Chapter 5: The Right To Work For Less

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of the American Dream"

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Right To Work For Less

In 1935, Congress passed, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed, the National Labor Relations Act, often referred to as the Wagner Act, legalizing labor unions in the United States for the first time. It was referred to as “the most radical piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress.”[lvii] New York’s Democratic Senator Robert Wagner was the new law’s main author, and his legislative aide, Simon H. Rifkind, told Theodore J. St. Antoine in 1986 that there were several reasons for the law.[lviii]

First, there was considerable labor unrest across the nation; it had been particularly bloody over the preceding fifty or so years since the labor movement first emerged in a big way in the 1880s. Employers would hire private security companies or pay off local politicians and police to harass, beat, and often even kill workers to prevent unionization.

One of the most infamous examples was the Ludlow Massacre in 1914. After John D. Rockefeller expelled striking workers from his company town, they set up a tent city. Colorado National Guard troops were brought in and set up a machine gun on a bluff overlooking the site, then used it to strafe the tents. Women and children escaped to small crawlspace “basements” they’d dug under the tents, so the Guard soaked the tents with Rockefeller’s kerosene and lit them on fire, killing dozens of women and children.[lix]

St. Antoine wrote that the goals, “of the Wagner Act were (1) to advance social justice and (2) to channel protest and defuse potential rebellion,” adding that, “it was essentially a ‘conservative’ measure.”[lx] He added that Senator Wagner thought it was high time America joined the rest of the developed world in offering union protections to workers, as unions were by that time widespread across the world, particularly in Europe.

The social justice part of the equation had to do with lifting working people out of poverty and into the American Dream of what would become known over following decades as the middle class. The legislation established the right of workers to unionize a business and then require all of the company’s hourly workers to join or pay dues to the union.

This “must join” provision is referred to as a “closed shop” (as opposed to an “open shop” where people are free to join or pay dues to unions or not). A third type of organization was called an “agency shop,” which is where employees can opt out of union membership but still must pay union dues, since the union incurs the costs of negotiating and enforcing contracts on behalf of all workers, whether they’re union members or not.

In 1937, the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Wagner Act, cementing it into the American business and labor landscape.

This led to an explosion of union activity across the nation and the rapid emergence of an empowered working class. It also infuriated business owners and the Republican politicians they owned.

Following World War II, the GOP had a major electoral victory in the election of 1946. Democrats had been solely in charge of the federal government from FDR’s 1932 election right up until that time, but in that election the GOP swept both the House and the Senate and held them for the following two years. Thus, in 1947, Republicans pushed through the notorious Taft-Hartley Act that allowed individual states to opt out of the closed shop provisions of the Wagner Act.

President Harry Truman vetoed the bill, but Republicans mustered the votes to override his veto and the act stood and stands to this day. Since its passage, 28 Republican-controlled states have chosen to opt out of Wagner Act provisions, driving the de-unionization of America.

They’ve done this while saying they’re simply allowing people in their states a “right to work.” That phrase was coined in its current meaning by Texas Republican operative and head of the Christian American Association, Vance Muse (1890-1950), who’d been an ardent opponent of unions, arguing that they would one day allow Black and Jewish people entry into industrial workplaces. It was quickly adopted by the GOP and is used to describe union-busting activity to this day.

Not everybody was fooled, though. As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in a 1961 speech:

“In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone. Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote.”

King never lived to see the day that Taft-Hartley and “right to work for less” was overthrown and the American Dream could become more available to all working-class Americans; it still hasn’t happened, even though it’s been at the top of labor’s wish list for decades.