II, most prominently a 113-day strike by the United Auto Workers against General Motors in the winter of 1945-46. In total, an estimated 4.6 million workers amounting to over 10 percent of the workforce struck,1 and general strikes were declared in Rochester, New York and Oakland, California. 2 Frustration with the strike wave, the onset of the Cold War, and 13 years of unbroken New Deal Democratic rule propelled Republicans to victory in the 1946 midterm elections. Using their new (and, as it would turn out, fleeting) majorities, Republicans passed the Taft-Hartley Act. 3 The law corrected a power imbalance between labor unions and employers created by the Wagner Act. Affirming that employees had a right to “refrain” from participating in union activities, Taft-Hartley applied anti-coercion rules already applying to employers to labor unions. 4 The law also secured employee rights to refrain from membership in unions and refrain from supporting unions; it codified a state option to enact a “right-to-work” law guaranteeing “that no person can be compelled, as a condition of employment, to join or not to join, nor to pay dues to a labor union.” https://www.influencewatch.org/legislation/labor-management-relations-act-of-1947-taft-hartley-act/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WHAT CAUSED THE DECLINE OF UNIONS IN AMERICA? Globalization, politics, and the American psyche are all to blame. The second half of the 20th century brought big, bold changes to the economic status quo in countries all over the world. Globalization and the invention of new technologies meant that companies in developed nations could produce goods for much less money in far-away factories or at home with the help of sophisticated machinery. These forces undoubtedly explain part of the decline in union density and influence in the United States; fewer workers employed in the union-dominated manufacturing sector meant fewer union workers. But this decline has not been replicated to the same extent in many European countries. In Iceland, for example, 92 percent of workers are still members of a union, according to the most recent edition of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Economic. Even in those European countries where union membership is lower, a much higher percentage of workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements. While union membership is only around 10 percent in France (much lower than the OECD average), almost 100 percent of workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements. In most of Europe, collective bargaining agreements are sector or industry-wide, covering vast groups of workers who aren't union members. The diverging experiences of European and American unions raises a puzzling question: Why has the decline of American unions been so much more dramatic and precipitous than that of their European counterparts, given that both sets of countries have faced a similar set of economic challenges? https://psmag.com/economics/what-caused-the-decline-of-unions-in-america --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Latest data release on unionization is a wake-up call to lawmakers One of the most important things that could be done to generate a more equitable economy is to dismantle the barriers to union organizing and collective bargaining (McNicholas et al. 2019; Oliver 2021). New data on unionization from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS 2022), coupled with evidence on the value of unions and on workers’ desire to be unionized, reinforce the importance of this goal and the urgent need for policy reforms: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In 2021, 15.8 million workers in the United States were represented by a union—a decline of 581,000 from 2019 and well under half what it would be had the share of workers represented by a union (11.6%) not fallen to well under half of what it was roughly 40 years ago. In 2021, after shooting up to 12.1% in 2020 because of pandemic-related employment shifts, the unionization rate dropped back down its 2019 level of 11.6% (down 0.5 percentage points from 2020 to 2021). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unionization rates jumped up in 2020 in large part because of a “pandemic composition effect,” and fell back in 2021 as that effect began to unwind. The jobs that were lost in 2020 were more concentrated in industries with low unionization rates, such as leisure and hospitality, which raised the overall unionization rate. In 2021 these types of less-unionized jobs came back and offset the 2020 increase unionization rates. As the economy continues to recover and the pandemic composition effect continues to unwind, that will put downward pressure on unionization rates in 2022. Since 2019, union levels have dropped in both the private sector (down 507,000) and, to a lesser extent, in the public sector (down 74,000). In the private sector, the unionization rate in 2021 was 7.0%, down 0.1 percentage points from 2019. The public sector unionization rate was 37.6% in 2021, up 0.4 percentage points from 2019. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In 2021, men had a unionization rate of 11.9%, compared with 11.3% for women. The gender gap in unionization has narrowed somewhat during the pandemic, though both men and women saw declines in the number of unionized workers between 2019 and 2021—a loss of 429,000 for men and a loss of 152,000 for women. Of all major racial and ethnic groups, Black workers continued to have the highest unionization rates in 2021, at 12.9%. This compares with 11.6% for white workers, 10.3% for Latinx workers, and 9.0% for Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) workers. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The substantial level of union activity in 2021 (including organizing drives and strikes), along with polling data showing the large share of workers who would like a union at their workplace, demonstrate that workers want and value unions. The fact that unionization nevertheless dropped in 2021 is a glaring testament to how broken U.S. labor law really is and how urgent it is that Congress pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act.https://www.epi.org/publication/latest-data-release-on-unionization-is-a-wake-up-call-to-lawmakers/