Labor law has been ‘turned inside out to help the powerful,’ top historian says

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.workdayminnesota.org/index.php?news_6_4668

By Mark Gruenberg
31 October 2010

WASHINGTON - U.S. labor law “has been turned inside out, protecting the powerful rather than the powerless” in the 75 years since the National Labor Relations Act was enacted, a top labor historian says.

“And by that standard, it’s a failure,” adds James A. Gross of the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Gross was the most provocative of many speakers at the opening Oct. 27 session of a day-and-a-half conference commemorating the 75th anniversary of the NLRA, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed on July 5, 1935.

The act was supposed to encourage industrial democracy by making it government policy to back workers’ efforts to organize and bargain collectively, to level the economic playing field and achieve social justice, Gross said. But the GOP-enacted 1947 Taft-Hartley Act and court decisions over the last 75 years negated those goals, Gross stated.

The legislation said its aim was “to promote common justice and economic advance.” Its lead sponsor, Senate Labor Committee Chairman Robert Wagner Sr., D-N.Y., spoke in economic terms, Gross recalled. Wagner argued that giving workers power to organize and bargain would lift their wages and incomes, without federal spending, and such a rise would help haul the U.S. out of the Great Depression.

To give them that power, the senator said, you needed democracy in the workplace – as the NLRA, also called the Wagner Act, envisioned – through union organizing and recognition, by elections or company recognition of pro-union majorities.


FULL story at link.

[unhappycamper]

1. k&r n/t

[Hannah Bell]

2. ditto

[Solly Mack]

3. K&R

[Dinger]

4. K & R

And I'll vote accordingly. I'm not the only one.

[lonestarnot]

5. ADA gutted and worthless.

[TBF]

6. K&R nt

[Brickbat]

7. So very true.

K&R.

[xchrom]

8. recommend

[Omaha Steve]

9. Kick

[Kingofalldems]

10. K and R for the union

[bvar22]

11. Most important post of the day...K&R

Working Americans no longer have a political party that represents them.


"There are forces within the Democratic Party who want us to sound like kinder, gentler Republicans. I want us to compete for that great mass of voters that want a party that will stand up for working Americans, family farmers, and people who haven't felt the benefits of the economic upturn."---Paul Wellstone

[snot]

12. K&R'd!