Law Commons^™

Representatives Of Their Own Choosing?: Certification, Elections, And Employer Free Speech, 1935-1959, John Logan

Seattle University Law Review

While previous studies by industrial relations and legal scholars have scrutinized NLRB decisions and court rulings governing the conduct of representation elections, this paper analyzes instead the following issues, which are scarcely mentioned in the existing literature: why the NLRB "voluntarily" abandoned card certifications; how employers influenced and responded to developments in certification policy; and how changes in certification policy and employer electioneering affected the outcome of organizing campaigns. The paper focuses on the two decades following the NLRB's 1939 decision to abandon card certifications, during which time employers played an increasingly active role in opposing unionization.