The Daft-Heartless Act
By Richard Girard
"The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour."
Bertrand Russell (18721970), British philosopher, mathematician. A Free Man's Worship and Other Essays, chapter 1 (1976).
I was listening to David Sirota on his morning show on 760AM KKZN here in Denver on Labor Day, and in the second hour of his show he asked what is wrong with the organized labor movement here in America?
He stated that membership in unions has been declining since its height of 34% just after the Second World War. This was happening in spite of the most recent polls that show 50% plus of American workers would belong to a union if they could. Mr. Sirota further stated that according to a study by Cornell University, twenty thousand employees are fired every year from their jobs--even though it is illegal to do so--for union activities, including attempting to organize a union at their place of work.
I will name the initial source of the difficulty--which Mr. Sirota seemed either unwilling or unable to--that has been used for the last sixty-three years as a hammer to pound America's workers back into their pre-1930's, subservient position.
The Taft-Hartley Labor Act of 1947.
The Taft-Hartley Act was not an act designed to merely correct any excesses in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, but to cut the legs out from under the labor movement in the United States. It drove many people out of organized labor--including many of the best spokesmen and organizers--for no other reason than their having a brief flirtation with socialism (or even Communism) in the 1920's and 1930's.
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