Anti-Communist Loyalty Oaths and Taft-Hartley Act Weaponized to Crush Labor Movement

After World War II, as worker militancy swept the country, the right-wing struck back with the Taft-Hartley Act, passed by a Republican Congress over President Truman’s veto on June 23, 1947. The bill used the threat of communist subversion to justify rolling back advantages labor had gained in the 1935 Wagner Act. Most of the bill’s provisions—banning closed shops, secondary strikes, and spending of dues for political purposes, while allowing states to pass union-busting “right to work” laws—had no Cold War purpose. They represented a long-stymied pro-business Republican agenda that had suffered under FDR’s New Deal administration.

The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act specifically targeted CPUSA-led unions under Section 9(h), which required union officials to sign affidavits that they were not Communist Party members. Refusal to comply meant unions forfeited access to the National Labor Relations Board, preventing participation in union certification elections or filing unfair labor practice charges against employers. If union leaders signed despite being CPUSA members, they could be charged with perjury and imprisoned. Union heads used the extreme climate of intolerance to consolidate power and eliminate the influence of the Communist Party and other “troublemakers.” Right-wing figures within the labor movement collaborated with anti-communists in HUAC and engineered the expulsion of several left-led unions.

In 1949 and 1950, the CIO responded to Taft-Hartley by purging communists from its ranks, firing left-wing officials and expelling 12 unions that refused to abandon their communist-tolerant ways. Five years later, the CIO merged with the AFL to form the AFL-CIO, which for decades was led by pro-business figures. The purge had an enormous effect on union membership, which had surged to about 35 percent of the workforce in the 1940s and 1950s but started declining drastically in the late 1950s. By the mid-1960s, union membership was down to 28 percent. Anticommunism proved a useful tactic for a business community seeking to roll back union gains since the 1930s, demonstrating how Red Scare hysteria was weaponized for corporate profit.