Wagner Act
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, 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 D.
The Act encouraged the rationalization of commerce and industry by establishing minimum wages and maximum hours of work. 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
NLRB Annual Reports Here you will find the most recent annual reports of the National Labor Relations Board.
* Seventy-Second Annual Report of the NLRB for Fiscal Year Ended September 30, 2007
* Seventy-First Annual Report of the NLRB for Fiscal Year Ended September 30, 2006
* Seventieth Annual Report of the NLRB for Fiscal Year Ended September 30, 2005
* Sixty-Ninth Annual Report of the NLRB for Fiscal Year Ended September 30, 2004 .
* Sixty-Eighth Annual Report of the NLRB for Fiscal Year Ended September 30, 2003
A Summary of the NLRA
The NLRA, as enacted in 1935, had five unfair labor practices. The NLRA created the following employer unfair labor practices:
Interfering with, restraining or coercing employees in their rights under Section 7.
These rights include freedom of association, mutual aid or protection, self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively for wages and working conditions through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other protected concerted activities with or without a union. 8(a)(4)
Refusing to bargain collectively with the representative of the employer's employees.
8(a)(5)
The key principles of the NLRA are embodied in its concluding paragraph of section 1 including:
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.
The key principles also include:
Protecting a wide range of activities, whether a union is involved or not, in order to promote organization and collective bargaining.
Protecting employees as a class and expressly not on the basis of a relationship with an employer. link: Ellen Dannin, Not a Limited, Confined, or Private Matter: Who is an Employee under the National Labor Relations Act
http:papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1115434
There can be only one exclusive bargaining representative for a unit of employees.
Promotion of the practice and procedure of collective bargaining.
Employers have a duty to bargain with the representative of its employees.
General information about the NLRA may be found on the NLRB website.
http:www.nlrb.gov/about_us/overview/national_labor_relations_act.aspx
Enforcement of the Act
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. 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/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 to the NLRA's Enactment
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 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. 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.
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. 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.
Robert Wagner (D-NY)
Taft-Hartley Act
Unfair labor practice
Union Organizer
United States labor law
WPA
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