The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is a 1935 United States federal law that limits the means with which employers may react to workers in the private sector who create labor unions, engage in collective bargaining, and take part in strikes and other forms of concerted activity in support of their demands. It was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The law holds that wildcat strikes are illegal, and that workers must formally request that the National Labor Relations Board end their association with their labor union if they feel that the union is not sufficiently supportive of them before they can legally go on strike.
Key Principles of the NLRA
The key principles of the NLRA include:
- Encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing.
- 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.
The law originally defined and prohibited five unfair labor practices:
- Interfering with, restraining, or coercing employees in their rights, including freedom of association; mutual aid or protection; self-organization; the right to form, join, or assist labor organizations; the right to bargain collectively for wages and working conditions through representatives of their own choosing; and the right to engage in other protected concerted activities with or without a union.
- "Dominating" or interfering with the formation or administration of any labor organization.
- Discriminating against employees to encourage or discourage acts of support for a labor organization.
- Discriminating against employees who file charges or testify.
- Refusing to bargain collectively with the representative of the employer's employees.
Controversy
The American Liberty League, an organization made up of conservatives, viewed the act as a threat to freedom and engaged in a campaign of opposition in order to repeal these "socialist" efforts. This campaign continued until the NLRA was found constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1937. As time went by, employers and their allies in Congress also criticized the NLRA 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. 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, health, and welfare plans sponsored by unions; and multi-employer bargaining.
The Taft-Hartley Amendment
The Taft-Hartley Amendment of 1947 is a United States federal law that monitors the activities and power of labor unions. The act was a means of demobilizing the labor movement by imposing limits on labor's ability to strike and by prohibiting radicals from their leadership.
The Taft–Hartley Act prohibited jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. It also required union officers to sign non-communist affidavits with the government. The act authorized the President to intervene in strikes or potential strikes that create a national emergency, a reaction to the national coal miners' strikes called by the United Mine Workers of America in the 1940s.
The act was sponsored by Senator Robert Taft and Representative Fred A. Hartley, Jr. It became law by overriding U.S. President Harry S. Truman's veto on June 23, 1947; labor leaders called it the "slave-labor bill," while President Truman argued that it was a "dangerous intrusion on free speech," and that it would "conflict with important principles of our democratic society. "
Nevertheless, Truman would subsequently use it twelve times during his presidency. President George W. Bush invoked the law most recently in connection with the employer lockout of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union during negotiations with West Coast shipping in 2001.
Democratic Senator Robert F. Wagner
Sponsor of the National Labor Relations Act/Wagner Act.