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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.
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Encyclopedia
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.
The origins of the Act
It was in a context of severe economic troubles that the Wagner Act came into effect. After a decade of prosperity, American workers during the Great Depression of the 1930’s faced an increasingly high unemployment rate and a rapidly declining standard of living. The National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act) was one of many programs put in place during the Second New Deal to get the economy back in order.. The Wagner-Connery bill was signed into law by the 32nd President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt on July 5, 1935. The Act encouraged the rationalization of commerce and industry by establishing minimum wages and maximum hours of work. It 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 board also looked into matters such as improving personnel by better training and the development of standard procedures in different work fields . 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. Federal interventions to regulate relations between labor and capital were opposed by many who subscribed to a “laissez faire” attitude towards economic order . Workers’ efforts to organize in the 1920’s were significantly limited by antitrust laws. The Wagner Act marked a significant change in government policy towards labor organizations in a context of economic depression. This change in mentality can be seen in Senator Wagner’s address on May 8th, 1937, in which he stipulated: “The right to bargain collectively is at the bottom of social justice for the worker, as well as the sensible conduct of business affairs. The denial or observance of this right means the difference between despotism and democracy”.
Enforcement of the act
It is not 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.
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 triple damage awards and mere sight checks of union authorization cards for a union to be certified as the collective bargaining representative.
See also
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