#wagner act

[fdrlibrary]

Members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), established by President Roosevelt in 1934 and reconstituted through the Wagner Act in 1935, leave the White House West Wing eighty years ago today.

They'd met with the President about recent calls to amend the Wagner Act to provide greater protection to employers and limit the influence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Pictured here from left to right are Edwin S. Smith, Chairman J. Warren Madden, and Donald W. Smith. After a controversial five year term, President Roosevelt chose not to re-appoint Madden, but later named him to the United States Court of Claims. Madden distinguished himself in several post-war legal assignments involving the Nuremberg trials and the Allied administration of Germany. He received the Medal of Freedom in 1947. President Roosevelt also declined to re-appoint Edwin S. Smith who like Madden had drawn the ire of NLRB opponents. Donald W. Smith resigned from his position in 1939. The board was considered highly controversial in its early years, and the men staunchly supported its  mission to the anger of Roosevelt's political opponents.

On a lighter note, Edwin S. Smith clearly left his overcoat and hat at the office that day, but then the weather was in the balmy sixties.

Photo: Library of Congress

[sataniccapitalist]

Green New Deal? Bring It! But Don’t Forget Your Union Card.

To be truly transformational, any bold green jobs proposal must be rooted in the right to organize.

[worklabournewsresearch]

Employee Voice and Representation in the New World of Work: Issues and Options for Ontario

“In  Ontario  the  model  by  which  employees  secure  representation  and  voice  contains  a set  of  features  that  are  common  to  all  systems  where  certified  bargaining  agents acquire  exclusive  representation  rightsand  where  the  employer  has  no  statutory obligation to deal with minority unions. In this system, --sometimes termed “exclusive representation with majority support” or simply the Wagner Act Model (WAM) -- workers who  have  certified  bargaining  agents  arecommonly  referred  to  as  “unionized”  or “organized”  while  those  with  no  certified  agent  are  referred  to  as  “non-unionized”  or “unorganized”. Though different  mechanisms exist  across  North  America  for securing trade  union  representation  (e.g.,  some  provinces  invoke  easier  rules  governing  the certification  process), the  Ontario  model  in  its  essential  form  displays  the  following seven  characteristics  (and  associated  deficiencies)  that  are  present  in all WAM based majoritarian representation systems.”

“Given  the  problems  associated  with  the  model  above,  this  report  identifies  a series   of employee/workplacevoice   options   for   the   unrepresented   worker   and unorganized   workplace.   The   voice   systems   cover   the   gamut   of   employment relationships:   from   employees   working   in   traditional   workplaces   under   standard employment relationships (e.g., full-time work with permanent as opposed to temporary contractual arrangements) to employees lacking a clearly defined employer (e.g., temp-agency workers) or workplace (e.g., freelance workers)”.

Ontario Ministry of Labour, July 27, 2016: “Employee Voice and Representation in the New World of Work: Issues and Options for Ontario,” by Rafael Gomez (70 pages, PDF)

[labor-historian-blog]

The Wagner Act

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is commonly referred to as the Wagner Act after its sponsor, New York Senator Robert Wagner.  Passed in 1935 and declared constitutional in 1937, it laid down the ground work for which most workers could chose to join a union an collectively bargain. After decades of being shot, beaten, berated, and broken, workers finally had legal protection that permitted them to unionize.  Well, the Railway Labor Act (RLA) was passed earlier but it only applied to railway (and later airline) employees.  Employees covered by this act are not covered by the NLRA.  Also excluded are farmworkers, domestic employees, and Federal employees, although Federal employees were included when John F. Kennedy signed an executive order to change that in 1962.

It’s other amendments will be discussed in future posts.

