Wagner+Act

__The Wagner Act__
The National Labor Relations Act of the Wagner Act of 1935 was created by Congress to protect workers' right to unionization. The National Labor Relations Board was created to enforce the National Labor Relations Act. The original employer unfair labor practices consisted of:
 * Interfering with, restraining or coercing employees in their rights under Section 7. These rights include freedom of association, mutual aid or protection, self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively for wages and working conditions through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other protected concerted activities with or without a union. Section 8(a)(1)
 * "Dominating" or interfering with the formation or administration of any labor organization . Section 8(a)(2)
 * Discriminating against employees to encourage or discourage acts of support for a labor organization. 8(a)(3)
 * Discriminating against employees who file charges or testify. 8(a)(4)
 * Refusing to bargain collectively with the representative of the employer's employees. 8(a)(5)

The NLRB conducts secret-ballot elections to determine whether employees want union representation and also investigates unfair labor practices by employers and unions (Smith, 1998). The act guarantees un-supervised employees the right to self-organize, choose their own representatives, and bargain collectively or they may choose not to do any of these things. "The statute guarantees the right of employees to organize and to bargain collectively with their employers or to refrain from all such activity" (Smith, 1998). This generally applies to all employers involved in interstate commerce other than airlines, railroads, agriculture, and government. The Wagner Act also enforces the national labor policy of assuring free choice and encourages collective bargaining as a means of maintaining industrial peace. Through the years, Congress has amended the Act and the Board and courts have developed a body of law from the statute (Reynolds, 1979). The Wagner Act makes it illegal for employers and labor unions to interfere with these rights and establishes the NLRB to hear cases involving unfair labor practices (Anderson, 1979). "The National Labor Relations Board is an independent agency created by the Wagner Act of 1935 to oversee the laws, investigate and hold hearings on unfair labor practice complaints, take action against employers found guilty of unfair labor practices, and to determine the make-up of individual employee bargaining units, as well as to oversee union certifications" (Anderson, 1979). The NLRB must also make sure that employers do not discriminate against union members. There have been cases where companies do not hire someone because they belong to a union or fail to rehire seasonal workers who join unions. Sometimes employees are laid off because they are in union or the employee is demoted or transferred to a less desirable job or location. On occasion employees are mistreated because they follow the rules of the union (Smith, 1998). Labor laws grant employees the right to unionize and prohibits/allows employers and employees to engage in strikes, picketing, and lockouts for the soul purpose of having their demands fulfilled (Anderson, 1979). Both federal and state statutes, as well as law and judicial decisions govern labor law. It is also governed by the regulations and decisions of administrative agencies (Anderson, 1979). There are many laws that affect labor in some way, however The Wagner Act marked the beginning of affirmative support for unionization and collective bargaining by the federal government. Sections 7 and 8 of the Act established employee rights and the enforcement of those rights. Section 9 deals with the secret ballot election, and section 10 contains provisions concerning judicial review (Reynolds, 1979). "The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 created an administrative agency called the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)" (Smith, 1998). The President of the United States with the help of the U.S. Senate appoints five members to the board for five-year terms. There are over thirty regional offices throughout the United States that report to the board's head office in Washington, D.C. There is also a general director at each regional office that reports directly to the general council in Washington (Anderson, 1979). The NLRB regulates the power between labor and management. This board prohibits management from using unfair labor practices like discouraging union membership. There should not be any discrimination in the hiring process. Another duty is to regulate unfair labor practices by labor. For example, when the labor force refuses to bargain with the management or they have an illegal strike or boycott. The NLRB has created a sixty-day "cooling off" period before a work stoppage at the end of a collective bargaining agreement. The board has special powers that they can enforce if there are strikes by the labor union that threaten the security of our nation. Unions must file financial reports with the NLRB so that they can make sure that the unions are following the laws and regulations that have been established (Smith, 1998). The current responsibilities of the NLRB include regulating power between labor and management. The NLRB prohibits management and labor from using unfair labor practices. The NLRB makes the decision as to whether or not a union can form. The NLRB acts as a mediator between management and labor, which means that if a disagreement occurs than the NLRB must settle the problem. Finally, the NLRB has to deal with complaints filed by the employees. There are certain laws that every group of employees must follow. In order to form a union every party must file a petition at a regional office and their needs to be valid proof that thirty-percent of the employees in that party agree with what is written in the petition. A member of the NLRB decides if the petition is valid and a regional director does an investigation to determine whether the union is the proper union to represent this group of employees and if there are any other legal matters that need to be dealt with (Reynolds, 1979). When a group of employees files a petition with the NLRB many things need to be considered. If the items in the petition are too broad, then certain employees may not be properly represented. The reason is that employees have different interests and goals. When the petition is to small it may lack the tools needed to bargain with the management. There are four major things that should be considered. First, the similarities of employees' amount of pay, method of calculating pay, benefits offered, hours, type of work performed, and qualifications required (Reynolds, 1979). Second, it involves the physical proximity of workers and integration of tasks. The third deals with the employer's supervisory or organization structure. The last idea is the employee preferences.

