Labor Board Research Articles

Judicial Management and Judicial Disinterest: The Achievements and Perils of Chief Justice William Howard Taft

Judicial Management and Judicial Disinterest: The Achievements and Perils of Chief Justice William Howard Taft Robert Post William Howard Taft holds the significant distinction ofbeing the only person in the his­ tory ofthe nation to preside over two branches of the federal government. He was President from 1909 to 1913, and he was ChiefJustice of the United States from 1921 to 1930.’ This achievement ought to have secured Taft a prominent position within the history of the Court. YetTaft has drifted into almost com­ plete professional eclipse. Although familiar to specialists in legal history, Taft is no more known to the average lawyer or law student than are ChiefJustices White, Fuller, or Waite. Taft’s contemporary obscurity is remark­ able. When Taft died on March 8, 1930, the nation convulsed in an overpowering and spon­ taneouswave ofmourning. He was widelychar­ acterizedas “the mostbeloved ofAmericans,”2 and hailed by observers like Augustus Hand, then a federal district Judge in New York, as “the greatest figure as ChiefJustice since John Marshall.”3 Even Felix Frankfurter, certainly no admirer ofTaft’s jurisprudence, was moved to observe that “Few public men have evoked such spontaneous and warm affection fromthe pub­ lic as has Taft. ... He is a dear man—a true human.”4 This was a striking tribute to a man who had only eighteen years before been crushingly repudiated. Caught between Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom, Taft was blasted as a reactionary, and managed to obtain only a hu­ miliating eight electoral votes in his 1912 cam­ paign forreelectionto the presidency. Taft took defeat graciously, however, and he quickly be­ came, in the famous phrase ofjournalistGeorge Harvey, “our worst licked and best loved Presi­ dent.”5 Although Taft had been known as the father ofthe labor injunction since his days as an Ohio state court judge, he mollified orga­ nized labor during World War I by assuming thejoint chairmanship (with Frank P. Walsh) of the National War Labor Board. The Board shocked industrial leaders not only by explic­ itly recognizing the right ofAmerican workers WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT 51 to unionize, but also by pledging official sup­ port for the right of employees to receive a “living wage.”6 Taft also transcended parti­ san politics by opposing the leaders of his own party in courageously and publicly championing Woodrow Wilson’s campaign to join the League of Nations. As a result, Harding’s nomination of Taft for the Chief Justiceship in July 1921 was greeted with “almost unanimous approval.”7 It was, as the The New York Times remarked, “a ‘come­ back’ unprecedented in American political annals.”8 We may ask, then, how this man, who, as Walter Lippmann’s New York World observed, retired “as Chief Justice with the enduring af­ fection of his countrymen,” with a “career” that “has no equal in our history,”9 could have slipped so rapidly into such deep professional oblivion. The short answer, I think, may be found in Time magazine’s pithy assessment of The administrative responsibilities of the chiefjusticeship became apparent to William H. Taft quickly after taking the oath of office on July 12. Two weeks after being sworn in, Taft learned that Deputy Clerk Henry McKenney had passed away, leaving no one authorized to issue official papers because the Clerk of Court, James D. Maher (pictured), had died on June 3. Told it was unneccessary to consult with the Associate Justices on summer recess, Taft unilaterally decided to appoint Assistant Clerk William R. Stansbury to fill the position. Taft’s resignation: “Outstanding decisions: none.”10 It is not, ofcourse, that Taft wrote few opin­ ions. Indeed, from October 1921 through July 1929, Taft authored 249 opinions forthe Court. The prodigious nature ofthis accomplishment can be seen by contrasting Taft’s output with that ofthe four other Justices who served con­ tinuously during those eight Terms: Holmes wrote 205 opinions forthe Court, Brandeis 193, McReynolds 172, and Van Devanter only 94.11 It is rather that Taft’s opinions were, as Holmes put it, “rather spongy.”12 Although Taft authored a good many opinions that were, within the context of his time, quite impor­ tant, his writing was...

The British Docks: A Test of Alternative Models of Wage and Employment Determination

In this paper we compare two well‐known models of union bargaining: labour demand and efficient bargains. We use data on the British docks which belonged to the national Dock Labour Board, abolished in 1989. The docks industry is particularly well‐suited for a test of the competing models: in fact it had a long tradition of union bargaining on manning levels and, at the same time, it experienced a long‐run decline in employment. Also, jobless dockers were granted some form of unemployment compensation.The institutional features of the industry allow to test a strong version of the efficient bargain model, where the union equates the utility of those who work and those who do not. Our evidence supports the strong efficiency hypothesis: employment depends only on the opportunity cost of working. The secular decline in employment in the industry is explained mainly by technological progress, i.e. the introduction of containers.

