Legal History Commons^™

Industrial Terrorism And The Unmaking Of New Deal Labor Law, Ahmed A. White

Publications

The passage of the Wagner (National Labor Relations) Act of 1935 represented an unprecedented effort to guarantee American workers basic labor rights--the rights to organize unions, to provoke meaningful collective bargaining, and to strike. Previous attempts by workers and government administrators to realize these rights in the workplace met with extraordinary, often violent, resistance from powerful industrial employers, whose repressive measures were described by government officials as a system of "industrial terrorism." Although labor scholars have acknowledged these practices and paid some attention to the way they initially frustrated labor rights and influenced the jurisprudence and politics of labor relations …