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 >>
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