>Okay, Rakesh, let's blame the victims of rightwing labor legislation and
>court decisions for their own legal restraints.
Nathan, that's not the question. Once those externally imposed restraints are accepted, can union leadership not devolve into cops for the bosses when they are not out on town in their ferraris? All your accounts of organizing cannot be deemed a success until we resolve this question.
>culminating in the 1970 Supreme Court decision, Boys Markets Inc., which
>essentially overturned the Norris-LaGuardia Act and reinstated federal labor
>injunctions as a weapon aimed at strikes during a contract. Note this
>decision did not involve contracts where unions had agreed to give up the
>right to strike. EVERY CONTRACT with any kind of arbitration agreement,
>even if the union had not agreed to give up the right to strike, was
>declared by the Supreme Court to have an "implied" agreement to give up the
>right to strike.
Things should be more complicated for a syndicalist, Nathan.
Felix Frankfurter's Norris LaGuardia Act (1932) did indeed rein in anti labor or yellow dog injunctions. But the long term goal was not defense of the laissez faire unionism of AFL militants but rather development of the *statist* bargaining system codified in the the Wagner Act (1935) whose commitment to contractualism *already* forbade strikes for the duraration of legally binding collective bargaining agreements (to say nothing of ceding investment decisions to employers).
After all, it is in the preamble of the Wagner Act that the principal objective is labor peace. And it is not surprising that courts have ruled against boycotts and secondary strikes in the name of the Wagner Act.
There was thus a real sacrifice of autonomous power or voluntarism in order for the CIO to to enter the statist system as an officially recognized representative . You must know Wm Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Harvard, 1991) or Staugton Lynd Living Inside our Hope (Cornell, 1997; see chapter 11 section on historical origins of business unionism)?
>rightwing laws like Taft-Hartley, followup legislation and NLRB/court
>decisions stripped unions of any legal right to conduct secondary strikes,
>"hot cargo" actions, slowdowns, "partial strikes" or almost any
>anti-employer action other than a duly authorized strike against a primary
>employer.
And to add to the list: mass picketing was prohibited, the President could declare an 80 day moratorium, strikes of govt employees were made illegal, trade unions could be made corporately liable for act performed by their members, affadavits had to be signed affirming no association with the Communist Party. (see Tom Kemp, Climax of Capitalism. Longman 1990)
If anybody ever gets around to writing Marx's missing book on wage labor, it may well have to be a subset of the also missing chapter on the state the regulations of which condition and limit the assertion of the working class.
>The conservative regime of collective bargaining punctuated by periodic
>strikes at the end of contracts was not the choice of unions but an imposed
>legal regime.
As Lynd notes in, the IWW, the Cmmunist Party prior to the Comintern of the Seventh Congress in 1935, and a few independent radicals like AJ Muste expressed grave reservations about collective bargaining and the required state sponsorship implicit in the National Labor Relations Act of once independent labor movements.
But this system was clearly chosen by some of labor's better, more respectable and above all more legalistic representatives of course, and is even defended today as the crowning achievement of the New Deal.
You are right: I don't know enough about the problem of job hierarchies and descriptions and how they have been challenged or entrenched by unions.
That's all for now.
Best, Rakesh