National Labor Relations Act

Impact

The NLRA was considered to be one of the most radical pieces of New Deal legislation. It transformed labor relations in the United States and signaled a profound change in the attitude of government to industrial relations. After an initial period of radical enforcement of the legislation that went hand in hand with aggressive unionization drives from the new Congress of Industrial Organizations and the American Federation of Labor, the NLRB moved to redress the balance of its rulings to take more account of the interests of business.

In addition, the NLRA solidified labor as a key component of the New Deal Democratic coalition. In the 1936 national elections, Democrats won by a landslide in large part because of the enthusiasm of workers. Initially, the NLRA had little impact on industrial relations, as employers virtually unanimously anticipated it would be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (as had most of the important New Deal laws). Only after the Supreme Court ruled in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. in 1937 did the NLRB become fully effective. Opposition to the NLRB was led by the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and the American Communist Party.

The National Association of Manufacturers opposed the NLRA as a fundamental abridgement of its members' right to manage in any way they saw fit and particularly without any interference from government. The AFL opposed the NLRB after initially fighting for it because they saw the NLRB as favoring the new rival Congress of Industrial Organizations in competition for new members. It was particularly upset that the NLRB did not set bargaining units along traditional craft lines. The AFL also continued to cling to a notion of “voluntarism” that regarded industrial relations as a contest of strength between employers and unions in which government should play no part. Finally, the AFL leadership was militantly anti-Communist and was happy to join with groups like the National Association of Manufacturers in dubbing both the Congress of Industrial Organizations and NLRB “Communist-inspired.” The 1939 investigation of the NLRB by the House Un-American Activities Committee was a good example of their cooperative efforts. The American Communist Party opposed the NLRA and NLRB as an insidious attempt to tame the class struggle through bureaucratic red tape and thus as an attempt to save American capitalism from revolutionary change. Even so, the NLRA served to encourage and assist the great labor upsurge of the 1930s and 1940s when labor union membership rose from 2.9 million in 1933 to 14.8 million in 1945.

The NLRA survives to this day as the major federal legislation governing industrial relations in the United States. Over the years, rulings of the NLRB have clarified and to some degree diluted the original, more radical purpose of the act. Two legislative initiatives have also modified the act: the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and the amendments of 1974. The 1974 amendments brought non-government-employed nurses back under the scope of the NLRA, something that had not happened since 1947.