| The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (or Wagner Act) protects the rights of workers in the
private sector of the United States to organize unions, to engage in collective bargaining over wages, hours, and terms and conditions of employment, and to take part in
strikes and other forms of concerted activity in support of their
demands. The Wagner Act established a federal agency, the National Labor Relations Board, with the power to investigate and decide unfair labor
practice charges and to conduct elections in which workers were given the opportunity to decide whether they wanted to be
represented by a union.
In its original version, passed in the midst of the Great
Depression, the Wagner Act only prohibited unfair labor practices by employers. Congress amended it twelve years later to
impose a number of restrictions on unions and to limit the application of the Act in other ways; that package of amendments is
commonly known as the Taft-Hartley Act.
Some commentators have suggested that Congress did not realize how far-reaching a statute they were passing at the time. That
is debatable: at the time that Congress passed the Act, the nation had just gone through a number of tumultuous general strikes in San Francisco, California, Minneapolis, Minnesota and Toledo, Ohio. The
Act was passed in order to channel those violent conflicts into more manageable channels, by recognizing workers' basic rights to
form unions and to bargain collectively, while creating an administrative mechanism to determine whether they wanted union
representation. While the Act did not deprive employers of their basic managerial prerogatives, it legalized the right to strike,
barred employers from firing workers for engaging in union activities and subjected management's decisions to scrutiny by the
federal government.
In the first few years of the Wagner Act, however, 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. 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—one wag called it the "switch in time that saved nine"—that marked 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 National Labor Relations Board v. Mackay Radio &
Telephone Co. in 1938 that while employers could not fire workers for going out on
strike, they could permanently replace them - a largely academic distinction in practice that undercut 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 underscored the CIO's industrial unionism, it retreated to a compromise position several years later under pressure from
Congress.
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 areas such 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 practices by unions, 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.
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, however, until the passage of the Taft-Hartley amendments in 1947.
The Taft-Hartley amendments made sweeping changes in US labor law: they outlaw secondary boycotts and closed shops, allow
individual states to outlaw union security clauses by passing what
opponents of unions call “right-to-work” laws, require unions
and employers to give sixty days notice before they may undertake strikes or other forms of economic action, give the President
authority to intervene in strikes or potential strikes that create a national emergency, exclude supervisors from coverage under
the Act, require special treatment for professional employees and guards, codify the Supreme Court’s earlier ruling that employers have a constitutional right to express their opposition
to unions, give employers the right to file a petition asking the Board to determine if a union represents a majority of its
employees, and allow employees to petition to oust their union or to invalidate the union security provisions of any existing
collective bargaining agreement.
The amendments also involved the federal courts more directly in enforcing the secondary boycott provisions of the Act by
giving employers the right to sue unions for damages caused by a secondary boycott, while giving the General Counsel exclusive
power to seek injunctive relief against such activities. The Taft-Hartley amendments also provide for federal court jurisdiction
to enforce collective bargaining
agreements while imposing a number of procedural and substantive standards that unions and employers must meet before they
may use employer funds to provide pensions and other employee benefit to unionized employees.
Congress amended the Act again in 1959, when it enacted new restrictions outlawing
hot cargo agreements, which require an
employer to cease doing business with other employers in some circumstances, and limiting unions' ability to use recognitional
picketing to obtain union recognition without going through an NLRB-conducted election. Congress extended coverage of the Act
in 1974 to apply to workers at health care institutions.
Unions have made repeated efforts over the past fifty years to amend the Act to eliminate the right to work provisions of the
Act, to expand construction unions' right to picket at sites where other building trades employees work, to strengthen the
protections for employees fired during organizing campaigns and to limit employers' power to hire permanent replacements for
strikers. None of those efforts have succeeded.
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