From: Carrol Cox <cb...@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:17:42 -0600
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raghu wrote:
>
> >
>
> The null hypothesis is the non-cynical,
The non-cynical is to grant that the Democrats have principles and
serve
those principles intelligently and courageously. It's just that the
principles are vicious: their principle is now and has been for a
century to serve corporate capital. Nothing cynical about that. It's
just history.
Carrol
^^^
CB: But we shouldn't be so cynical as to think that the Bureau of
Economic Analysis serves corporate capital. They are neutral as between
corporate capital and the working class, and all their categories and
technical decisions are neutral with respect to the class struggle,
unlike all Democrats.
For example, the New Deal's Social Security, Unemployment compensation,
and National Labor Relations Act served corporate capital. Corporate
capital didn't want to keep the law of the land as criminalizing unions,
oh no.
National Labor Relations Act
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs the act as Secretary of Labor
Frances Perkins (right) looks on.
The National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act) is a 1935 United
States federal law that protects the rights of most workers in the
private sector to organize labor unions, to engage in collective
bargaining, and to take part in strikes and other forms of concerted
activity in support of their demands. 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.
Contents [hide]
1 The original act
2 Enforcement of the act
3 Amendment of the act
4 See also
5 References
6 External links
[edit] The original act
The Wagner-Connery Act — signed into law on July 5, 1935 —
established a federal agency, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB),
with the power to investigate and decide on charges of unfair labor
practices and to conduct elections in which workers would have the
opportunity to decide whether they wanted to be represented by a union.
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[1].
[edit] Enforcement of the act
In the first few years of the Wagner Act many employers simply refused
to recognize it as law. The United States Supreme Court had already
struck down a number of other statutes passed during the New Deal on the
grounds that Congress did not have the constitutional authority to enact
them under its power to regulate interstate commerce. Most of the
initial appellate court decisions reached the same conclusion, finding
the Act unconstitutional and therefore unenforceable. Many unions did
not bother to use the NLRB in the first few years of its passage,
choosing instead to strike for recognition, using methods such as the
sitdown strike used by the United Auto Workers in the Flint Sit-Down
Strike and dozens of other labor disputes in the mid-1930s.
It was not until the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the
statute in 1937 in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin
Steel Corporation that the Wagner Act became law in practical terms as
well. That was a surprising decision, issued as the controversy over
Roosevelt’s “court packing plan” was still hot, marking a
fundamental change in United States constitutional law and in the power
of the federal government.
The Supreme Court, for its part, generally upheld the NLRB's
interpretation of the Wagner Act in those early years, but imposed two
major limitations on it. The Court held in NLRB v. Mackay Radio &
Telegraph Co.. in 1938 that, while employers could not fire workers for
going out on strike, they could permanently replace them — a seemingly
semantic distinction that, in practice, sharply limited workers' ability
to strike. The Court later held in National Labor Relations Board v.
Virginia Electric & Power Co. that the First Amendment to the
Constitution barred the NLRB from making it illegal for employers to
express their opposition to unionism, so long as they did not try to
coerce or threaten workers with reprisals for exercising their rights.
The act was immediately controversial. 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.
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.
[edit] 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 for
such things as treble damage awards and mere sight checks of union
authorization cards for a union to be certified as the collective
bargaining representative.
[edit] See also
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