In 1976, only two years after the National Labor Relations Board decided to deny certification to unions with a record of discrimination, it called a hearing to reconsider the case of Bekins Moving & Storage. As the Board’s announcement noted, the Bekins decision had garnered only a bare majority, and two of its supporters, Chairman Edward Miller and fellow Republican Ralph Kennedy, had since left the agency. At first glance, Miller’s replacement appeared likely to support the Bekins majority. Republican Betty Southard Murphy was the first woman on the NLRB and the only female head of a major regulatory agency. A former international journalist and hard-boiled labor lawyer, Murphy had already smashed one glass ceiling at the helm of the Wage and Hour Division in Nixon’s Department of Labor. Murphy was described as a “gingerly feminist”: someone “who can recount years of indignities as a professional woman but who does not make a point of doing so.” That said, she supported the Equal Rights Amendment and “civil rights and equal employment opportunity for workers.” But the possibility that employers might accuse unions of racial discrimination simply to avoid recognizing them worried Murphy. Her upcoming hearing would reconsider Bekins in light of this concern.

In the late 1970s, Bekins, and the workplace Constitution on which it rested, scrambled political alliances. Assigning labels like “liberal” and “conservative” was tricky. Those resisting unionization were a much broader, more ideologically diverse group than the anti–New Deal conservatives who gave birth to the right-to-work movement. Similarly, those defending workers’ right to organize stretched beyond New Deal Democrats. Yet one thing was clear: nearly all who supported retaining Bekins made no pretense of seeking to harmonize civil and labor rights. More than ideology or politics, opposition to unions drove their support.