On Thu, March 5, 1998 at 13:53:17 (-0500) Paul Zarembka writes:
>Does anyone have a good citation for the background leading President
>Roosevelt to include Section 7B in the NIRA of 1933? This is the section
>providing for the right to union representation and comes BEFORE the mass
>unionizing waves of 1934-39. I am interested in the relation of law to
>working class struggle and that this seems to be a case of the bourgeois
>state passing a law which stimulated worker struggles rather than a law
>reflecting working class struggle. Roosevelt may have proposed it for
>Keynesian-type reasons (to stimulate wages and thus the economy), but I
>like to see some good research on this. Thanks for any help.
I asked this of Tom Ferguson, and this is his reply:
There were some union leaders who had a role in the NIRA. So did some
small NE textile firms who wanted to equalize wages in the industry, so that
the south would pay more. But the main force for 7A certainly came from
Bernard Baruch and his colleagues who had run the War Labor Board. Baruch's
guy, Hugh Johnson, wrote much of the bill. I have somewhere a copy of BB's
telegram to him. The basic point, I think, was that they feared that if you
cartelized everything but labor that firms would compete madly to drop the
last unfixed price in the system -- and produce an explosion. It did not
hurt that oil firms wanted the bill to cartelize oil prices.
Bill