[thechakraview]

…the phrase “affirmative action” first appeared in a Wagner Act provision that directed judges to impose financial penalties on employers who discriminated against union organizers. The eventual implementation of affirmative action in the workplace likewise drew on precedent stemming from the Wagner Act. As study after study has shown, few if any employers use quotas — which are not mandated by Title VII. Instead, employers hoping to avoid costly lawsuits established offices of equal employment to ensure compliance with anti-discrimination law. These new equal employment offices were modeled on the labor relations departments union and non-union firms established in the wake of the Wagner Act. Moreover, many of the policies implemented by equal employment offices to ensure fair employment practices — including in-house grievance procedures, formal job descriptions, published guidelines for promotion and termination, salary classifications, and open bidding— were already in use by labor relations departments partly because unions had demanded them. The Wagner Act and the labor movement it helped spawn are perhaps the clearest expression of the social-democratic impulses informing the old New Deal Democratic coalition. As such, the links between the right to collective bargaining and anti-discrimination legislation draw attention to the historic importance of social democracy to so-called civil rights issues.

Affirmative Action’s Labor Roots

[thechakraview]

It is no coincidence then that the attacks on affirmative action and collective bargaining have intensified over the past few decades, a period that has witnessed the retreat from a more social-democratic state and the rise of neoliberalism. For free-market ideologues, anti-discrimination legislation and unionization both muck up the rational function of the market and disrupt capitalist class power. To be sure, corporate America — which was responsible for devising workplace affirmative action strategies to begin with — has been one of affirmative action’s most powerful allies for the better part of the last three decades. But the fact that the corporate defense of affirmative action centers on diversity poses its own problems. The diversity defense — itself the product of Board of Regents of University of California v. Bakke and the Reagan administration’s efforts to gut anti-discrimination programs with the assistance of then Equal Employment Opportunity Commission director Clarence Thomas — has come to reify race and gender alike, insofar as it presumes that each member of an identity group possesses a unique cultural perspective. In conflating culture with race, “diversity” inadvertently plays into the hands of racists, like Justice Scalia, who view presumed hardwired group differences not as cause for celebration, but as justification for exclusion and even continued exploitation — as was the intent of race from the start.

Affirmative Action’s Labor Roots

[thechakraview]

The case for affirmative action — like unionization before it — proceeded from the view that anti-discrimination policy was in the public interest. Though the history of federal workplace anti-discrimination initiatives dates back to the New Deal, President Kennedy’s 1961 Executive Order 10925 — which authorized the federal government to cancel contracts with vendors who failed to take “affirmative action” to redress employment disparities — is generally understood as the start of the modern era of anti-discrimination policy. The Kennedy and later the Johnson administrations argued that workplace discrimination was a drag on the national economy, viewing racism as an irrational encumbrance on productivity. The Kennedy administration’s case for a fair employment practices bill — what would eventually become Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — thus centered on the Commerce Clause, placing workplace discrimination in the purview of the federal government. ...In fact, the phrase “affirmative action” first appeared in a Wagner Act provision that directed judges to impose financial penalties on employers who discriminated against union organizers.

Affirmative Action’s Labor Roots

[thechakraview]

Prior to the 1935 Wagner Act, “freedom of contract” limited the government’s authority to regulate the employer-employee relationship. The Great Depression, however, led the drafters of the Wagner Act — Senator Robert Wagner and his assistant Leon Keyserling — to argue that the right to collective bargaining was essential to redressing the problem of under-consumption that had caused the protracted economic downturn. Many progressives also argued that unions would check managerial caprice by allowing workers to negotiate for contracts that established formal employment guidelines — for things such as hiring, firing, promotions, and raises — which would confer stability and dignity to the workplace via democratic process. From the second New Deal through World War II, the overwhelming majority of Americans were united with the executive, the courts, and the majority of legislators in the view that unions served a “public good.” As can be said of any institution in America, many unions — particularly in the building trades — were guilty of discrimination. But unions — particularly industrial unions — were also among the civil rights movement’s strongest allies. In fact, unions and churches accounted for nearly equal shares of the financial contributions to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. More to the point — in cases such as Tunstall v. Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen (1944) and James v. Marinship (1944) — the courts chipped away at union discrimination, denying NLRB coverage to unions guilty of racial discrimination.

Affirmative Action’s Labor Roots