The NLRB at Sixty

Abstract

Broken Promise details the post-Taft-Hartley course of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Resting on exhaustive research in Board files and other relevant archives and on the results of a massive oral history project that James Gross has directed, it is a unique and authoritative study. No federal agency has had its records so thoroughly examined, its personnel and clientele so extensively interviewed, or its activities so copiously documented. Gross's discussions of the Board's decisions, its internal operations, and its relationship to employers, unions, and Congress and the president are clear, insightful, and judicious. Along with his preceding two volumes on the NLRB, Gross's Broken Promise stands as a monumental work of scholarship.' This is the story of a New Deal agency that has come to serve virtually opposite purposes from those its originators intended. Once the handmaiden of a rising labor movement, the NLRB became in the 1980s, if not before, an obstacle to organized labor and to the stated purposes of the original law. Today, the only defense of the NLRA [National Labor Relations Act] comes from the business community, declares the director of the AFL-CIO's Task Force on Labor Law.2 Having failed repeatedly to achieve legislative reform, unions today turn only reluctantly to the NLRB. The original National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act, passed in 1935) grew out of three decades of debate over federal labor policy. Senator Robert F. Wagner and his staff sought to craft a law that would encourage collective bargaining as a means of boosting consumer demand, reducing conflict over union recognition, and extending democratic rights to the workplace. They wanted to right the wrongs that had become apparent during the work of the labor boards established under the National Recovery Administration, notably the National Labor Board (1933-34), which Wagner chaired, and the first National Labor Relations Board (1934-35). The distinctive features of the new law-its stipulation of majority rule, listing of unfair labor practices, outlawing of company unionism, creation of an authoritative independent agency,