The Labor-Management Relations (Taft-Hartley) Act of 1947 is frequently treated, even by experts, as a continuation of Wagner Act policy. Insofar as Taft-Hartley accepted collective bargaining, there was a continuity. However, Taft-Hartley, which would further fragment the already divided labor movement, was a very basic shift in federal labor policy.

Whereas Section 7 of the Wagner Act had provided a straightforward, protected right of employees to join unions and bargain collectively, Taft-Hartley shifted the basis of labor law from this protected right of employees to protection of the right not to join unions and not to bargain. This change – buttressed by many other new provisions designed to split labor and limit free bargaining or directly help employers – had then and continues to have decisive effects on all collective bargaining.

A recent authority, James A. Gross, professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University, has analyzed in his valuable book the transition in national labor policy. Gross has also argued, in an article written after several years of much-publicized malaise in the labor movement, that confusion in national policy results partly from the contradictions about purpose in the 1947 act. He maintains that in the final conference version Representative Hartley's wish to deny collective bargaining altogether is represented, along with the original Wagner Act's purpose of encouraging collective bargaining.