The first thing to realize is that "killed" is a bit of a strong word - the labor movement in the USA still has over 14 million members. But that is a far cry from the coverage it had in the 40s.
So how did it get there? I'd point at 5 illustrative moments and trends.
First, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Law. Labor unions in the US (mostly) had been governed by the Wagner Act (1935), which guaranteed/protected the rights to form unions, collective bargaining, and collective action (strikes). It also formed the NLRB. But after WWII, the government passed Taft-Hartley - which put more restrictions on unions and their tactics. An example of those is banning secondary boycotts (where workers go to boycott places that buy/sell the products their employer makes) and solidarity strikes (where you go on strike to help people who aren't under your direct employer). Taft-Hartley also made closed-shops (where workers would only be hired from union members) illegal, and opened up the right for states to make their own laws on labor matters - which is what has allowed for the proliferation of "right to work" laws. These aren't all the restrictions and consequences of the law - but it's some of the big ones.
Second, Operation Dixie. This was a major drive by the CIO (one of the two major federations of unions at the time, with the AFL) to unionize the south of the USA. This operation failed miserably, for a number of reasons (race, communism, religion, already improving conditions, and in some areas, memory). If we look big picture at US labor and work over the latter half of the 20th century, a lot of manufacturing moved from North to South - and with the failure of Operation Dixie, that also meant more unionized to less unionized.
Third, the Red Scare and the subsequent expulsion of communists from unions. Of the two union federations, the CIO was the more radical (and had experienced far larger growth in the preceding decade). During that time many of its most effective organizers were communists - they tended to be highly militant and full of energy. But in the midst of the start of the cold war, their presence was seen as a problem - and CIO leadership took steps to remove communists from their midst, forcing leaders to sign non-communist affidavits and kicking out unions that wouldn't. So instead of focusing on how well those unions were run, it was a focus on getting rid of the reds at the time. 11 unions were expelled, from among the most radicals, and the CIOs membership dipped. From a postwar high of 6.3 million, in 1954 the CIO had 4.6 million and merged back with the AFL.
This purge of communists and left led unions, along with a number of other steps the labor movement took to show that they weren't communists, would have further impact later. They'd removed many of their most committed, most radical organizers - and started a trend towards focusing more inwards on their own members, and more limited strikes aimed at negotiating their contracts. Strikes are a good example, as they transitioned from being often violent affairs to tests of endurance, or almost 'ritualized'.
Fourth, public unions (and the air traffic controller's strike). As it became harder to unionize the private sector, unions increasingly turned to the public sector - government employees. These had been growing rapidly in the period from the late 50s to 70s - and when states were controlled by liberals, it was an easy job to unionize. But they tended to also be more compartmentalized (teachers in x district, but not y, could organize, vs the industrial line unions could have), and more restricted on collective bargaining and striking. But as promising as the public sector seemed, and despite the very real unionization of it, it was also far more vulnerable to public opinion and the political context.
That public opinion started to shift in the mid 70s, with an economic recession highlighting the strikes and expenditures on city budgets. The air traffic controller strike in 1981 is a prime example of that changing opinion, when Reagan went in front of a national audience and fired all the ones who didn't report the next day. Within 2 months the union in question was destroyed in an incredibly public way.
Finally, the growing shift of manufacturing and other employment away from the United States to overseas. International competition started to cut into profits, making it harder to get concessions from business. Plants were closed, and the threat of them closing was also a dangerous tool. Some of this has forced unions into more 'defensive' tactics of protecting gains made in the 50s and 60s, vs aggressively trying to get additional victories.
None of these solely explain how Unions in the US have fallen in membership, opinion, and power, but they are some of the important landmarks of the period after WWII. Government regulation at the state and federal level put new restrictions on and weakened unions, unions failed to organize the south and kicked out communists. Their push to organize the public sector was initially successful, but stalled out more easily. And finally the changing economic climate and globalized world has changed the world unions live in.
My main source for this post "Working Hard for the American Dream - Workers and Their Unions, World War I to the Present" by Randi Storch.
For operation Dixie, much also came from "Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South" by Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf.
