National Labor Relations Act
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The National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act) is a 1935 United States federal law that protects the rights of most workers in the private sector to organize labor unions, to engage in collective bargaining, and to take part in strikes and other forms of concerted activity in support of their demands. The Act does not, on the other hand, cover those workers who are covered by the Railway Labor Act, agricultural employees, domestic employees, supervisors, independent contractors and some close relatives of individual employers.
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[edit] The original act
The Wagner-Connery Act — signed into law on July 5, 1935 — established a federal agency, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), with the power to investigate and decide on charges of unfair labor practices and to conduct elections in which workers would have the opportunity to decide whether they wanted to be represented by a union. The NLRB was given more extensive powers than the much weaker organization of the same name established under the National Industrial Recovery Act, which the United States Supreme Court had declared unconstitutional.
[edit] Enforcement of the act
In the first few years of the Wagner Act many employers simply refused to recognize it as law. The United States Supreme Court had already struck down a number of other statutes passed during the New Deal on the grounds that Congress did not have the constitutional authority to enact them under its power to regulate interstate commerce. Most of the initial appellate court decisions reached the same conclusion, finding the Act unconstitutional and therefore unenforceable. Many unions did not bother to use the NLRB in the first few years of its passage, choosing instead to strike for recognition, using methods such as the sitdown strike used by the United Auto Workers in the Flint Sit-Down Strike and dozens of other labor disputes in the mid-1930s.
It was not until the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the statute in 1937 in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation that the Wagner Act became law in practical terms as well. That was a surprising decision, issued as the controversy over Roosevelt’s “court packing plan” was still hot, marking a fundamental change in United States constitutional law and in the power of the federal government.
The Supreme Court, for its part, generally upheld the NLRB's interpretation of the Wagner Act in those early years, but imposed two major limitations on it. The Court held in NLRB v. Mackay Radio & Telegraph Co.. in 1938 that, while employers could not fire workers for going out on strike, they could permanently replace them — a seemingly semantic distinction that, in practice, sharply limited workers' right to strike. The Court later held in National Labor Relations Board v. Virginia Electric & Power Co. that the First Amendment to the Constitution barred the NLRB from making it illegal for employers to express their opposition to unionism, so long as they did not try to coerce or threaten workers with reprisals for exercising their rights.
The act was immediately controversial. The American Federation of Labor and some employers accused the NLRB of favoring the Congress of Industrial Organizations, particularly when determining whether to hold union elections in plantwide, or wall-to-wall, units, which the CIO usually sought, or to hold separate elections in separate craft units, which the craft unions in the AFL favored. While the NLRB initially favored plant-wide units, which tacitly favored the CIO's industrial unionism, it retreated to a compromise position several years later under pressure from Congress that allowed craft unions to seek separate representation of smaller groups of workers at the same time that another union was seeking a wall-to-wall unit.
Employers and their allies in Congress also criticized the NLRB for its expansive definition of "employee" and for allowing supervisors and plant guards to form unions, sometimes affiliated with the unions that represented the employees whom they were supposed to supervise or police. Many accused the NLRB of a general pro-union and anti-employer bias, pointing to the Board's controversial decisions in such areas as employer free speech and "mixed motive" cases, in which the NLRB held that an employer violated the Act by firing an employee for anti-union reasons, even if the employee had engaged in misconduct. In addition, employers campaigned over the years to outlaw a number of union practices such as closed shops, secondary boycotts, jurisdictional strikes, mass picketing, strikes in violation of contractual no-strike clauses, pension and health and welfare plans sponsored by unions and multi-employer bargaining.
[edit] Amendment of the act
Opponents of the Wagner Act introduced several hundred bills to amend or repeal the law in the decade after its passage. All of them failed or were vetoed until the passage of the Taft-Hartley amendments in 1947 for such things as treble damage awards and mere sight checks of union authorization cards for a union to be certified as the collective bargaining representative.
[edit] See also
- Duty of fair representation
- Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act
- NLRB election procedures
- Norris-LaGuardia Act
- Right-to-work law
- WPA
- Taft-Hartley Act
- Unfair labor practice
- United States labor law
- Sen. Robert Wagner (D-NY)
- National Labor Relations Board
- National Labor Board
- Union Organizer
[edit] References
- Morris, Charles. The Blue Eagle at Work: Reclaiming Democratic Rights in the American Workplace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8014-4317-2
- Schlesinger, Arthur M. The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal: 1933-1935. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958. ISBN 0-618-34086-6
[edit] External links
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