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8 Labor Law Reform, Employer Style More Changes In the National Labor Policy Control over appointments to the NLRB remained with the Republicans throughout the 1950s, since Eisenhower retained the presidency by defeating Adlai Stevenson again in 1956 by ten million votes, almost double his margin of victory in 1952.1 During the same period, however, Democrats regained and strengthened their control of the House and Senate, increasing their margin over the Republicans in the House from 29 in 1954, to 33 in 1956, to 129 in 1958, and in the Senate from 1 in 1954, to 4 in 1956, to 20 in 1958.2 (Eisenhower was the first president to have to deal with three successive opposition majorities in both houses.)l Particularly after the resounding Democratic victories in the 1958 congressional elections over a Republican Party beset with rising inflation, unemployment , and a falling gross national product, the recently merged AFLCIO mistakenly believed it would be in command of the 86th Congress. The relationship of organized labor to the Democratic Party, however, was changing. Both political parties were moving toward the political middle, seeking out independent voters who wanted a "politics of moderation."4 Although the national Democratic Party's overall record on progressive social welfare issues (especially when compared to the Republicans') continued to retain the allegiance of organized labor, many Democrats in the House and Senate were anti-organized labor or uninterested in labor matters.s Thus organized labor had an uneasy relationship with the Democratic Party in the 1950s.6 CIO president Walter Reuther maintained, for example, that "labor law reform would eventually come when the public realized and began to appreciate the role labor had played in pressing for progressive legislation.m IroniCally, in the late 1950s the press and the widely publicized McClellan committee hearings persuaded the public that unions were typically controlled by corrupt and arrogant leaders, such as Dave Beck and James Hoffa of the Teamsters; that few union officers were freely elected; that the views of these union leaders were contrary to the wishes of their membership; and that union 122 Labor Law Reform, Employer Style 123 treasuries were systematically looted by union bosses. The public demanded and got labor reform in 1959, but it was hardly what organized labor had in mind when it used the same phrase. Instead, it got a code for the regulation of internal union affairs, including disclosure of union records, elections of union officers, the use of trusteeships, the handling of union funds, and the conduct of intra-union disciplinary and expulsion proceedings. Although the original idea was to keep legislation concerning internal union reforms separate from amendments to Taft-Hartley, the political pressure for internal reform was converted into some amendments to the act designed to make unionization more difficult and weaken the bargaining power of unions-in part because of serious strategic blunders by the labor movement. Willard Wirtz summarized the results of this attempt at labor reform: The McClellan Committee's proper concern about "labor racketeering" was molded into a demand that "racket picketing" be prohibited, and this became the camouflage for a movement against all "recognition" or "organizational" picketing . The false impression was generated that the 1947 Act contained no restrictions on secondary boycotts, and the "hot cargo" clauses in the Teamsters' contracts were used to illustrate the need for additional prohibitions. What emerged as Title VII [of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959] was a weird combination of responsible attempt at repair of a twelve-year-old statute which needed repair-and of irresponsible political opportunism.s Although labor did not come away empty-handed-the noncommunist affidavit section was repealed, pre-hire contracts for the construction industry were approved, representation elections were expedited, and replaced economic strikers could vote in an NLRB election held within a year of the start of a strike-managt.mtnt obtained its key goals of closing "loopholes" in the act's picketing and boycott provisions and opening the way for greater state control of labor relations matters. Once again, major changes were made in Taft-Hartley without empirical evidence about how the law was working in practice or about the particular labor problems the new legislation was supposed to resolve. In fact, no congressional hearings were held on the 1959 amendments, which were hammered out between House and Senate conferees. As with Taft-Hartley in 1947, many of these amendments were simply the products of compromises designed to remove obstacles...

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