Seventy Five Years Later, Toll Of Taft-Hartley Weighs Heavily On Labor
The Taft-Hartley Act was the centerpiece of big business’s counterattack against a labor and people’s movement that had, over the previous decade, won major improvements for working people on factory floors and in the halls of Congress.
From 1936 through World War II, the new industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) — UE, the United Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers, and dozens of smaller unions — had successfully organized the mass-production industries that dominated U.S. economy at the time. Like Amazon today, the huge corporations that dominated these industries — General Electric and Westinghouse in electrical manufacturing, the “Big Three” auto companies, and U.S. Steel — were engines of economic inequality. They exploited massive workforces to generate massive profits for a tiny corporate elite.