Reorganizing Labor

Abstract

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 was intended to end a fifty-year-long era of court-enforced union repression and the disruptive and often violent responses it provoked from both workers and management. Regulating industrial relations, the argument went—licensing unions and settling employment disputes with binding arbitration—would restrain the force of class conflict with the reason of corporatist responsibility. “The door of a court of equity,” wrote federal judge Robert Wagner in a 1921 case enjoining a business to abide by a union contract, “is open to employer and employee alike.”