NPR. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I am Patty Hirsch.

And I'm Adrian Ma. In the recent past, we haven't really thought about unions as being particularly powerful.

But over the past 12 months or so, we've seen unions from Starbucks workers

to auto workers rack up a series of successes.

Yeah, and in the last few days, of course, we've seen the Longshoremen's Union face down the United States Maritime Alliance.

So unions appear to still have some mojo, and this despite the best efforts of business over the years to neuter organized labor.

And those efforts really began with something we heard a lot about while the Longshoreman

strike was on, the Taft-Hartley Act. On today's show, we'll learn what the Taft-Hartley Act.

On today's show we'll learn what the Taft-Hartley Act is, why it was created, and why it is still

such a thorn in the side of unions today.

That's coming up after the break.

The International Longshoremen's associations accord with the United States Maritime Alliance is not a done deal. In fact, it's only a partial deal. They still have to agree on

things like the use of automated equipment and other stuff and if they don't reach an

agreement by January 15th, the strike could resume. Throughout the strike last week, we kept hearing about something called Taft-Hartley.

The president should invoke Taft-Hartley, the pundin said.

The president himself said he didn't believe in Taft Hartley.

So what the heck is Taft Hartley?

So this is an act from 1947 that basically clawed back some of the rights and privileges that had been given to unions and

organized labor just about 10 years earlier. This is Beth Acres. She's an

economist at the right-leaning think tank, the American Enterprise

Institute.

She says Taft Hartley was a response to the National Labor Relations Act, also known as the

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