There's a lot of different responses to this, but some of the better ones (in my opinion) have a few things in common, which are the effectiveness of US anti-labor law, the structure of US unions and collective bargaining agreements and the way those things have shaped labor history here. I will note that this is something that is a very active debate in the labor movement and among labor historians. My perspective is as someone who has helped research, write and lead trainings on labor law and labor history for the union I have worked with over the past decade. I'm happy to answer any questions.
The most concise history from this perspective is from Joe Burns' "Reviving the Strike," where he describes the formation of what he describes as "the straightjacket of US labor law". He argues that at numerous different points in the early to mid 20th century, the response to major strike actions such as the strike waves of 1934-38 and the strike waves of 1946-47 was to develop a carrot-and-stick approach that allowed the government to compel employers to recognize unions through legal means, but then used those same legal means to prevent unions from taking actions that were effective but disruptive to the economy. The key laws in this period are the National Labor Relations Act in 1934, which created the legal apparatus that unions still use to navigate elections and charges of "unfair labor practices", and the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which made secondary strikes--tactics that multiple unions had been using to great success--illegal. In the 1950s, concerns about corruption in labor unions led to the passage of Landrum-Griffin, or the LMRDA, which on the one hand gave union members the rights to use the legal apparatus set up earlier to charge their union and its leaders with violating their rights, but also demanded all union officers sign an affidavit that they weren't members of the Communist Party. That last part was struck down, but not before many left-wing union officials and leaders were thrown out.
On the question of structure, Robert Fitch's "Solidarity for Sale" argues that the peculiar way that American unions are structured through exclusive bargaining agreements and automatic dues leads to American unions being, in effect, spectacularly weak and spectacularly wealthy when compared to their European counterparts. He enumerates some of the worst-case scenarios here, but argues that the financial incentives are set up in a way that union leaders have far more pressure on them to maintain good relationships with management in order to preserve a contract that promises them a steady flow of dues, than to be an effective organization for workers. Thaddeus Russell's "Out of the Jungle," a history of Jimmy Hoffa's rise to power and the rapid growth of the Teamsters, makes this same argument at times, that the lack of competition between unions means there is no pressure on them to expand and be more effective for their members for fear that another union may sweep in and run things better.
Finally, there's a fairly dark perspective found in some of the writings in Detroit from the 50s-70s, such as Jimmy Boggs' "American Revolution" and others in his circle, which saw the leadership of the United Auto Workers, as early as the 50s, effectively plan their own obsolescence, refusing to fight against automation and plant closures, instead working with management to prevent workers from participating in those fights in exchange for pension guarantees. As plants worked down and gradually shuttered or moved to new, non-union plants (which UAW did not actively seek to organize), Boggs claims that UAW's emphasis was on providing for laid off workers and was hostile towards workers organizing around the sped-up pace of work and poor conditions that allowed smaller work-forces to take over from larger ones, which is attested to by the work of several rank-and-file organizations which took to shutting down some of these plants around the late 60s; the best book on this period is "Detroit: I do Mind Dying". It's also my favorite book.
Works Cited:
Joe Burns, "Reviving the Strike"
Robert Fitch, "Solidarity for Sale"
Thaddeus Russell, "Out of the Jungle"
Jimmy Boggs, "American Revolution, Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook"
Marvin Surkin & Dan Georgakas, "Detroit: I Do Mind Dying"
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The two top level comments are both about post-war America, so I thought I'd jump in with a discussion of how the Labor Movement got to that point from 1901 through the wars. I'll use Seattle labor, as that's what I know most about.
In 1877 a terrible compromise was struck to give Rutherford B Hayes the presidency (in a contested election against Democrat Samuel Tilden) to remove federal support for biracial southern legislatures, and Reconstruction was effectively over. In the period since the end of the civil war (1865) and onwards, 4 million freed blacks were joining the economy. Another decade of wars destroyed the Native American populations and the Dawes Act of 1887 broke up reservations into farms and then made the 'extra' available to white settlers.
