[7]: 76 Taft had co-authored the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, legislation which significantly restricted the use of the strike, outlawed the closed shop, imposed a new class of unfair labor practices (ULPs) on unions, and gave states the right to enact right-to-work laws.
[7]: 72–91 [14] Martin P. Durkin, president of the United Association of Plumbers and Steamfitters, had been appointed Secretary of Labor but was considering leaving the department because of opposition within the administration and lack of agreement on the Taft-Hartley and NLRA amendments.
"[20] Farmer advocated wholesale re-examination of the major decision of the Herzog board, especially in those areas restricting employer freedom of speech, permitting bargaining during the contract, and giving unions preferential treatment in captive audience meetings.
[7]: 98–99 Farmer was consistently in the minority in NLRB decisions during his first two months on the board, outvoted by the holdover Truman appointees (Houston, Styles, Ivar H. Peterson, and Abe Murdock).
As the effective date of Styles' resignation approached, Eisenhower seemed ready to appoint Lawrence E. Gooding, chairman of the Wisconsin Employment Relations Board, to the NLRB as his replacement.
[35] As the Labor post sat unfilled, Chief Justice of the United States Fred M. Vinson died unexpectedly from a heart attack on September 8, 1953.
[37] Shortly after the Warren appointment, Senator Hubert Humphrey made national headlines after he charged that Farmer and Rodgers were already changing settled policy at the NLRB, and that Eisenhower intended to "pack" the Board with right-wing appointees.
[7]: 99–100 On November 23, he wrote to the President: "It is readily apparent that the person appointed by you to fill the remaining Board vacancy will be in a position to determine in large measure the extent to which the policies of your administration will be effectuated by this agency.
[42] By December, with Murdock continuing to abstain, the Farmer-led Board reversed Bonwit Teller in Livingston Shirt Corp., 107 NLRB 400, (1953), and established a new rule in Peerless Plywood Co., 107 NLRB 427 (1953) (in which both employers and unions were barred from making captive audience presentations 24 hours before an election, but the employer could make such speeches before this period without giving the union equal time).
[43] The Farmer Board also held[45] that Section 8(c) of the Taft-Hartley Act should be applied to representation elections (overturning General Shoe), and that an employer assertion that it would appeal any union victory in the courts was not a per se ULP but a statement of legal rights.
[46] Beeson was a personal friend of Vice President Richard Nixon and United States Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. (who had strongly supported the Eisenhower campaign in 1952).
[50] Democratic Senator Herbert H. Lehman pointed to a newspaper report in which Beeson claimed he intended to return to his labor relations job after leaving the NLRB.
[51][7]: 328 Democratic Senators Paul Douglas, John F. Kennedy, and Lehman all expressed concern that Beeson was a "company man" and could not administer the law in a neutral way, and won a two-day postponement of his confirmation hearing on January 20.
[56] Davies said that Beeson had, instead, sought a one-year leave of absence without pay or benefits, and asked that he be permitted to continue to make payments into the company pension plan.
[7]: 103, 330 Describing the Board's actions to Sherman Adams (Eisenhower's White House Chief of Staff), Farmer said the NLRB had created a "no man's land" in which the law did not apply.
In Peerless Plywood Co.[72] Farmer, Rodgers, and Peterson agreed that employers may not hold captive audience meetings within 24 hours of a union representation election.
[70]: 137 Two years later, in Economic Machinery Co., Farmer led a unanimous board in holding that one-on-one conversations between the employer and employee about the union is inherently coercive.
In BVD Company, Inc.,[77] Farmer and a majority of the board refused to order the reinstatement of striking workers who picketed peacefully when other, unidentified individuals committed strike-related violence.
The question, the majority said, was not whether the terminations were right or wrong, but whether the purposes of the NLRA (e.g., labor peace) would be achieved by restoring the workers to their jobs and awarding back pay.
In Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Co.,[78] the union engaged in a whipsaw strike: Employees randomly struck different locations of the same employer for a short period of time.
In a concurrence in Valley City Furniture, Farmer said it was "unduly harsh and legalistic" to allow an employer to "engage in every and all forms of retaliatory or unlawfully motivated discrimination."
In Whitin Machine Works,[95] Farmer joined a majority in holding that unions had the right to see employer payroll data prior to contract negotiations.
In his opinion in Aiello Dairy Farms, Farmer argued that the change in policy was need to prevent unions from wasting the board's time and the public's money by seeking two chances to prove majority status.
[121][122] But after the appointment of more conservative members to the NLRB, Shopping Kart Food Market was overturned in 1979 in General Knit of California, Inc.,[123] which adopted the Hollywood Ceramics standard again.
He also advocated new legislation to take the issue out of the hands of the NLRB and give it to an agency with greater investigative and prosecutorial authority so that the problem of communist control of labor unions could be more fully dealt with.
[144] Finally, on May 31, 1954, the Farmer board denied the protection of the NLRA to the International Fur & Leather Workers Union after its president, Ben Gold, was indicted for perjury for filing false anti-communist affidavits.
The early favorite was NLRB member Philip Ray Rodgers, and his candidacy was pushed by Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks and Senator William F. Knowland (R-CA).
In October 1959, Eisenhower appointed Farmer to a three-man fact-finding panel investigating a strike by the International Longshoremen's Association which had shut down ports all along the East Coast of the United States.
The panel was set up under provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act which provided for an injunction to bring an end to a strike if warranted by national security or economic necessity.
[196] That same year, Boyle forced a 30 percent increase in miner pension benefits through the three-person board of trustees of the UMW Welfare and Retirement Fund.