> The Wagner Act I think was a setback for labor from the very beginning.
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Just a short note to say I don't see how, Carrol. The National Labor
Relations Act (Wagner Act) enshrined in law the right of workers to have
their unions recognized and to collectively bargain their working
conditions. Prior to that, it was illegal to form unions or to strike.
Employers could fire union organizers and refuse to negotate with their
employees backed by the full protection of the law. The bloody history of
industrial unionism in large part, and not only in the US, was a fight for
union recognition and the right to bargain. Militants lost their jobs and
lives to win these rights. Passage of the Act was directly responsible for
the explosion of organizing and union recognition drives which followed,
notably in auto, steel, rubber, and the other industrial unions which formed
the CIO.
I don't know of any tendency on the left in the 30s which opposed passage of the Wagner Act, do you? I know there were -- and have been ever since -- qualms about the institutional web of labour relations laws and regulations surrounding and subsequent to the Act which, not surprisingly, biased the labour boards in favor of employers and hamstrung the unions' ability to strike and to administer their agreements. Things like cooling off periods, prohibitions against secondary and mass picketing, and cumbersome grievance procedures have all been cited as examples.
But even the most imperfect grievance procedures were an advance over the days when there was no review, third party or otherwise, of daily employer abuse. The only option, if the matter was serious enough, was for all workers to walk off the job until the grievance was resolved -- at great risk to themselves. This meant in practice that the overwhelming number of individual grievances were unaddressed.
Let me put it to you another way. I don't know whether, as a university teacher in Indiana, you had the right to belong to a union and go on strike or file a grievance. Most of your Canadian counterparts can legally organize, strike, and grieve on promotions, classification, discipline, academic freedom and other matters. If your colleagues at Indiana sought the same protections for themselves, would you have joined them or decried their efforts as "a setback for labor"? What exactly is your problem with passage of the Wagner Act?
Marv Gandall