This Day in Labor History: July 5, 1935. President Franklin Roosevelt signs the National Labor Relations Act. Let's talk about this critical moment that allowed unions to succeed--and how it has been totally taken over by employers today.
When Franklin Roosevelt took over the presidency in 1933, the economy was in the worst state in American history. But Roosevelt wanted to help business, not hurt it.
His first New Deal labor legislation was really more a pro-business measure.
The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) intended to bring business on the board with a reform program, and in fact parts of the act were welcomed by corporations, especially as it promoted bigness to undermine harmful competition.
Somewhat unintentionally, the NIRA’s provision protecting collective bargaining for workers was interpreted by American workers as giving them approval to strike.
1934 saw some of the greatest militancy in American history, with major strikes in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Toledo, and the textile plants in New England and the South. This growing labor movement helped cleave corporate support from the New Deal.
It is however worth noting that much of the New Deal promoted the largest corporations to become larger and the FDR "I welcome their hatred" speech that the left likes to cite is really an anomaly that lacks the necessary context to know what FDR was getting at.
In fact, this is a big problem in how we think about the past today. Like Eisenhower's military-industrial complex speech. It is cited SO OFTEN. But Eisenhower was a total corporate hack who brought in other corporate hacks to do terrible things. He was no liberal!!!
The past is complicated! We need to move beyond simplistic single-speech narratives that take people out of context and don't help us today. But I digress, typically.
In 1935, when the right-wing Supreme Court ruled the NIRA unconstitutional, Roosevelt moved for greater empowerment of workers. In fact, it was only when the NIRA was shut down that FDR moved toward this greater empowerment of workers.
FDR was originally skeptical of a big labor law bill because it did so much for workers and seemed anti-business. But the election of 1934 created an overwhelmingly liberal Congress that the political space existed for Roosevelt to take such a significant step.
Senator Robert Wagner (D-NY) shepherded the bill through Congress (and giving it its popular name of the Wagner Act). Wagner had long been a champion of labor.
He had served as chairman of the New York State Factory Inspection Commission in the aftermath of the Triangle Fire and built upon that to become a Democratic senator from the state in 1927.
Wagner was the Senate’s leading liberal during the New Deal, shepherding a variety of legislation through the body, particularly around labor issues.
Workers had “the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid & protection”
The law applied to all workers involved in interstate commerce except those working for government, railroads, airlines, and agriculture.
The agriculture exception, as in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, happened because the law simply would not have passed had black southern workers been included. They were sacrificed to get the larger labor law.
Again, every major piece of progressive legislation has been a major compromise with conservative forces. Every single one. Incrementalism has always been how things have happened. Which isn't to say you don't demand big. But when you have a deal, you take what you can get.
And then you take the deal and demand more. But simply put, the votes were not there to pass any labor legislation that didn't reinforce Jim Crow. This is, sadly, the reality of American history.
The most important part of the NLRA was the establishment of the National Labor Relations Board, creating a government agency with real authority to oversee the nation’s labor relations.
The government had now officially declared its neutrality in labor relations, seeing its role as mediating them rather than openly siding with employers to crush unions.
This was a remarkable turnaround in a nation where unionbusting was a good political move for the ambitious pol. After all, Calvin Coolidge, out of office only 4 years before Roosevelt took over, made his name by busting the 1919 Boston police strike.
Business went ballistic after the NLRA passed. Business Week ran an editorial titled “NO OBEDIENCE!” It read: “Although the Wagner Labor Relations Act has been passed by Congress and signed by the President, it is not yet law. For nothing is law that is not constitutional.”
Conservatives immediately challenged the constitutionality of the NLRA. But Roosevelt’s war on the Supreme Court, while damaging his prestige and ability to get new legislation passed, did have an effect.
The pressure of a changing nation by the time the case came to them had an effect. In the 1937 decision in NLRB v. Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation, the Court ruled 5-4 in favor of the government and the act’s future was ensured.
Within a year of the decision, three justices retired and Roosevelt ensured the future of his programs.
It’s also important to remember what life for workers was life before the National Labor Relations Act.
It wasn’t just that they couldn’t form strong unions and thus were poor, although that was a piece of it. It’s that companies could do basically anything they wanted to in order to stop or bust a union.
Employers could hire spies. They could hire a police force. They could kill union organizers. They could fire you for joining a union.
Corporations had all the power and workers had none because in the end, the government was willing to back up the companies through legislation or even through military intervention to bust unions.
The NLRA ended that, perhaps not entirely, but largely. Leveling the playing field meant workers now had the right to a decent life, a right they were happy to grasp and fight for. And fight for they did, as union membership skyrocketed after the NLRA was upheld by the Court.
In other words, social movements require accessing the levers of power, even if that means compromising on key principles, in order to codify change.
So the NLRA made unions possible for millions of workers. Today, it helps makes unions impossible. Employers have leveraged the agency to take years for workers to get an actual union, if they ever do. Republican appointees seek to undermine workers constantly.
I am very loathe to engage in the kind of "screw the state and organize" talk about workers that so dominates labor conversations on the left because I know just how hard it was to win anything. Abandoning those victories is almost always a very bad idea.
However, in this case, it's hard to know how the National Labor Relations Board can be fixed to actually even the playing field for workers again. We haven't had comprehensive labor legislation in 80 years. Congress, even many Democrats, aren't committed to new laws to fix it.
Without that, unions simply can't win most of the time through the NLRA procedures. Many have tried ways to move beyond it. The Employee Free Choice Act was one of those, but there wasn't real support for it in Congress. For Obama, it wasn't a top priority.
Was this a generation with just normal opposition to a president instead of Mitch McConnell's fireeating right-wing radicalism, maybe the EFCA would have stood a chance. But the ACA took just about all the political capital Obama had. Even cap and trade failed to advance.
So I struggle to see how the NLRB can be fixed. It's a very hard question for everyone involved in labor struggles to deal with. There are no easy answers. Someday, maybe, we can have the needed labor legislation to fix it. Otherwise, we have to find ways around it.
So a great law, one that changed the lives of tens of millions of Americans, is now a tragic story.
Back tomorrow with a discussion of how the Philippine Scouts, a division of Filipino troops working for the US Army, revolted in 1924 because of terrible working conditions, a window into the military as labor and the labor of American imperialism.
