National Association of Manufacturers Drafts Taft-Hartley Act "Sentence by Sentence, Paragraph by Paragraph"

Legislative aides and representatives from business and industry, particularly members of the National Association of Manufacturers, draft committee bill H.R. 3020 that becomes the Taft-Hartley Act during 1947, with Congressman Donald O’Toole of New York later revealing that the anti-union legislation was prepared “sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, by the National Association of Manufacturers.” The NAM’s direct role in drafting the legislation represents the culmination of decades of corporate organizing against the 1935 Wagner Act, with the organization working since the late 1930s and 1940s for repeal of the National Labor Relations Act that guaranteed employees the right to organize into trade unions. The 1946 midterm elections leave Republicans in control of Congress for the first time since the early 1930s, with many newly elected congressmen strongly conservative and seeking to overturn or roll back New Deal legislation.

Republican Joseph Ball of Minnesota tells attendees of the 1946 NAM convention regarding the pending legislation, “It will bear down most heavily on unions,” making explicit the corporate lobby’s understanding that they are crafting legislation designed to systematically restrict union power. The bill is promoted by large business lobbies including the National Association of Manufacturers, which successfully lobbies for the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act to restrict unions’ power following their massive anti-union propaganda campaign in response to the 1946 strike wave when nearly 10 percent of the US workforce walked off the job. NAM advertisements regarding positions favoring lifting price controls, abolishing the Office of Price Administration, and passing Taft-Hartley appear nationally on radio and in newspapers as part of the organization’s multi-million dollar propaganda campaign.

The Taft-Hartley Act fundamentally restricts union power by prohibiting closed shops, jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity strikes, political strikes, secondary boycotts, mass picketing, and union monetary donations to federal political campaigns. Critically, Section 14(b) authorizes states to pass “right-to-work” laws banning union shop agreements, providing the legal foundation for state-level labor suppression campaigns. The Act also requires union officers to sign non-communist affidavits during the Cold War, imposes good faith bargaining requirements on unions, prohibits “excessive” dues and initiation fees, and creates the legal framework enabling permanent striker replacement. Despite President Truman’s veto denouncing the legislation as a “slave-labor bill,” the Republican-controlled 80th Congress passes the bill with support from Southern Democrats on June 23, 1947. The NAM’s direct drafting of Taft-Hartley establishes the template for corporate lobby groups writing legislation that serves their interests, a practice that ALEC systematizes beginning in 1973 with model legislation written by corporate lobbyists and distributed to state legislators, demonstrating that legislative capture by corporate interests was being perfected decades before the Powell Memo called for such systematic efforts.