A Taft-Hartley Roundup of Recent Labor News

Key Points

• The “Taft-Hartley consensus” of conservative labor-relations policy seeks to ensure that union participation is voluntary, that union finances and internal processes are free from corruption, and that the public is protected from labor disputes.
• While Congressional Republicans want to clarify the power of workers to decide whether to be self-employed independent contractors or formal employees, union-backed state-level Democrats advance the “ABC test” that would force more to be employees subject to forced unionism.
• Shawn Fain, the leftist-activist president of the United Auto Workers, was rebuked by the government monitor overseeing the union after its corruption scandal.
• Democratic-run states are considering using taxpayer funds through state unemployment insurance payments to pay strikers, potentially making strikes more disruptive to the economy and consumers.

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For just shy of 80 years, conservative Americans and the Republican Party that provides their imperfect electoral vehicle have sought to advance a policy consensus on labor relations based on three principles: ensuring union membership and participation is voluntary, scrutinizing unions’ operations in exchange for their government-granted powers, and protecting the public from the fallout from labor disputes. As America sits by the pool at the beginning of what might prove to be a long, hot summer, what news is there about the Taft-Hartley consensus?

Freelancer Voluntarism in Congress and Coercion in New Jersey

Despite loud noises from Senate backbenchers about throwing away the Taft-Hartley consensus and adopting the labor policies of former President Barack Obama, other Republicans in Congress are looking for piecemeal ways to advance the Taft-Hartley consensus principle of voluntarism. Regrettably, the great desiderata of a national right-to-work law or fundamental reform on the lines of the Employee Rights Act remain beyond practical medium-term political reality.

But Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA) has offered two proposals to strengthen the ability of workers to freely choose to work as freelancers or independent contractors—independent businesspeople whose work is mostly self-managed—rather than employees managed by a boss and subject to forced unionism. Kiley’s Modern Worker Empowerment Act would set a national, statutory definition of worker classification that would override a Biden administration rule that adopted a more union-friendly classification standard, and his Modern Worker Security Act protects the ability of people and businesses who hire contractors to provide benefits to those workers without making them employees. In late May, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing on the two proposals, featuring advocates for independent work.

Meanwhile, in a dark parody of the circle of life, state-level officials in blue states continue to shill for unions’ efforts to compel workers to pay dues and accept political and economic domination by union bosses who support those state-level officials’ political campaigns. The New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development in the administration of Gov. Phil Murphy (D), who received over $800,000 in campaign contributions alone from organized labor in his two gubernatorial efforts, has issued a proposed regulation effectively cloning the “ABC test” from California’s notorious AB 5 law, potentially forcing thousands of freelancers and other contractors in the state out of work or into forced unionism. (It is not a coincidence that Rep. Kiley, who seeks to protect contractors, is a member of the minority party of Big Labor’s Golden State.)

Misbehavior and Oversight

Shawn Fain took over the United Auto Workers (UAW) following the worst union corruption scandal of the 21st century. (The UAW might, given the disproportionate representation of graduate students and retirees on its membership list, better be called the “United non-Auto non-Workers.”) As part of the settlement the union made with the federal government to avoid a full government takeover, the UAW agreed to install an outside monitor to adjudicate internal management disputes and supervise the union’s finances.

A recent report from the federal monitor suggests that Fain, who made a name for himself as an aggressive leftist activist and labor negotiator, is also a jerk to his UAW colleagues. The monitor investigated allegations that Fain sidelined Margaret Mock, the secretary-treasurer of the union, by improperly removing her from overseeing 11 of the union’s departments and two boards. The report substantiated Mock’s allegations, concluding, “The monitor’s investigation found that Secretary-Treasurer Mock was falsely accused of misconduct, and that therefore there was no basis for removing departments from her oversight or reassigning her board positions.”

In addition to finding Mock’s removal improper, the monitor’s report criticized Fain’s potty-mouthed and threatening leadership style. According to the report, witnesses alleged that Fain told a group of UAW staff that “he would ‘slit’ or ‘cut’ the ‘f—– throats’ [sic] of anyone who ‘messed’ with certain members of his inner circle” and that he told Mock “Your only responsibility is to sign the f—— [sic] check” when Mock challenged some of Fain’s demands. Despite the aggression, Fain still remembered his Everything Leftism; the monitor wrote that Fain “believed having Black women present the motion against Mock, who is also Black, would shield him from potential accusations of racism.” Remember, Fain is (in the UAW’s story of itself) the good guy who saved the bent union by making it a Red union.

