With his party in the majority, Hartley served as the chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor in the 80th United States Congress. Along with United States Senator Robert A. Taft who was Chairman of the Labor and Public Welfare Committee, the next year he introduced legislation to curb what he felt were the worst of labor's excesses. The resultant Taft-Hartley Act was a major revision of the 1935 Wagner Act (officially known as the National Labor Relations Act) and represented the first major revision of a New Deal act passed by the post-war Congress. The act placed limits on labor tactics such as the secondary boycott, and gave each state the option to enact right-to-work laws if it so chose (28 states have done so). This provision, known as Section 14(b), was one of the Act's most controversial.