American Labor in the Era of World War II.

Acknowledgments Introduction by Sally M. Miller and Daniel A. Cornford Labor in the National Arena CIO Leaders and the State, 1935-1955 by Robert H. Zieger The Law of Collective Bargaining and Wartime Labor Regulations by James A. Atleson The United Steelworkers of America and Health Insurance, 1937-1962 by Alan Derickson Struggles at the Workplace Wartime Shipyards: The Transformation of Labor in San Francisco's East Bay by Marilynn S. Johnson The San Francisco Machinists and the National War Labor Board by Richard P. Boyden Who Controls the Hiring Hall? The Struggle for Job Control in the ILWU during World War II by Nancy L. Quam-Wickham Race, Gender, and Community Her Husband Didn't Have a Word to Say: Black Women and Blues Clubs in Richmond, California During World War II by Shirley Ann Moore African-American Migrant Women in the San Francisco East Bay Area by Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo Catalyst for Change: Wartime Housing and African Americans in California's East Bay by Delores Nason McBroome The CIO: A Vanguard for Civil Rights in Southern California, 1940-1946 by David Oberweiser, Jr. Index

The NLRB at Sixty

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,

What's Wrong With Industrial Relations?

Industrial Relations was the first multidisciplinary field in American universities, established fifty years before the next one to come along, American Studies. For almost three-quarters of a century it provided the central paradigms for the large majority of the social scientists, law professors, arbitrators, mediators, and personnel managers concerned with union-management issues and also the key figures in the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the National War Labor Boards, and virtually all the other government commissions and boards established to regulate labor. For some scholars and professionals it still does. In recent years faculty have challenged and reshaped nearly all of the older conceptions in the social sciences and humanities. Nothing comparable has yet occurred in the newer studies programs. But now Bruce Kaufman, a labor economist and director of the Institute for Personnel and Employment Relations at Georgia State University, has sharply attacked the Industrial Relations field. To reassess Industrial Relations (or IR, as it is colloquially known), Kaufman adopted a historical approach, a decision which itself represents a departure. Like Kaufman, John R. Commons, the founder of labor economics in America, was not originally a historian. Yet Commons was strongly committed to historical research. I cannot bring in . . . an employers' association and a trade union, put them in a glass case ... watch them tussle, higgle, settle their differences-the way Sir John Lubbock did when he studied bees and ants, he told an audience in 1907.1 Commons believed that unions must shun radicalism to survive in the United States and used historical illustrations to advance his conviction. Between the world wars Commons's proteges, such as Edwin Witte and Selig Perlman, pushed the historical approach to Industrial Relations even further. But when the number of IR programs increased enormously after World

The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-Century

The era of wage stretching has been a current focus, but we direct attention here to a decade of extraordinary wage compression—the 1940s. Wages narrowed by education, job experience, and occupation, and compression occurred within cells. The 90–10 differential in the log of wages for men was 1.45 in 1940 but 1.06 in 1950. By the late 1980s it returned to its 1940 level, thus restoring a dispersion of 50 years ago. World War II and the National War Labor Board share some credit for the Great Compression, but much was due to an increased demand for unskilled labor when educated labor was greatly expanding.

Some Reflections on Fifty Years of the National Labor Relations Act: The Need for Labor Board and Labor Law Reform

Many of the characteristics of American labor-management relationships are identical to those of the 1920s and early 1930s-the eve of the New Deal and the Wagner Act. There are numerous similarities between the two periods. One difference is that the post-World War II period has fostered multi-employer and industrywide pattern bargaining relationships that are now being eroded or dissolved. Another is that the advent of multinational corporations which cut across national boundaries seems to have placed national unions at something of a disadvantage. Today, as then-slightly more than fifty years ago-the unions are in retreat on virtually all fronts. Then, as now, there are multiple causes-economic circumstances: tolerance of unemployment at increasingly high levels, faith in a kind of swashbuckling individualism, the rise of overt management anti-union practices, trade union lethargy and bewilderment, and the law. Today, these changes are not limited to our shores but are present in most industrialized countries throughout the world. Fifteen years after the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act, Professor Irving Bernstein, in his important work, The New Deal Collective Bargaining Policy, noted that on the eve of the Great Depression and the New Deal, union membership had retrogressed to the level obtained in 1917: When the percentage of the total work force is consid

The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I

The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I

Looking for Work: Solicitation by Labor Board Employees

Unlike ordinary federal pleading rules, where respondents must defend only against allegations naturally emanating from notice pleadings, complaints filed under the National Labor Relations Act can evolve from original charges filed by a complaining witness to much broader complaints against a respondent. Because the party plaintiff is a federal agency which takes the initial charge of NLRA violations as “the spark that leads to the investigation,” respondents are, arguably, unfairly asked to defend against a moving target.

