The Taft-Hartley Act is to the American Labor Movement what the Fugitive Slave Act was to slavery. One of its authors--Fred A. Hartley--admitted in print that this was the first step to overturning FDR's New Deal. The Re-publicans are within sight of the Congressman's wet dream: a subservient and defenseless labor force who'll take what crumbs the rich will give them. the Democrats are our last worst hope.

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The Daft-Heartless Act

By Richard Girard

"The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour."

Bertrand Russell (18721970), British philosopher, mathematician. A Free Man's Worship and Other Essays, chapter 1 (1976).

I was listening to David Sirota on his morning show on 760AM KKZN here in Denver on Labor Day, and in the second hour of his show he asked what is wrong with the organized labor movement here in America?

He stated that membership in unions has been declining since its height of 34% just after the Second World War. This was happening in spite of the most recent polls that show 50% plus of American workers would belong to a union if they could. Mr. Sirota further stated that according to a study by Cornell University, twenty thousand employees are fired every year from their jobs--even though it is illegal to do so--for union activities, including attempting to organize a union at their place of work.

I will name the initial source of the difficulty--which Mr. Sirota seemed either unwilling or unable to--that has been used for the last sixty-three years as a hammer to pound America's workers back into their pre-1930's, subservient position.

The Taft-Hartley Labor Act of 1947.

The Taft-Hartley Act was not an act designed to merely correct any excesses in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, but to cut the legs out from under the labor movement in the United States. It drove many people out of organized labor--including many of the best spokesmen and organizers--for no other reason than their having a brief flirtation with socialism (or even Communism) in the 1920's and 1930's.

The concepts of the open shop, right to work, and having to attempt organizing a new union in full view of ownership and management, have made the organization of new union shops something that borders on the impossible, because those attempting to organize are threatened with or subjected to termination, as the Cornell University study demonstrates. In fact, preventing unionization has become a multi-billion dollar enterprise in the United States.

Even a pro-business publication like Business Week stated in an editorial in its December 18, 1946 edition, that the Taft-Hartley Act "crossed the narrow line separating a law which aims only to regulate from one which could destroy. Given a few million unemployed in America, given an administration in Washington which was not pro-union--and the Taft-Hartley Act conceivably could wreck the labor movement."

Which is exactly what the Re-publican Reagan Administration started to do when it came into power in the 1980's. And no President has been actively supportive of labor since LBJ.

We have also been fed a continuous line of anti-union propaganda for the last sixty-some years, trying to destroy the image of the unions in the eyes of the American people. These include:

• The unions were responsible for starting most of the violence in disputes between labor and capital. The unions were responsible for less than half of the incidents that marked the start of violence. They did start much more violence west of the Mississippi than they did east of the Big Muddy. It should also be noted that even in cases where labor seemed to start the violence (the Pullman Strike of 1894 being a prime example), there is some question whether it was actually the strikers who started the violence, or agents provocateur. When FDR put Federal troops around the automobile plants in Michigan in 1937, their guns were not pointed at strikers; they were pointed at the goons hired by the owners, and the local police who ignored the attacks on the strikers.

• That there are businesses where unions were established, promising better take home pay, and that after the unions were established, and the workers started paying dues, they ended up with a lower take home pay. This seems to be in the same category as Reagan's "welfare queen" driving her Cadillac to pick up her welfare check: a complete anecdotal fabrication.

• The unions are guilty of inefficient practices including featherbedding, i.e. requiring more workers than the job actually needs for completion, that cost businesses extra money. The need for these practices by unions is a direct result of the Taft-Hartley Act. Unions have simply been trying to maintain their deteriorating position under the impossible rules imposed by this dastardly Act.
  
  

Are unions perfect? No. Like every human enterprise, they are only as good as the people who actively participate in the enterprise. In some past cases, the participation has been by criminals, e.g., the Teamsters. In most cases, the participation has been by people just trying to make a living, and a better future for their children. Sometimes, they have been at the forefront of social change, e.g., Caesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers.

Regardless, unions--good, bad, and indifferent--are absolutely necessary for the creation and maintenance of a large and vibrant middle class in a democratic society, as part of the system of checks and balances against a domineering capitalist elite and their monolithic corporate power. To quote Abraham Lincoln in his First Message to Congress (December 3, 1861), "Let them [the workingmen] beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which, if surrendered, will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they, and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon [them] till all of liberty shall be lost."

