Conservative View on Employment Rights

Robert A. Taft was a conservative Republican pushed out of the 1952 presidential race by the party’s liberal wing, which favored the political naïve Eisenhower. The Goldwater candidacy was the 1964 last gasp of conservatism among Republicans, and only one Republican candidate for president today presents conservative views that Taft would approve of.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net

“We can all agree that full employment at good wages for every man and every woman who wishes to work in the United States is a goal devoutly to be wished,” Taft told the National Industrial Conference Board.

But it could not be an absolute right; that notion was impractical. The Declaration of Independence “mentions only the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Constitution, while promising to secure blessings of liberty, only proposes to promote the general welfare.” A guarantee of work would be impossible to fulfill, and was “wholly inconsistent with the very freedom which has produced and animated the machine which provides jobs at good wages.”

President Roosevelt, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations which backed this proposal, had talked of guaranteeing fifty or sixty million jobs. But, Taft inquired, “What is full employment and what is a good wage? Is there to be a guarantee of any job a man wants in any industry or is it to be such a job as the Government chooses to provide?...”

“It is clear to me that any direct guarantee of full-time jobs at good wages would involve the Government in the placement of every man and woman in the country, and ultimately the assignment by the Government of every man and woman to the job selected by the Government. This is exactly the system pursued in Russia today.”

Taft’s other arguments in this speech demonstrated that the concept of full employment could be realized only in a socialist state – and even there only at the cost of diminished production and of total direction of labor; it would be fatal to the character of the people, and contrary to the material interest of every wage-earner.”

(The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft, Russell Kirk & James McClellan, Fleet Press, 1967, pp. 115-116)