Valerie Jean Conner, The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. iv. + 283 pp.

Valerie Jean Conner, The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. iv. + 283 pp.

Looking for Work: Solicitation by Labor Board Employees

This Article provides a comprehensive survey of cases where improper solicitation of charges by National Labor Relations Board agents has been alleged as a defense by Respondents in those cases. The Board is empowered only to act on charges brought before it by individuals, labor organizations, or employers. The author shows that the Board is without authority—either by statute, by its own rules and regulations, or from the courts—to engage in solicitation, which includes initiating charges, fil ing complaints which are beyond the scope of the original charge, or acting upon events which happened greater than six months previous to the filing of the original charge. The author finds, however, that in nearly fifty years of attempts by Respondents to prove such wrongdoings, the Board has never found its agents to have overstepped their authority by engaging in acts of improper solicitation. The author proposes the framework of a test to determine when Board agents have acted excessively.

Changes at the labor board: Favorable rulings for management

Changes at the labor board: Favorable rulings for management

Valerie Jean Conner. <italic>The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I</italic>. (Supplementary Volumes to the Papers of Woodrow Wilson.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1983. Pp. xi, 234. $23.50

Valerie Jean Conner. <italic>The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I</italic>. (Supplementary Volumes to the Papers of Woodrow Wilson.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1983. Pp. xi, 234. $23.50

The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I

Conner explains the background, organization, and workings of the National War Labor Board, created by President Wilson in April 1918. She analyzes the board's struggle to succeed and reveals how both labor and business attemted to use this partnership to further their own special interests. The author shows how, when dissatisfied private employers refused to cooperate voluntarily, the Wilson administration was forced to make compliance mandatory.Originally published in 1980.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I.

The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I.

Valerie Jean Conner, The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1983, £17.60). Pp. xi, 234.

Valerie Jean Conner, The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1983, £17.60). Pp. xi, 234. - Volume 18 Issue 1

New York State Labor History Association Annual Conference

New York State Labor History Association is one of the few organiza tions in the Northeast which regularly brings together academics and practitioners to discuss problems facing workers and their organizations. Historians, economists, and sociologists are called upon to put these issues in an understandable context while trade unionists discuss their current impact on the workplace. This year's annual conference, held at the headquarters of Local 802 Ameri can Federation of Musicians on April 13-14, addressed the topic Labor's Response to Technology. program included a labor history and technology walking tour of lower Manhattan led by Debra Bernhardt and Jon Bloom, a screening and discussion of the films Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu and The Business of America conducted by Miriam Frank, and a full day of conference and discussion. Historian Robert Asher of the University of Connecticut began the confer ence with an historical overview of the relationship of labor to technological change in a paper entitled The Humane View: American Unions and a Century of Techno logical Change. Asher argued that American workers have a long history of trying to manage technological changes by developing values in the workplace with recog nize the right to job security, income stability, and a safe and humane work routine. In countering managements' attempts to control the workplace through Taylor's personnel functions, labor has responded over the past century with its own strate gies: calls for government ownership, reduction in hours, strong work rules and work guarantees, unemployment insurance, comanagement, and of course the use of economic action. Asher concluded that the federal government's inverventionist role from the compromises of the War Labor Board through the present has weakened the workers' role in controlling the introduction of new technology. remainder of the morning was reserved for case studies of how specific unions have dealt with technology issues. John Glasel, President of Local 802 American Federation of Musicians, reported on his union's efforts to counter the use of recorded music for dance performances and synthesizers in the production of film scores, television commercials, and jingles. His union has struck over the technology issue and has also lobbied heavily for legislative assistance in changing the copyright codes. Jack Boris, negotiator for the International Typographical Union, outlined

The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I. By Valerie Jean Conner. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. xi + 234 pp. $23.50.)

The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I. By Valerie Jean Conner. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. xi + 234 pp. $23.50.)

The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I

The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I

The partographic labor board: An alternative for earlier decisions regarding management during labor

The partographic labor board: An alternative for earlier decisions regarding management during labor