Wanted: An Integrated System of Labor Law

Abstract

Perhaps this article should have been entitled Wanted: An Integrated System of the Law of Labor Organization, for it is with the law of labor organization, rather than with the law of labor as such that we intend to deal here. The time is ripe-indeed overripe-for an attempt to treat the law of labor organization as a system of legal relations, rather than as a collection of bundles or groups of rules with no inner relation or unity. That we have no such integrated system of the law of labor organization is made evident by the fact that, search as we may, we shall be unable to find either a generally accepted or a tolerably satisfactory answer to the question: What is a labor organization? Nor is this the only question which baffles the student of our subject. If we turn from the question just put, which of necessity stands at the very outset of the consideration of our subject, to a question which concerns the most important relation of labor organization, namely, What is a collective bargaining agreement? we shall be confronted with the same difficulty. And what is even more disturbing, neither of these questions has ever been seriously put or adequately considered. And the same applies to all of the problems which lie in between, or all around, the two questions just put. The law of labor organization has been growing at a tremendous pace, and the law reports as well as the law reviews are full of it. But the text writers, like the opinion writers, usually deal with certain specific problems, to the utter neglect of the body of law as a whole. As a result there is no branch of the law which could properly be called the law of labor organization. One will search in vain for such a rubric in legal encyclopedias, from the American and English Encyclopedia of Law, first