Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword, David Montgomery
- Preface and acknowledgments
- 1 Labor's fragmentation and the industrial relations context in 1945
- 2 Searching for coexistence: The Management-Labor Charter and the Labor-Management Conference
- 3 The great strike wave of 1946 and its political consequences
- 4 The Taft-Hartley legislative scene
- 5 The aftermath of Taft-Hartley: Real behavior versus union rhetoric
- Postlude
- Index
1 - Labor's fragmentation and the industrial relations context in 1945
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword, David Montgomery
- Preface and acknowledgments
- 1 Labor's fragmentation and the industrial relations context in 1945
- 2 Searching for coexistence: The Management-Labor Charter and the Labor-Management Conference
- 3 The great strike wave of 1946 and its political consequences
- 4 The Taft-Hartley legislative scene
- 5 The aftermath of Taft-Hartley: Real behavior versus union rhetoric
- Postlude
- Index
Summary
Labor's Power
At the end of World War II, labor's aggregate numbers suggested real power. Many experts believed that the balance of power had shifted away from the management side to labor. In an address to a Princeton University conference in 1946, an eminent labor economist, Professor Sumner H. Slichter, placed trade union organizations in the context of what he called “a revolutionary shift in power from business to labor in the United States. … A laboristic society is succeeding a capitalistic one.”
Slichter's judgment was mirrored not only in economic, industrial, and historical studies but also, more significantly, in committees of Congress. When the 80th Congress decided in 1947 to reverse the basic New Deal labor law, the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act, it did so partly on the ground that the “excessive power” of labor demanded statutory change. The law that the 80th Congress enacted in place of the Wagner Act, the Labor Management Relations (Taft-Hartley) Act, is still the basic labor law of the United States.
The concept of “Big Labor,” originating in the 1940s, became an important argument for labor-law reversal. It has since become a fashionable term, connoting equal power, along with “Big Business” and “Big Government,” with liberals as well as conservatives practicing this new addition to the American language.
The present book covers some relevant events of 1948–50, focusing however on the period 1945–7, a turning point in modern labor history.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Labor's Struggles, 1945–1950A Participant's View, pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994