Taft-Hartley

Chuck0 chuck at tao.ca
Mon Mar 12 17:40:04 PST 2001


It's a real shame that organized labor is such a wimp. Would be nice to see the machinists going ahead with their strike, in effect giving the Bush adminsitration the middle finger. The airlines and the Bushies might have some success bad-mouthing the machinists, but I think the mood of the population has changed since the PATCO strike.

Chuck0

Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> [interesting that Carter paved the way for Reagan even here...]
>
> "Death by Lethal Injunction: National Emergency Strikes Under the
> Taft-Hartley Act"
>
> BY: MICHAEL H. LEROY
> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
> Economics/Labor and Industrial Relations
> JOHN H. JOHNSON
> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
> Economics/Labor and Industrial Relations
>
> Paper ID: Bureau of Econ. & Bus. Research Working Paper No.
> 00-0116
> Date: July 25, 2000
>
> Contact: MICHAEL H. LEROY
> Email: Mailto:m-leroy at staff.uiuc.edu
> Postal: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
> Economics/Labor and Industrial Relations
> 504 East Armory Avenue
> Champaign, IL 61820-6297 USA
> Phone: 217-244-4092
> Co-Auth: JOHN H. JOHNSON
> Email: Mailto:jhjohnsn at uiuc.edu
> Postal: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
> Economics/Labor and Industrial Relations
> Room 213
> 504 East Armory Avenue
> Champaign, IL 61820-6297 USA
>
> Paper Requests:
> Contact Information Resource Retrieval Center, 128 Library,
> 1408 West Gregory Drive, Urbana IL 61801 USA. Fax:(217)244-0398;
> Phone:(217)333-1958 mailto:irrc at uiuc.edu. Basic fee is $10.
> http://www.library.uiuc.edu/irrc/
>
> ABSTRACT:
> The Taft-Hartley Act gives the President and federal courts
> extraordinary power to enjoin lawful strikes that pose a threat
> to national health or safety. Although rarely used, this power
> has great impact. We show that Taft-Hartley injunctions lowered
> public support for unions by portraying them as selfish economic
> actors who were harmful to the nation, and altered the balance
> of bargaining power in critical strikes, usually to the
> detriment of unions.
>
> We trace these injunctions to their common law antecedents
> from the 1820s. We show that courts routinely abused their
> equitable powers in labor disputes. Our research shows that
> Taft-Hartley courts have failed to avoid this pitfall. They (1)
> failed to exercise judicial powers, (2) relied on distorted
> assumptions to support injunctions, (3) interpreted national
> health to mean national inconvenience, (4) favored the
> government - and by extension, powerful employers - by granting
> eighty percent of the petitions for injunctions, and (5) issued
> impractical orders.
>
> Although the last Taft-Hartley injunction was issued in the
> 1970s, this public policy remains relevant in two respects. When
> major strikes affect the nation - most recently, the 1997
> Teamsters strike at UPS - presidents respond to growing public
> pressure by threatening to invoke this power. Although
> politically expedient, this power undermines a main tenet of the
> National Labor Relations Act that permits unions to strike in
> support of their bargaining proposals. In addition, our research
> questions a current theory explaining that the sharp decline in
> strikes resulted from President Reagan's use of the striker
> replacement doctrine in the PATCO strike. By showing that
> President Carter's use of Taft-Hartley in the 1977-1978 national
> coal strike caused the first sharp drop in strikes, and by
> demonstrating that this law was intended to impair this right,
> we show that the presidency plays a more complex role in the
> dying right to strike.

-- << Chuck0 >>

This was the year *everything* changed.

-- Commander Ivanova, 2261

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