Senate Overrides Veto: Taft-Hartley Limits Union Power

Congress handed American labor its biggest legislative defeat in a generation and did it over the president’s veto. On June 23, 1947, the Senate voted 68 to 25 to override Harry Truman’s veto of the Taft-Hartley Act, following the House’s override three days earlier. The Labor Management Relations Act fundamentally restructured the balance of power between unions and employers that had been established by the Wagner Act of 1935. The political backdrop was a wave of massive strikes in 1945-46 that disrupted steel, coal, railroads, and meatpacking. More than five million workers walked off the job in 1946 alone, the largest strike wave in American history. Republicans swept the 1946 midterm elections with promises to rein in union power, and Senator Robert Taft of Ohio and Representative Fred Hartley of New Jersey crafted legislation that labor leaders would call a "slave labor bill." Taft-Hartley banned closed shops, where only union members could be hired, and allowed states to pass right-to-work laws prohibiting union security agreements. The law required union leaders to sign affidavits swearing they were not Communists, authorized the president to impose 80-day cooling-off periods on strikes that threatened national security, and barred unions from contributing to federal political campaigns. Truman’s veto message called the bill "a clear threat to the successful working of our democratic society." The override had lasting consequences. Right-to-work laws spread across the South and West, weakening union density in those regions for decades. The Communist affidavit requirement purged leftist organizers from the labor movement and aligned unions with Cold War foreign policy. Truman’s veto, though unsuccessful, cemented his support among union voters and helped fuel his upset victory in the 1948 presidential election.