Law Commons^™

The Striking Success Of The National Labor Relations Act, Michael L. Wachter

All Faculty Scholarship

Although often viewed as a dismal failure, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) has been remarkably successful. While the decline in private sector unionization since the 1950s is typically viewed as a symbol of this failure, the NLRA has achieved its most important goal: industrial peace.

Before the NLRA and the 1947 Taft-Hartley Amendments, our industrial relations system gave rise to frequent and violent strikes that threatened the nation’s stability. For example, in the late 1870s, the Great Railroad Strike spread throughout a number of major cities. In Pittsburg alone, strikes claimed 24 lives, nearly 80 buildings, and over 2,000 …

The Depression Era Sit-Down Strikes And The Limits Of Liberal Labor Law, Ahmed A. White

Publications

This paper explores the history of sit-down strikes from the New Deal Era and beyond and traces their influence on the substance of modern labor law. It argues that, even as the sit-down strikes proved essential to the development of a meaningful system of labor rights, the strikes also had a very different effect. As this paper undertakes to demonstrate, legal and political attacks on labor rights that were originally aimed at the sit-down strikes metastasized into a more general campaign to prohibit a range of militant strike practices, even those bearing little outward resemblance to the original sit-down strikes. …

Union Security Agreements Under The National Labor Relations Act: The Statute, The Constitution, And The Court's Opinion In Beck, Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The Supreme Court's recent decision in Communications Workers of America v. Beck interpreted section 8(a)(3) of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to prohibit the observance of agency shop agreements. By interpreting the statute in this way, the Court avoided the question of whether union security agreements under the NLRA are subject to constitutional scrutiny. The Court's determination that section 8(a)(3) does not allow agency shop agreements was an important decision affecting the enforceability of union security agreements in the vast majority of private sector bargaining agreements.

In this Article, Professor Dau-Schmidt criticizes the Court's interpretation of section 8(a)(3) in …

Is The Anti-Trust Law Anti-Labor?, Frank Edward Horack Jr.

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Due Process Of Law In State Labor Legislation, Pt. 2, Fowler V. Harper

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.