Immigrants from China numbered only 180,000 or so, versus the 7.5 million who entered from Europe, britain, scandinavia, etc (out of a country of 70 million), and they became an emblem of the 'unassimilable immigrant'. So when we say the labor movement, we're talking about the White labor movement. Freed slaves and their children weren't generally invited to join unions, and both chinese and black workers were seen as working cheaper than white labor.
My family was personally involved in the shameful 'Chinese Riots' of Seattle in 1886. White labor movement types loaded all the Chinese on a train, forcibly, and evicted them from Seattle and Tacoma, sending them to Portland. The subtext here was the portland was even more overtly white supremacist, and it was expected that they'd 'take care of them'. My great, great, great granduncle Peter Peyto Good 'died of shame' after a jail sentence for his part in the action.
So the labor movement at the turn of the century reflected a long period of national industrialization and the unionization of those industries, while unskilled laborers of color were mostly locked out of those movements. In 1900 the biggest union of the west was the Shingle Weavers Union, because cedar shingles was a HUGE trade - Historian, Norman H. Clark described the Shingle Weavers’ as, "The most militant and articulate representatives on the Trade Council were the shingle weavers, whose union was by far the largest and strongest." So when we say 'the labor union movement' we're talking about specific industries who had their own rise and fall in terms of jobs provided, percentage of the economy, etc. My point here is that there never was one labor movement per se, it was always in the act of forming itself, gaining organization, falling apart, and it was in this context that we get into WWI.
I wrote a bunch of stuff but it's too much detail, so here's the basics on The Everett Massacre:
In the year the US entered WWI (1917), this huge union:
They called a strike when Everett wouldn't go along. Goons attack the picketers, more picketers show up, police arrest the picketers, a bunch of wobblies (IWW) got on a boat to Everett, the Sheriff OPENS FIRE on the boat and kills a bunch. The president sends a commission to force everyone to the table, because WWI is underway by this point. On March 1st, 1918 the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT orders an 8 hour day.
Okay! So now we're in post WWI - The Seattle Strike. The Seattle Strike was the FIRST national general strike - my point here is that labor movements were still forming, and trying things, and trying to become the kinds of unions we imagine they were. WWI nationalistic sentiment meant that the Shingleweavers had to disavow the IWW, and the communist revolution of 1919 made 'commie' a curseword. The Seattle Strike is often described as a 'success' by labor at the time - for showing that it could be orderly and not anarchic. The mayor of Seattle allegedly said, "I want the hospitals open and the roads clear," but was otherwise supportive.
The _problem_ was that it didn't ask for much. It was a solidarity strike with the shingleweavers union, which did get its demands and thrived after. Strikes, however, cost a lot of stored up capital and halt the economy, and post-strike labor found itself significantly weakened. Post war recession meant that when the anti-unionists called for Open Shop policies, they weren't in a great position to respond.
From 1921 to the 1929 crash, unions fought and lost a little ground to open shops, recession, British Columbia anti-union competition, and more. By the time of WWII and the Taft Hartley act that people are mentioning, the Unions had won the 8 hour day but lost the overall fight for closed shops. They won greater worker safety protections, the elimination of child and women labor, but entered WWII in a weakened state to where they had been during the Seattle Strike of 1919. The Great Depression certainly took a huge bite out of the power of labor, and then conscription in 1941 took workers from all areas of production that weren't war related.
Now, back to that racism topic - black workers were brought to Seattle to work at Boeing in large numbers. Others were drafted into the war and, upon returning, went to New York and other major urban centers rather than returning to what was for many a wage-slave job in the South. While Shingleweavers had actually worked with the Chinese Labor Association during their attempts to prevent owner control, there was still a deeply segregated movement. As women and African Americans entered the work force and replaced white draftees, it provided the foundation of internecine conflict once those workers returned from the war and expected those other populations to give way to their dominance. This failure of inclusivity certainly weakened them, creating the very scab population they were against.
Here's some books on the topics:
Clark, Norman H. Mill Town: A Social History of Everett Washington. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1970.
Dembo,Jonathon, Unions and Politics in Washington State 1885- 1935.
Schwantes, Carlos A. Radical Heritage: Labor, Socialism, and Reform in Washington and British Columbia, 1885- 1917.