National Labor Relations Act of 1935

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs the act as Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins (right) looks on.

The National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act, after Robert F. Wagner) is a 1935 United States federal law that limits the means with which employers may react to workers in the private sector that create labor unions, engage in collective bargaining, and 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, federal state or local government workers, independent contractors and some close relatives of individual employers.

Origins

It was in a context of severe economic troubles that the Wagner Act came into effect. After a decade of prosperity, during the Great Depression of the 1930s the nation 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 kick the economy back into order.. The Wagner-Connery bill was signed into law by the 32nd President of the United States Franklin Delano 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 Senate address on May 8, 1937, in which Roosevelt 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”.

The NLRB's website includes some documents concerning its history, a number of which may be found here. http://www.nlrb.gov/Publications/History/ Its most recent Annual Reports may now be found on-line. http://www.nlrb.gov/publications/reports/annual_reports.aspx

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Enforcement

The National Labor Relations Board has two basic functions: overseeing the process by which employees decide whether to be represented by a labor organization and prosecuting violations. Those processes are initiated in the regional offices of the NLRB. http://www.nlrb.gov/About_Us/locating_our_offices/

The National Labor Relations Act is enforced by the National Labor Relations Board http://www.nlrb.gov/About_Us/Overview/ and the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. http://www.nlrb.gov/About_Us/Overview/general_counsel/

The NLRB's website includes the text of manuals useful for those who are engaged in union organizing or in the practice of labor relations and law. These include Rules and Regulations. http://www.nlrb.gov/publications/rules_and_regulations.aspx

The list of practice manuals whose text may be found on the NLRB Website http://www.nlrb.gov/publications/manuals/index.aspx include

* NLRB Casehandling Manual, Part 1, Unfair Labor Practice Proceedings

* NLRB Casehandling Manual, Part 2, Representation Proceedings

* NLRB Casehandling Manual, Part 3, Compliance Proceedings

* NLRB An Outline of Law and Procedure in Representation Cases

* NLRB Guide for Hearing Officers

* NLRB Bench Book

* NLRB Section 10(j) Manual (Redacted) (PDF*)

* NLRB FOIA Manual

* NLRB Style Manual

* Dos Idiomas -- Una Ley, Two Languages -- One Law (A Bilingual Guide)

Reactions

The act was immediately controversial.

First, the American Liberty League, an organization made up of the corporate leaders of the day, engaged in a campaign of opposition. This included encouraging employers to refuse to comply with the NLRA and supporting the nationwide filing of injunctions to keep the NLRB from functioning. This campaign continued until the NLRA was held constitutional.

Second, 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.

Third, as time went by, 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.

Many of these criticisms included provisions that employers and their allies were unable to have included in the NLRA. Others developed in reaction to NLRB decisions. Over all, they wanted the NLRB to be neutral as to bargaining power, even though the NLRA's policy section takes a decidedly pro-employee position:

It is declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self- organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.

Some of these changes were later achieved in the 1947 amendments.

Amendments

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. More recent failed amendments included attempts in 1978 to permit triple backpay awards and union collective bargaining certification based on signed union authorization cards, a provision that is similar to one of proposed amendments in the Employee Free Choice Act. Under the NLRA unions can become the representative based on signed union authorization cards, but only if the employer voluntarily recognizes the union. If the employer refuses to recognize the union, it can be certified through a secret-ballot election conducted by the NLRB.

See also

• Duty of fair representation
• Employee Free Choice Act
• Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act     
• National Labor Board
• National Labor Relations Board
• NLRB election procedures
• Norris – La Guardia Act

• Right-to-work law
• Sen. Robert Wagner (D-NY)
• Taft-Hartley Act
• Unfair labor practice
• Union organizer
• United States labor law
• WPA

References

Bibliography

• Atleson, James B. "Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law" (Amherst, Mass: University of Massachusetts Press 1983)
• Cortner, Richard C. The Wagner Act Cases 90 (1964).
• Dannin, Ellen. "Taking Back the Workers' Law: How to Fight the Assault on Labor Rights" (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006)
• Gregory, Charles O. "Labor and the Law" (2d rev. ed. 1961)
• Keyserling, Leon H. Wagner Act: Its Origin and Current Significance, 29 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 199 (1960).
• Klare, Karl E. Judicial Deradicalization of the Wagner Act and the Origins of Modern Legal Consciousness, 1937-1941, 62 Minn. L. Rev. 265 (1977-1978).
• Lynd, Staughton. Communal Rights, 62 Tex. L. Rev. 1417, 1430-35 (1984)
• Mikva, Abner J. The Changing Role of the Wagner Act in the American Labor Movement, 38 Stan. L. Rev. 1123 (1986)
• 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
• Nathanson Nathaniel L. & Ellis Lyons. Judicial Review of the National Labor Relations Board, 33 Ill. L. Rev. 749 (1938-1939).
• Note. Effect on the A.F. of L.-C.I.O. Controversy of the Determination of Appropriate Bargaining Units under the National Labor Relations Act, 47 Yale L. J. 122 (1937-1938).
• Note. The Proposed Amendments to the Wagner Act, 52 Harv. L. Rev. 970 (1938-1939).
• Pope, James Gray. How American Workers Lost the Right to Strike, and Other Tales, 103 Mich. L. Rev. 518 (2004).
• Pope, Jim. Worker Lawmaking, Sit-Down Strikes, and the Shaping of American Industrial Relations, 1935-1958, 24 Law & Hist. Rev. 45 (2006)
• Scheunemann, Edward. The National Labor Relations Act Versus the Courts, 11 Rocky Mountain L. Rev. 135 (1939)
• 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
• Warm, J. Louis. A Study of the Judicial Attitude Toward Trade Unions and Labor Legislation, 23 Minn. L. Rev. 256 (1938-1939)
• Woods, Warren & Altha Connor Wheatley. The Wagner Act Decision – A Charter of Liberty for Labor? 5 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 846 (1936-1937).

External links

• National Labor Relations Act
• National Labor Relations Board