Last week I was lecturing about the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and its vast consequences for the labor movement. A student raised his hand and asked if President Biden had used Taft-Hartley to intervene when rail workers threatened to strike a couple years ago.
It had been awhile since I had thought about that episode. I tried to dredge up some information from memory, but after largely failing to do so, I promised the student I would look into it and report back to the class.
It turns out that the key law in play was the Railway Labor Act of 1926, not Taft-Hartley. The 1926 law governs labor relations in railways and, after amendment in 1936, airlines. It empowers the president to create a Presidential Emergency Board to to investigate and recommend a settlement. The creation of such a board effectively declares a sixty-day cooling off period during which workers cannot strike. This is the authority President Biden used in 2022, but when four of twelve unions rejected the board’s recommended settlement and declared their intent to strike on December 9, the president turned to Congress and asked legislators to pass a law that imposed the terms.
The details of the 2022 impasse between twelve labor unions and employers were complex, but union members recognized that the nearly one-hundred-year-old law tipped the scales in favor of their employers. Michael Baldwin, president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, one of four unions that rejected the presidential board’s terms, told CNN that Congress’s intervention prevented the workers “from reaching the end of our process” thereby taking away “the strength and ability that we have to force…the railroads to…do the right thing.” In this case the right thing involved granting workers a handful of sick days.
While Biden had not drawn on Taft-Hartley, there was a connection I could have made in class. Both the Railway Labor Act and the Taft-Hartley Act stipulate that workers have the right to strike unless the federal government says they can’t.
michaelrosenow.com 