Corporate Dreams: Big Business in American Democracy from the Great Depression to the Great Recession

Chapter 11 - Killing the Unions Softly

72 Chapter 11 Killing the Unions Softly Corporate executives now set about converting their newly recovered moral authority into political power. Here, too, they were successful. The anti-union legislation they persuaded Congress to enact would, in the long run, help to diminish the American Dream. Corporations used their postwar moral victory over the unions to shape Americans’ understanding of freedom. To many, freedom came to mean weak government, weak unions, and minimal interference with the supposedly free market. The issue of corporate power as a threat to freedom slipped off the radar. The Democrats’ identification with the unions, which had once been a political asset, would increasingly become a liability. Truman had tried to escape the labor incubus by opposing some of the postwar strikes. He had even threatened to draft railroad workers into the army before they settled their 1946 strike on his terms. Nevertheless, voters blamed the Democrats for inflation and for the postwar strike wave. For the first time in a generation , voters saw Republicans as better equipped than Democrats to manage the economy. In the midterm election of 1946, Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress, a feat they had last achieved in 1928. The election results amounted to a rebuke of the labor movement by the American public. By contrast, corporations enjoyed more status, prestige, and political power than since the days of Calvin Coolidge. Should newly empowered corporate interests try to repeal the Wagner Act of 1935? That law had given a majority of a plant’s workers the right to elect a union that spoke for all. The Wagner Act had made possible the new industrial unions such as the United Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers, and the United Rubber Workers. Many businessmen , their heads swelled by their new political power, were tempted to try for a knock-out punch, a complete repeal of the Wagner Act. Cooler heads prevailed in corporate groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers. They saw that President Truman would almost surely veto a Wagner Act repeal. Even with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, it might not be possible to get the two-thirds vote needed to override a presidential veto. If corporate interests overreached, they might end up with no legislative gains at all. Anyway, the industrial unions were well established and would have some staying power even if the Wagner Act were repealed. A frontal attack on the unions might only make them more militant while sacrificing business leaders’ new moral authority. Having succeeded in convincing the public that they were more reasonable and public-spirited than labor leaders, corporate chiefs wanted to hang on to their advantage . Corporate managers had made gains in public favor by positioning themselves as defenders of freedom. They would lose their hard-won moral weight if they appeared to oppose workers’ freedom to organize unions. Business had to be for freedom, including workers’ freedom. The National Association of Manufacturers therefore argued that “[t]he right of employees to organize in unions . . . should continue to be protected by law.” But workers should also have the “right not to organize” and “should be protected against coercion from any source” including unions.1 Corporate America would protect employees from union tyranny. Let freedom ring! The great civil right to which corporate interests committed themselves in the late 1940s was workers’ freedom not to unionize. For many business leaders this approach was not cynical. They often spoke warmly of workers as “our men” who shared management’s conservative American values but could not say so, owing to union oppression. The idea of protecting workers against union tyranny sold well in the new Congress that took office in 1947. The Republican majority shared the anti-union sentiments of citizens frightened by the great postwar strike wave of 1945 and 1946. On the first day of the new Congress, legislators introduced seventeen anti-labor bills.2 There was a real chance that congressional conservatives might try for a stronger anti-union law than was favored by corporate interest groups, thereby forfeiting the reputation for moderation that business now enjoyed with the public. The decisive figure in the congressional negotiations over a new labor law was Republican Senator Robert A. Taft. A skillful parliamentarian, Killing the Unions Softly 73 he brought in a bill that reflected the shrewdly restrained goals of corporate interest groups. Rather than attempting to...