The gap between libertarians and certain conservatives has grown broader in recent years, and nowhere is that divide more evident than in the disputes over the status and legitimacy of the American labor union movement. The new wave conservatives want to revive labor unions as part of their ongoing effort to counteract the dominance of business, professional, and intellectual elites. These elites command too large a share of the pie, so that ordinary working people end up with too little. Only a determined return to a strong New Deal pro-labor movement can restore a rough measure of income and wealth parity on which the well-being of our collective institutions necessarily depends.
The obvious intellectual target of this new offensive is traditional classical liberal thought—I will refine this word shortly—which mistakenly holds that market solutions can continuously generate appropriate levels of support and satisfaction throughout society. I think that this modern fascination of the new conservative regime is a profound mistake because it wishes to return to some bucolic period of labor relations that never was. It is all too easy for modern commentators to forget the huge “strike wave” that followed in the aftermath of World War II when union strikes were perhaps the central issue of domestic policy, leading in 1947 to the passage (over Truman’s veto) of the Taft-Hartley revisions of the National Labor Relations Act that among other things allowed states to pass right-to-work laws that gave workers the option to take a job without joining an union, and created a list of unfair labor practices by workers to parallel those by employers. Those revisions most notably allow the president to announce an 80-day cooling-off period between labor and management, thus affording the government an opportunity to enjoin any strike by convincing a federal court that the strike constitutes a national emergency or otherwise imperils the “national health and safety.”
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