"Compulsory Unionism" and Its Critics: The National Right to Work Committee, Teacher Unions, and the Defeat of Labor Law Reform in 1978

In 1977, a bill to better enforce the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) sailed quickly through the House of Representatives. Facing a Senate filibuster, its proponents weakened the proposal—making it, according to historian Jefferson Cowie, "lean, moderate, and basically unchallenging to the corporate order."¹ Even in its attenuated state, however, the bill would have curbed the most flagrant violations of private-sector workers' rights. Though this version reached the precipice of the supermajority necessary to invoke cloture, it ultimately fell two votes short.

This article seeks to understand how antiunion activists defeated organized labor's last big legislative opportunity to reverse its fortunes in the wake of deindustrialization and an onslaught of corporate attacks in the 1970s. Indeed, the right's success in stymieing labor reform was decidedly momentous, especially because the law represented such a modest change. Kim Phillips-Fein has shown that a half a century of activism from market fundamentalist intellectuals and anti–New Deal businessmen paved the way for the formation of the Business Roundtable—a group of powerful CEO's from Fortune 500 companies—and politicized other somnolent forces like the Chamber of Commerce. In fact, she shows that by the 1970s there was a robust, consciously political "business activist movement."² Kim Moody's account of the failure of the bill—as "labor's major agenda point of the decade"—centers on the pushback from anti-labor corporate activism, in particular the Roundtable.³

What should be added to this historiography, however, is further insight into how anti-labor forces succeeded in mobilizing public opinion against unions in order to prevent cloture. This article argues that while direct lobbying on the part of the Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce was significant, the filibuster effort would not have succeeded without the growing legitimacy of the view that unions opposed both the public interest and the rights of individuals through the guise of "compulsory unionism." In other words, a fuller explanation for the failure of the Labor Reform Act should include the long-term discursive case made by groups such as the National Right to Work Committee (NRTWC) that the labor movement had gained too much power.

Within the first decade following the advent of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, or Wagner Act, 1935), anti-labor groups challenged—in both the court of public opinion and the actual courts—the legitimacy of union security clauses.⁴ Following the spread of public-sector collective bargaining in the 1960s and '70s, however, the NRTWC's effort increasingly focused on public employees, and this critique began to find greater traction. In particular, the organization argued that union officials used their "monopoly" power to force teachers to join unions against their will and the public, as a consequence, to pay excessive costs for inferior services. In short, the anti-union right leveraged its criticism of "compulsory unionism" in the public sector to mainstream a broader argument emphasizing the protection of individual rights instead of the higher pay and workplace protections unions offered against employers. Mobilizing these views effectively against the labor reform bill in 1978, in turn, represented a logical outgrowth. Indeed, the work of anti-union groups like NRTWC in the 1970s underscores a significant historiographic point: often, historians treat public- and private-sector labor separately—sometimes, for good reason, given the very real differences in labor law, bargaining concerns, and organizing tactics. As this article shows, however, their histories also intersect in important ways, and critics of both sectors of the labor movement in this case used those connections to undercut the position of each.

The labor reform act of 1977

Jimmy Carter was not the ideal candidate of the labor establishment in 1976: as governor of Georgia he had supported the state's right-to-work law. On the campaign trail, however, Carter had benefited immensely from labor's help. In 1977, then, the AFL-CIO hoped that, even with a lukewarm president in the White House, the two-thirds majority of...