Law Commons^™

An American Approach To Social Democracy: The Forgotten Promise Of The Fair Labor Standards Act, Kate Andrias

Articles

There is a growing consensus among scholars and public policy experts that fundamental labor law reform is necessary in order to reduce the nation’s growing wealth gap. According to conventional wisdom, however, a social democratic approach to labor relations is uniquely un-American—in deep conflict with our traditions and our governing legal regime. This Article calls into question that conventional account. It details a largely forgotten moment in American history: when the early Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) established industry committees of unions, business associations, and the public to set wages on an industry-by-industry basis. Alongside the National Labor Relations Act, …

The Wagner Act: Labor Law's Signal Event, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

There's no fun in stating the obvious. Sophisticated professionals bestow few kudos on those who declaim the conventional wisdom. Even so, one would have to be far more perverse than I, in this fiftieth anniversary year of the National Labor Relations Act, to suggest that the Wagner Act, wasn't the most important (and at the time of it- passage the most controversial) development in the last half-century of labor law.

The Role Of Law, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

In the early New Deal days, workers' placards in the coal fields proudly proclaimed, "President Roosevelt wants you to join the union." If not literally true, that boast was well within the bounds of poetic license. After the brief interval of federal laissez-faire treatment of labor relations ushered in by the Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932, the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act of 1935 declared the policy of the United States to be one of "encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining." Employers, but not unions, were forbidden to coerce or discriminate against employees because of their organizational activities. …

Proposed Labor Reform: "Brave New World" Or "Looking Backward"?, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Other Publications

By now it is a commonplace in the labor relations community that there are two significant deficiencies in the administration of the National Labor Relations Act. Neither is a matter of substantive law in the usual sense. The first is the inordinate delay in securing a remedy in contested cases, and the second is the inadequacy of the remedy in certain critical situations. I should like to examine a few key recommendations of the NLRB Task Force, and a few key provisions of the proposed Labor Reform Act, in light of those two central concerns.

In my assessment I shall …

Secondary Boycott: From Antitrust To Labor Relations, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

The ethos of the labor movement cuts against the American grain at several points. Our national instinct, reflected in many statutes and much judge-made law, is to exalt the rugged individualist over the anonymous group, to favor wide-open competition rather than a controlled market, and to prize the right of each person to remain aloof from the quarrels and concerns of his neighbors. It is not for nothing that our most universal folk hero is the frontiersman, who proudly stands alone and self-sufficient. Yet the ordinary workingman does not have the capacity to assume that heroic stance. For him strength …