The Taft-Hartley Act

Описание: The Labor Management Relations Act (LMRA), also called the Taft-Hartley Act, was passed by Congress as an amendment to the 1935 NLRA. Whereas the NLRA identified a series of employee rights and employer unfair labor practices, the LMRA attempted to rebalance employer and employee rights.

The LMRA included a number of new provisions that limited union and labor rights in the United States. It outlawed several types of union actions that had been used since passage of the Wagner Act. These included jurisdictional strikes, which union members used to push companies to provide them with certain types of jobs. In addition, the law limited union shops, where every employee was required to become a member of the union within a certain time period.

Finally, the LMRA provided that supervisors had no right to be protected if they chose to participate in union activities, so if a supervisor participated in unionizing activities, the company was allowed to terminate them. In addition to the limitations on unions and labor, the LMRA created mechanisms for decertifying unions through an election process, and it allowed the states to pass a right-to-work law.

Right-to-work laws work directly against union shops by declaring that every employee in a company has a right to work, even if they choose not to join the union representing the shop. Union shops cannot be set up in states that pass right-to-work laws.