Stacked Deck: The Rules of the Game Won’t Let the Unions Win
[Excerpt] At the center of labor's problems is not the Reagan NLRB, but the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Even a pro-labor Board would be hamstrung by that law's antilabor biases. "Repeal Taft-Hartley," once a powerful rallying cry in the labor movement, today sounds as compelling as "Who Lost China?" And yet Taft-Hartley established the legal structure that has squeezed organized labor into its present tight spot Business Week, hardly a friend of the unions, foresaw the process in a 1948 editorial: The Taft-Hartley Act, the magazine said, "went too far. . . . Given a few million unemployed in America, given an Administration in Washington which was not pro-union-and the Taft-Hartley Act conceivably could wreck the labor movement."
