Republicans and Big Labor, a Failed Courtship (full series)
Before Franklin Roosevelt | Wagner and Taft-Hartley
The Two Minds of Tricky Dick | Reagan-Bush and Beyond
The Two Minds of Tricky Dick
In 1960, Robert Kennedy’s brother John F. Kennedy was elected president, bringing labor’s liberal wing into the White House, as UAW leader Walter Reuther was an ally of the Kennedys. When Republicans nominated firebrand conservative Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) for president in 1964, even the occasionally right-leaning Jimmy Hoffa backed Jack Kennedy’s liberal Democratic successor, President Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson aggressively expanded the welfare state and sought to expand union power, with the massive Congressional Democratic majorities that rode his coattails pushing legislation in 1965 to repeal 14(b), the provision of Taft-Hartley that explicitly authorizes state laws prohibiting compulsory union fees (called right to work laws). Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-IL) led a bipartisan filibuster that protected 14(b), and the 1966 elections narrowed the Democratic majority such that the repeal of 14(b) was dropped.
In 1968, President Johnson withdrew his campaign for reelection and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a long-time favorite of the AFL-CIO, became the Democratic nominee. Opposing him was former Vice President Richard Nixon, whose labor record was mixed. He had voted for Taft-Hartley in Congress, but opposed efforts to establish a national right-to-work law. After his decisive but narrow victory, President Nixon pursued a middle path on labor relations, reaching out to AFL-CIO head George Meany and wining and dining the grandees of the union federation.
Tricky Dick’s friendly relations with union bigwigs did not apply to them all. Leonard Woodcock, Walter Reuther’s successor as the head of the self-consciously progressive United Auto Workers, was named on President Nixon’s first list of 20 “political enemies.” He was joined in that distinction by AFL-CIO political chief Alexander Barkan. Lane Kirkland, then George Meany’s number-two at the AFL-CIO itself, was listed as one of the administration’s “political opponents,” though the drafter of the list noted dryly “but we must deal with him.”
But in 1972, Nixon’s outreach and overreach by the Democratic left wing paid off, sort of. Democrats nominated Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), a darling of anti-Vietnam War and social-liberal activists loathed by Meany and his old-labor Cold Warriors. Facing the choice of McGovern or Nixon, the AFL-CIO, for the only time in its united existence to date, elected not to endorse the Democratic candidate and remained neutral, vowing to focus its Committee on Political Education (COPE) activities on supporting pro-labor candidates (mostly Democrats) for Congress.
Some labor leaders went farther than mere neutrality in support of Nixon. Prominent among them was Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York president Peter J. Brennan. Brennan was a controversial figure, as he pushed back against construction-industry racial-integration initiatives pushed by then-liberal Republican New York City Mayor John Lindsay. The Nixon administration had pushed similar affirmative-action initiatives on federal construction projects itself.
Brennan rose to national prominence after the May 1970 “hard hat riot,” in which construction workers, many of whom claimed to be Vietnam War veterans, attacked student anti-Vietnam War demonstrators and stormed New York City Hall demanding the American flag, which Mayor Lindsay had ordered lowered to half-mast in mourning for the student demonstrators killed at Kent State University, be raised to full mast. Brennan denied orchestrating the riot, though eyewitnesses and participants claimed union shop stewards encouraged or directed the demonstrators. Brennan organized a later march through lower Manhattan to show support for the Vietnam War, and at the end of May, Brennan met with President Nixon and presented him with a hard hat in commemoration of the event.
Nixon’s re-election campaign commissioned Brennan to drum up labor unionist support for the Republican candidate. Supporters of conservative outreach to labor unions as such (like former U.S. Representative Peter King (R-NY), a labor-favorite Republican during his time in office) often tout the hard hat men (if not their riot) as evidence that going through Brennan was necessary. However, it seems likely that the hard hat demonstrations merely revealed a fissure that already existed between Big Labor’s national bosses who found themselves on Nixon’s adversaries’ lists and the working men and their families those bosses claimed to represent.