While not every union has the same record of recent misbehavior as the UAW to require intensive federal monitoring, history shows that the extensive powers federal law grants unions (such as a de facto power to tax workers in forced-unionism states) warrant federal regulation and supervision of union finances to prevent or detect corruption. The principal law regulating union finances and management, the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA), was passed in 1959 following congressional revelations of criminality in organized labor (especially Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters Union). The law’s implementation toward labor unions was last substantially changed almost 20 years ago, when the George W. Bush administration toughened up its requirement that unions disclose their outside spending.

Now, Congress is interested in potential statutory revisions to the LMRDA’s disclosure and union-governance rules. The House Education and Workforce Committee has solicited feedback from interest groups, labor-relations practitioners, employers, and workers on how the LMRDA might be improved to strengthen worker voice within labor organizations. According to a press release, the committee is interested in ideas:

• To “better clarify union member rights, especially during strike negotiations and union elections”;
• To assess the usefulness of the labor organization annual report (LM-2) in giving members understanding of how their dues are being spent;
• To “give union members more direct control and transparency over the portion of their dues used for lobbying, campaign contributions, or ballot‑measure advocacy”;
• To use technology to reduce compliance burdens and protect personal data; and
• To assess the effectiveness of LMRDA’s enforcement, compliance, and whistleblower-protection provisions.

Strike Items

Part of the conservative Taft-Hartley consensus that Big Labor and its political allies seek to overturn both within the conservative movement and in national labor-relations policy is a principle that third parties—people and business not themselves negotiating a labor dispute between themselves—should be protected from the consequences of other people fighting. For this reason, laws regulate for what reason a union is allowed to call a strike and who may call a strike.

Blue-state legislators heavily obligated to organized labor for their offices are advancing a policy explicitly designed to hurt more third parties by making strikes easier for unions to call and maintain, at taxpayer expense. Traditionally, unions themselves had to prepare their members to sustain themselves during a strike. Compiling strike funds, which provide stipends to members during strikes, is a principal reason for unions to charge their members dues in the first place. But states such as Washington, which has a governor who received $167,363 in labor-union contributions in his 2024 campaign, are compelling the taxpayer to help Big Labor make the taxpayer’s life miserable.

In Washington, strikers will receive unemployment benefits starting in 2026. By adopting that policy, the state joins all-but-union-run New York and New Jersey in a triumvirate of foolishness. Connecticut’s legislature passed a similar bill, but the state’s governor—Ned Lamont, a union-backed Democrat—has said he would veto the legislation because of the potential negative consequences for economic growth.

Unions implausibly claim that strikes will resolve more quickly with taxpayers paying workers to strike. This makes no sense whatsoever. The pressure that brings strikes to an end is the economic loss to both striker and business, and whichever side can weather the pain better gets more of what it wants in the final resolution. Making taxpayers pay for union strikes gives unions more incentive to hold out, since strikers face less economic pain. If anything, the policy will make strikes longer and more disruptive, which is precisely what union activists want. That is why the PRO Act, Big Labor’s federal-level wish-list legislation, would eliminate many of Taft-Hartley’s regulations dictating on whose authority and for what end a union may strike.

Conservative advocates aren’t taking Big Labor and its leftist allies’ “Make Strikes Destructive Again” policies lying down. Federal law allows workers, even workers in forced-unionism states, to terminate formal union membership at any time (even though workers in forced-unionism states must still pay a portion of dues). This becomes especially relevant during strikes, since unions are permitted to impose fines and other penalties on formal union members who defy the union. If the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation’s (NRTWLDF) periodic updates on its work on behalf of workers who dissent from union activities are any indication, union officials are far from diligent in following the laws setting limits on their ability to penalize workers who have terminated (or never took) formal union membership.

The NRTWLDF promoted a recent victory in a case against the United Auto Workers stemming from a 2024 strike against auto accessory manufacturer Dometic. In March 2024, workers for the company who had resigned their formal union membership filed National Labor Relations Board charges alleging that UAW Local 644 had threatened that any workers who attempted to continue working through the strike would be fired. That’s not allowed, and the union had to settle in October of that year agreeing to inform workers of their rights to abstain from union activities and accept trainings for union officials on the limits of union powers to punish workers working under union contracts.

Conclusion

While supposedly right-leaning advocacy groups funded by left-wing Big Philanthropy and apparently also Big Labor itself promote a supposed new approach (that actually would repeat the errors of the Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford administrations) toward union appeasement and empowerment, the logic of the conservative Taft-Hartley consensus is proved by these developments. Unions demand extortionate power over workers and the national economy. Someone has to protect them—to protect us all.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/a-taft-hartley-roundup-of-recent-labor-news/