Law Commons^™

The Law Of Arbitration, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

The law did not look kindly on arbitration in its infancy. As a process by which two or more parties could agree to have an impartial outsider resolve a dispute between them, arbitration was seen as a usurpation of the judiciary' sown functions, as an attempt to "oust the courts of jurisdiction." That was the English view, and American courts were similarly hostile. They would not order specific performance of an executory (unperformed) agreement to arbitrate, nor grant more than nominal damages for the usual breach. Only an arbitral award actually issued was enforceable at common law. All this began …

Conflict Resolution In Industrial Relations, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

Only about one-fifth of the American labor force is unionized. With certain important exceptions, therefore, no formal machinery exists to resolve the various disputes that arise between a majority of the country's workers and their employers. The exception, which will not be treated in detail in this study, relate to (1) the right to organize into unions, which has been protected in most of the private sector since 1935 by the National Labor Relations Act and in the public sector since the 1960s by federal law and regulation covering U.S. Government employees and by statutes in about thirty states covering …

The Collective Bargaining Process, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

A half century after the passage of the Wagner Act the right to bargain collectively remains a glowing but imperfectly realized promise for American workers. In recent years even the theoretical dimensions of the right have been markedly compressed. Yet collective bargaining was conceived in the widespread belief that both the cause of industrial peace and the welfare of the individual employee would be promoted if workers were given a genuine voice in determining their employment conditions. Why has the process apparently lost so much appeal? Does it still hold hope for the future?

In this paper I shall review …

Individual Rights In The Work Place: The Burger Court And Labor Law, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

The Supreme Court, like other institutions, must play the part that the times demand, often with small regard for the personal predilections of its membership. The Warren Court and the Burger Court, in their respective contributions to the law of union-employer-employee relations, almost reversed the roles they might have been expected to assume. The major accomplishment of the Court in the labor area during the Warren era was a fundamental restructuring of intergovernmental relationships, while the Court's overriding concern throughout the Burger decade of the 1970s and beyond has been the defining of individual rights in the work place.

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. …

The Consent Of The Governed: Public Employee Unions And The Law, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

The major development in labor relations legislation during the past decade was the veritable eruption across the country of state statutes providing for the unionization of public employees. Wisconsin led the way in 1959 by 'imposing the duty to bargain on municipal employers. Ten years later, by my count, 22 states had passed laws authorizing some form of collective bargaining for either state or local employees, or both. An additional ten or so states have prescribed bargaining procedures for certain specified categories of employees, such as firemen, policemen, teachers, or public transit workers. All told, over two and a half …