Enforcement The National Labor Relations Board has two basic functions: overseeing the process by which employees decide whether to be represented by a labor organization and prosecuting violations. Those processes are initiated in the regional offices of the NLRB. __**The act was immediately controversial.**__ First, the American Liberty League, an organization made up of conservative Democrats, viewed the act as a threat to democracy and engaged in a campaign of opposition in order to repeal these "socialist" efforts. This included encouraging employers to refuse to comply with the NLRA and supporting the nationwide filing of injunctions to keep the NLRB from functioning. This campaign continued until the NLRA was found constitutional by the Supreme Court in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. Second, 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. Third, as time went by, 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. Many of these criticisms included provisions that employers and their allies were unable to have included in the NLRA. Others developed in reaction to NLRB decisions. Over all, they wanted the NLRB to be neutral as to bargaining power, even though the NLRA's policy section takes a decidedly pro-employee position: > It is declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred //by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self- organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection//. Some of these changes were later achieved in the 1947 amendments. media type="youtube" key="i2GSnBhYpvc" height="390" width="480"

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. More recent failed amendments included attempts in 1978 to permit triple backpay awards and union collective bargaining certification based on signed union authorization cards, a provision that is similar to one of proposed amendments in the Employee Free Choice Act. Under the NLRA unions can become the representative based on signed union authorization cards, but only if the employer voluntarily recognizes the union. If the employer refuses to recognize the union, the union can be certified through a secret-ballot election conducted by the NLRB. After the National Industrial Recovery Act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, organized labor was again looking for relief from employers who had been free to spy on, interrogate, discipline, discharge, and blacklist union members. In the 1930s, workers had begun to organize militantly, and in 1933 and 1934, a great wave of strikes occurred across the nation in the form of citywide general strikes and factory takeovers. Violent confrontations occurred between workers trying to form unions and the police and private security forces defending the interests of anti-union employers. In a Congress sympathetic to labor unions, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) was passed in July of 1935. The broad intention of the act, commonly known as the Wagner Act after Senator Robert R. Wagner of New York, was to guarantee employees “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 and protection.” The NLRA applied to all employers involved in interstate commerce except airlines, railroads, agriculture, and government. In order to enforce and maintain those rights, the act included provision for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to arbitrate deadlocked labor-management disputes, guarantee democratic union elections, and penalize unfair labor practices by employers. To this day, the board of five members, appointed by the President, is assisted by 33 regional directors. The NLRB further determines proper bargaining units, conducts elections for union representation, and investigates charges of unfair labor practices by employers. Unfair practices, by law, include such things as interference, coercion, or restraint in labor’s self-organizing rights; interference with the formation of labor unions; encouragement or discouragement of union membership; and the refusal to bargain collectively with a duly chosen employee representatives. The constitutionality of the NLRA was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in //National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.// in 1937. The act contributed to a dramatic surge in union membership and made labor a force to be reckoned with both politically and economically. Women benefited from this shift to unionization as well. By the end of the 1930s, 800,000 women belonged to unions, a threefold increase from 1929. The provisions of the NLRA were later expanded under the Taft-Hartley Labor Act of 1957 and the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959.

__Sources:__ http://www.stfrancis.edu/content/ba/ghkickul/stuwebs/btopics/works/wagner.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_act http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=old&doc=67 []