The American plutocrats have always hated our representative democracy and any limitations on their power, and not simply in the economic sphere. A group of them plotted to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. This group including members of the Du Pont Family and the J.P. Morgan banking concern. Their desire was to set up a fascist state similar to Mussolini's Italy, using an army of American Legion members led by retired Marine General Smedley Butler. Fortunately, General Butler was a man of honor (something they rarely had to deal with) and exposed the plutocratic conspiracy to members of Congress. (For more on this see the late Steve Kangas's Liberalism Resurgent, as well as Jonathon Vankin and John Whalen, The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time (Secaucus, N.J.: Carol Publishing Group, 1997); Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1973.))

When their plot failed, the plutocrats dug in their heels against FDR's New Deal. America's difficulty in rising out of the Great Depression was due less to problems with the New Deal itself, than with the continued intransigence of American Business and their allies in the Supreme Court of the United States to allow any part of the New Deal to come to fruition. These plutocratic crypto-fascists claimed that they were protecting the nation from the spectre of socialism, Communism, Bolshevism: take your pick. Had the New Deal and its Keynesian economics been allowed to proceed as similar programs did in Sweden and Great Britain, we may well have been out of the Great Depression by 1935 or 1936. Had FDR not listened to the conservatives among his economic advisers about reducing the deficit in 1937, we would not have had a recession in 1938 that slowed our economic recovery.

The length of the Great Depression in the United States was due primarily to the crypto-fascists dragging their feet against the policies of the Roosevelt Administration. These plutocrats were constantly taking New Deal programs to court in an attempt to stop it. The length of today's Great Recession can be laid at the feet of the two administrations who seem to be in the pockets of the heirs to those selfsame plutocrats. The Obama Administration seems to be completely unwilling to take any aggressive action to help rebuild the nation's middle class, even if it is at the expense of those plutocrats. FDR's greatest mistake may have been not prosecuting those individuals who had attempted to overthrow his Presidency, just as President Obama's may be his failure to prosecute the Wall Street bankers and the Bush Administration.

So what is the difference between the Fascist and the Communist state? Only this: In the Fascist state the corporations control the government; in the Communist state the government controls the corporations. FDR was no Communist: he never wanted to control the corporations, simply place a system of checks and balances against their most destructive impulses directed at our nation, its institutions, and its people. The plutocrats on the other hand have always wanted to control the government, and to hell with the rest of us.

After Roosevelt's death, the Taft-Hartley Act was created for passage by the Re-publican dominated 80th Congress. Congressman Fred A. Hartley Jr., the co-author of this act, unabashedly asserts that he considers this only a first step to the elimination of any government regulation of labor-industry relations. That in fact, it "points the way to correcting other errors of the government in the 1930's," including the Social Security Act. (The New National Labor Policy, Fred A Hartley, Jr.; New York, Funk and Wagnalls, 1948, p. xvi.)

As it says in the book of Ecclesiastes "There is nothing new under the Sun." The reactionaries (as President Truman called them) in our government, these Re-publicans, spiritual heirs to the thrice damned publican thieves that the Bible curses, who robbed the common people of Rome's empire blind; wish to rob the American Treasury just as blind, and through this theft, destroy America's middle class. They are trying to destroy our tattered social safety net, just as the largest group of Americans in seventy years need it. They are trying to finish the destruction of the unions in America, who have always been the workers' best counterpoise to the illegal and immoral excesses of the largest corporations.

For this reason, it is absolutely vital that all of those who voted for President Obama two years ago return to the polls in November, and vote back an even greater majority of Democrats to the House and Senate.

Am I disappointed in what has been achieved in the last two years? Damn straight. But if we permit the Re-publicans to establish a majority in either Chamber of Congress, they will do everything in their power to not only undo what little we have been able to accomplish in the last two years, but in the last seventy-five.

The one thing you have to admire about the reactionary Re-publicans is their perseverance. They have been trying to kill the unions in this country and get rid of Social Security and other New Deal and Great Society programs for years, and they are getting closer and closer to their goal, much to the detriment of our nation. They do so in the name of "liberty," but Abraham Lincoln--a real Republican, meaning a true child of the Republic--had the final word in an address delivered in Baltimore, April 18, 1864:

"With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men and with other men's labor. Here are two not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names--liberty and tyranny."

Authors Bio:

Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'