type: timeline_event
Congress overrides President Harry Truman's veto to pass the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, known as the Taft-Hartley Act after sponsors Senator Robert Taft (R-OH) and Representative Fred Hartley (R-NJ). The legislation fundamentally restricts union power by amending the 1935 Wagner Act, 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) of Taft-Hartley authorizes states to pass "right-to-work" laws banning union shop agreements, providing the legal foundation for the state-level labor suppression campaigns that ALEC would later coordinate beginning in 1979. 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 that Reagan would exploit in the 1981 PATCO strike.
President Truman denounces the legislation as a "slave-labor bill," warning it would "reverse the basic direction of our national labor policy" and "conflict with important principles of our democratic society." Despite organized labor's fierce opposition, the Republican-controlled 80th Congress passes the bill with support from Southern Democrats and corporate lobbying from the National Association of Manufacturers. Taft-Hartley represents the first major legislative rollback of New Deal labor protections and establishes the legal architecture enabling systematic union destruction over the following 75 years.