[lbo-talk] The Wagner Act

[John Lacny]

The biggest legal impetus for organizing came with the National Recovery Act
(NRA), later overturned by the Supreme Court, which stipulated that workers
had a right to "representatives of their own choosing," or words to that
effect. Of course organizing had been going on for a long time, but as far
as legal cover, that's all the unions felt they needed, so John L. Lewis had
people drive around the mining camps on flatbed trucks with signs that read:
"The President wants you to join the union." Which was not technically true,
at least not at that point, but had the same effect as the rumors in 1860
that Lincoln wanted to free the slaves. Even if they weren't 100% true at
the time, they became self-fulfilling prophecies as the mass movement grew.

If you look at the legal framework of the original NLRA (Wagner Act), I
don't think it was half-bad. I once heard Lynn Williams, former Steelworkers
president, talking about how in those days in Canada one of the labor
movement's demands was for a system of labor law like they had in the US!
It's the subsequent stuff, like Taft-Hartley as well as the legal decisions
about "employer free speech" and so on, that made US labor law the nightmare
it is today.

John Kerry and John Edwards support the Employee Free Choice Act, by the way
(which would make card-check the law of the land). Carrol and Yoshie have
their hands clasped over their eyes as they scroll past having to read this
offending paragraph, and Chuck Munson is right now typing a polemic
plagiarized from the National Right to Work Committee on how Kerry is in the
pocket of "Big Labor."

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John Lacny
http://www.johnlacny.com

People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!