When Nixon defeated McGovern, Brennan was rewarded. Shortly after Nixon’s second inauguration, Nixon nominated Brennan for labor secretary. Brennan and Nixon did little related to collective bargaining, though the pension law ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974) was enacted during Brennan’s time as labor secretary.
Meany’s Man
In August 1974, the misdeeds of President Nixon’s reelection campaigners caught up with the President. Facing an expected impeachment and removal from office, Richard Nixon became the first (and to date, only) president to resign his office before the end of his term. His successor, the appointed Vice President Gerald Ford (Nixon’s running mate, elected Vice President Spiro Agnew, had himself resigned over tax issues), had been House Minority Leader from 1965 through his appointment as vice president in 1973.
Ford was not interested in continuing giving Secretary Brennan patronage. In early 1975, with liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller safely ensconced as Vice President, Ford reshuffled the Cabinet he had inherited from the resigned Nixon. Brennan was out; he turned down an offer to take a consolation post of U.S. Ambassador to Ireland, instead returning to lead his old union, just as Martin Durkin had in 1953.
Succeeding Brennan was John Dunlop, an academic economist from Harvard specializing in labor-relations negotiations. Dunlop had served extensively in government, sitting on the National Labor Relations Board from 1948 through 1952 and on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1964 to 1965.
Dunlop, like Durkin, was tasked with shepherding a legislative “compromise” to empower organized labor under a Republican presidency (though Democrats controlled Congress under Ford, unlike the Republicans during Durkin’s time in Eisenhower’s Cabinet). The issue was “common situs picketing,” a proposed change to rules from the Taft-Hartley Act restricting labor actions against third-party businesses rather than the immediate parties to a labor dispute (known as “secondary boycotts”).
The courts, applying Taft-Hartley’s restrictions on secondary boycotts, had prohibited picketing against a building site contractor if such picketing induced workers for other contractors on the building site not to work. These findings later led to rules allowing job sites to have a reserved entrance for disputing contractors and union members and that was eligible to be picketed. Construction unions chafed at these restrictions, and Big Labor pushed “common situs” rules that would free unions to picket at multi-contractor job sites.
Secretary Dunlop supported the “common situs” legislation and argued for its passage. Opposed to the bill were the right wing of the Republican Party, led by former California Governor and likely 1976 Ford primary challenger Ronald Reagan, and the activist National Right to Work Committee, whose president Reed Larson dubbed Dunlop “an Ivy League mouthpiece for George Meany and his union hierarchy.” Hundreds of thousands of mailers were returned to the White House calling on President Ford to uphold the Taft-Hartley Consensus and veto the “common situs” legislation. As the legislation reached Ford’s desk, the influential Evans-Novak Political Report thought Ford’s dalliance with Big Labor inexplicable, writing, “With organized labor making him a punching bag a year before the [1976] elections, he cannot win significant union support no matter what he does.”
On December 22, 1975, President Ford announced his intention to veto the common situs legislation, and he carried out the veto shortly after the turn of the year. Dunlop took this as something of a double cross. In an interview before his death, Dunlop said that “He [President Ford] asked me to support it; the issue was not my idea.” Dunlop blamed Ford’s switch on political considerations related to Reagan’s looming primary challenge and resigned shortly thereafter.
Big Labor remembered what Dunlop had tried to do for its institutional power. After the union-backed Democrat Jimmy Carter unseated President Ford in 1976, AFL-CIO head George Meany and number-two man Lane Kirkland both declared Dunlop “their only choice for Secretary of Labor,” according to a contemporary New York Times report. When Dunlop faced opposition from ethnic-minority and women’s-interest groups, Carter instead chose Ray Marshall, who would later co-found the union-backed think tank Economic Policy Institute after his time in government.
In the next installment, union members stick with President Ronal Reagan despite him firing the air traffic controllers.
