National Labor Relations Act

Context

As the United States became an industrial nation, gigantic corporations came to dominate the economy. It became all too clear that individual workers had little bargaining power or leverage with their employers. As a consequence, for the bulk of America's workers, working lives were dangerous and unpredictable, more so than for workers in any other industrial country. Efforts by workers to combine into labor unions that might induce employers to negotiate over wages and conditions were, by the end of the 1920s, largely unsuccessful except among the most skilled workers.

The Great Depression of 1929–1941 provided a challenge to the United States unprecedented either before or since. By the time Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office as president in March 1933, a quarter of America's workers were unemployed, and at least another quarter of workers were underemployed. As the Great Depression bit deeper, workers were unable to defend their livelihoods. They suffered wage cuts, deteriorating conditions of work, short time, layoffs, and unemployment. Industrial warfare broke out in 1933 and lasted until mass-production industries unionized beginning in 1937 and, that same year, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the NLRA constitutional in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.

Attempts to allow American workers some say in their working lives had some precedent in federal legislation but flew in the face of legal assumptions that placed the sanctity of private property ahead of the rights of the individual when it came to business and commercial activities. Beginning in the Progressive Era in a piecemeal way, a concept of industrial democracy and workers' rights in the workplace gained ground. New Deal reformers such as Senator Robert F. Wagner drew on Progressive ideas in putting together the program of the New Deal.