Posts tagged Taft-Hartley Act
Port Strike Halts: Now What? Commentary
October 9, 2024 // Even a new contract agreement, if it does not fundamentally address American port uncompetitiveness, would prove to be only a six-year punt. Legislation has been introduced to move port workers from the main National Labor Relations Act governance structure that applies to most private-sector workers to the Railway Labor Act, which governs the railroad and airline industries. This change would give Congress and the administration more power to impose a negotiated settlement and prevent strikes, but the idea has been batted around for nearly a decade.
Dockworkers strike suspended, tentative agreement includes 62% pay raise over 6 years
October 4, 2024 // The tentative agreement would increase workers’ wages by 62% over the life of the 6-year contract, sources familiar confirm to ABC News. This represents a significant increase from the shipping industry group’s offer of a 50% wage increase earlier this week. The union had been pushing for a 77% pay hike over six years.
Op-Ed: Biden’s Longshoreman Strike
October 3, 2024 // American ports are less efficient than most in the world owing to union work rules and restrictions on automation.
Biden Backs ILA Strikers Warning Shippers on Price Spikes
October 2, 2024 // “Now is not the time for ocean carriers to refuse to negotiate a fair wage for these essential workers while raking in record profits,” Biden said in a statement from the White House. “My administration will be monitoring any price gouging activity that benefits foreign ocean carriers, including those on the USMX board.”
Dockworkers Launch Strike at Ports From Maine to Texas
October 1, 2024 // Port employers, pressed by Biden administration officials to resolve the impasse, raised their offer on wages to a 50% increase over six years, from an earlier 40% increase, along with other improvements in benefits in the 24 hours before the strike deadline. The ILA is seeking a 77% wage increase over six years as a condition to sit down to talks with maritime employers, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. The walkout shuts down some of the country’s main gateways for imports of food, vehicles, heavy machinery, construction materials, chemicals, furniture, clothes and toys.
Report: Biden won’t block dock strike
September 18, 2024 // International Longshoremen’s Association has set Oct. 1 strike deadline at East and Gulf Coast ports. Taft-Hartley Act grants presidents powers to intervene in labor disputes that threaten national security or safety by imposing an 80-day cooling-off period, and forcing employees back to work while negotiations continue.
The Accidental Success of the NLRA: How a Law about Unions Achieved Its Goals by Giving Us Fewer Unions
August 30, 2024 // The Wagner Act was passed to promote labor peace. It aimed to keep commerce flowing by promoting collective bargaining, and thus unionism. Taft-Hartley reversed one part of that policy: it helped make unionism, and thus collective bargaining, less common. But by doing so, it finally achieved labor law’s original goal. The labor market today is more peaceful than at any time in the last century. And that peace owes in large part to the relative scarcity of unions. That lesson is worth keeping in mind in contemporary debates. Today, voices on both sides of the aisle laud the benefits of unionism. They speak of unions as vehicles of workplace democracy—a productive way for workers to express their collective discontent. But unions have not always funneled discontent through peaceful channels: when given too much power, they have disrupted the avenues of commerce.
The Cases Against Sectoral Bargaining: The Practical Case
August 11, 2024 // The effect of sectoral bargaining on union corruption would be unclear. Scholars of union corruption have blamed enterprise bargaining combined with union monopoly representation for America’s unusually high levels of labor racketeering. There is truth to this, but it is also not the case that American unions involved in industries with more-sectoral-style approaches are “cleaner.” The New York City garment industry, which was exempted from various Taft-Hartley regulations on union conduct, was believed by the federal government to have been Mob influenced as recently as the 1990s. More recently, the United Auto Workers, which conducts a sort of pseudo-sectoral bargaining with the unionized Detroit Three automakers by “patterning” its contracts, was forced into a regime change after the largest union corruption scandal of the 21st century. Putting more power in the hands of America’s long-standing class of union officials, who are known for having their hands in the cookie jar, certainly is not an obvious approach to reducing or surveilling corruption in organized labor.
Op-Ed: Union membership is now political. So can the government still require people to associate with a union?
July 10, 2024 // Since then, employees have argued that exclusive union representation does violate the First Amendment. Exclusivity saddles them with the “services” of nakedly political bargaining agents. Lower courts have turned those arguments aside mostly because of an older case, Minnesota Board for Community Colleges v. Knight, which suggested that exclusive representation was okay in the public sector. Knight seemed to say that when the government bargains about working conditions, it can choose its own bargaining partner. And if it chooses one exclusive union to bargain with, that choice burdens no one’s associational rights. But whether or not that’s what Knight meant, the decision has no bearing on private-sector bargaining. In the private sector, the government does not choose its own bargaining partner; it imposes one on private parties. And some of those parties object to their unions’ political views—views that are increasingly central to unionization itself. So private-sector bargaining raises a different question: can the government force private citizens to associate with a union when that union’s core purpose is increasingly political? (Elsewhere, I have argued at greater length that it cannot.)
Parity in Labor Transparency
April 24, 2024 // The institutional left has sought to reward Big Labor by making union organizing campaigns shorter, or bypassing them with “card check.” Big Labor knows that the dynamics of union organizing rely on labor unions being able to make their pitches to workers from trusted positions without skeptical responses from other workers or employer representatives. And they only need to win the vote once to start collecting dues and engaging in compulsory bargaining. As long as government-recognized and government-empowered compulsory union bargaining exists, the government require workers be given all the information before deciding whether to form a union and bargain collectively. The SALT Act would accomplish this needed reform.