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The Legacy of Taft-Hartley
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 Dec. 21, 2017 | LABOR HISTORY | […] Recent efforts to undermine the democratic and associational rights of public sector workers echo and mimic attacks on private sector workers that began seventy years ago, with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in June 1947. Taft-Hartley capped a tumultuous decade and a half in US labor relations and labor law. In 1933, three years into the Great Depression and a hundred days into his New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt signed the National Recovery Act, which sought to at once tightly regulate competition and protect workers’ rights. When the Supreme Court ruled the Recovery Act unconstitutional two years later, workers — encouraged by the law’s nod to collective bargaining — pressed for both union representation and legal clarity. Business, meanwhile, was suffering from competitive and political disarray, and at least some viewed labor legislation as a recovery strategy — hoping that bargained wages would bolster aggregate demand and rein in their low-wage (often Southern) competitors… Jacobin
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