Theodor de Bry’s 1590 engraving of Secoton, from John White’s watercolors. Public domain.
The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, passed over President Truman’s veto, narrowed the Wagner Act, banned the closed shop, and let states outlaw compulsory union membership.
A stretched household in a union plant could still bargain, and it could be ordered back to work if a strike was judged a national emergency.
A household that did not want to join a union gained, in states that passed the laws, a legal right to refuse that the closed shop had denied.
An employer regained tools the 1935 act had taken away, including more room to argue against a union and a path to operate in a state that banned the union shop.
The statute, called Taft-Hartley, also limited some union political spending and some boycotts, and it let the president ask a court to delay a strike that threatened national health or safety.
Workers kept the right to organize.
They kept it inside a narrower fence, and the fence was the point of the fight over the veto.
Labor Management Relations Act, 61 Stat. 136 (1947)